Did you read the NZLB post? Did the absurdity of that post strike you? Did you see moaning, little boys and girls clutching pencils as they tried to escape from the handcuffs attaching them to their floor-bolted desks?
As the author of this blog, though, I’d like to say that that might be one of the scariest posts I’ve ever written. Under the current law, a parent who had tied up her child in blinkie lights and brought that child to school would absolutely be entitled to put that child in school. Special ed teachers, psychologists and social workers would all create an individual education plan for blinky-light child, filled with accommodations such as extra time on tests, the teacher translating and transcribing answers, a special desk away from the smell of other students, etc. We might create a whole new category of an existing certificate: The Bilingual Certificate for speakers of Zombie.
Don’t be crazy you say? Is this any crazier than handing a seventh grade special education student a 7th grade state achievement test when he can’t read? The student in question wrote “to hare” on his test for all the questions that required writing. When I pointed out the “d” on the end of “hard” he wrote “to hared.”
Why do we all need a zombie infestation plan? The nation that brought us grade-level standardized testing for all students regardless of what they actually know will never be able to handle an actual outbreak. Think about it. These are the same people who are body scanning elderly Norwegian grandmothers at the airport.
P.S. How did that student do? The student failed abysmally, of course, but no one knows that score. The test results never get back to teachers during the actual school year, making those results almost useless. If that same government were addressing an actual zombie outbreak, I’d expect them to issue the first warnings at about the same time that the lights went out in Seattle, Biloxi, New York and Cleveland. They’d probably start doing blood tests and body cavity searches on Norwegian grandmothers, too, in an effort to show they weren’t profiling.
My guess is we’d decline to select candidates for blood tests who actually looked ill on the basis that this violated The Americans with Disabilities Act.
