SAMPLE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS QUESTIONS ON A SOCIETY RELATED STANDARDIZED TEST

Seeing a group of Chinese American parents picketing against changing admission procedures that would determine who gets into elite high schools in NYC led me to review several standardized tests sample questions on Christopher Columbus; used to evaluate high school students. None of the questions asked what was the decision making process followed by the Kingdom of Castile and Aragon: “who participated, how long it took and what criteria was used when deciding or not to support the trip across the ocean?” All the questions are to be answered using multiple choice options. And the answers to these questions will be used to decide who gets into what type of university. At CCNY I met quite a few professors who loved to brag about having attended one of those NYC elite high schools and, often, would say to me that they had studied Spanish in High School, but it was Castilian Spanish. Little they knew that Castilian and Spanish are synonyms, and that in some Spanish speaking regions and countries, they use Castilian to refer to the language and Spanish to the State. Among them, there was a dean of the School of Education, whom when engaged in the language, all he could say was “buenos días, gracias, adios”. Of course, it was not only his ignorance, but the need to sublimely suggest that what he spoke was not Puerto Rican Spanish. The review of the items on the standardized tests reminded me of the town’s historian in Guayama, Señor Ledée, who was also the history teacher in the high school, forcing us to get up when answering his questions, and to explain in detail what we had read in our books regarding the colonization of the Americas, including the imperialistic drives of Isabel de Castilla y Fernando de Aragón. Torquedama was our favorite one, just to say his last name. We also had to go to the town’s cultural center where he was one of the members who organized lectures on history related topics, including learning about the town’s architecture, the owners of the surrounding sugar cane plantations, slavery and economic development. Those standardized tests that are also used now in Guayama, after Obama's national education project forced Puerto Rico to standardized it's testing approaches or no federal monies would be provided to the colony in the Caribbean, not only evaluate the mastery of atomist concepts, but prepare the students to face a very fragmented society without having to deal with a larger context to place history in.