His days were often bright, filled with sunshine and optimism, sugar and pancakes, discord and evil. The day his test results were returned was not one of these days. He was a large boy for his age, at 4 foot 6. His kindergarten classroom was terrified of him. He took pleasure in causing mischief wherever he went, but was so insecure that he could not tolerate feeling insecure. Naturally, when he saw his inferior test scores, he went on a small rampage and nearly decimated the LEGO village that his classmates had worked so hard to build.
He had practiced rigorously for the Scholastic Ineptitude Test (SIT), but still only placed in the 98th percentile. His peers had done much better than him, scoring near the 2400/2400 mark. His parents were concerned - they had never expected him to get as low a score as a 2390, or a GPA as low as a 3.99.
“The stress levels must be getting to him”, his father would say.
“How can this be? Our child, a 2390! What is his school teaching him? We should sue the school!”, his mother chided, while her child cried loudly about his insecurity behind her.
The school board agreed to rid the students of books, math, and logic as long as the boy’s parents did not sue for negligence, and replaced the curriculum with picture books and coloring. The other parents of the “smarter” children were not happy with these new changes. They voiced their complaints to the superintendent while he was catching up on his ABC’s.
“Mr. Superintendent, these changes are preposterous - how are our children going to go to Harvard if they are not part of a competitive school district?”, inquired one such parent.
“F… G… H…”, sang the superintendent
“Mr. Superintendent, my child must go to Yale - he’ll die penniless and alone if he doesn’t!”
“J… K… L…”
“Stanford, Mr. Superintendent! Stanford!”
The boy who had ruined it all went on to graduate from kindergarten with a 4.0 GPA, as did all the students in the district, but was rejected from countless elementary schools - including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale - because he had nothing to show from his 180 days of education. His career was over before it began - tainted in just a half a year of American schooling.
As district-wide graduation rates and test scores plummeted, Princeton Elementary School began writing on their rejection letters, “Please apply again when you learn how to read this letter”.
He dropped out of the one elementary school that accepted him, Stultus Elementary, (whose motto was “stultus est sicut stultus facit!”) at the age of 7. Out of job options, the boy became an SIT essay grader, where he spent his day ruining the lives of kindergartners nationwide - making them as miserable as he was. More and more educationally challenged students joined the boy at his post. A vicious cycle of stupidity and misery plagued the nation for decades, ruining life after life. At the age of 10 - 4 long years working for the SIT - the boy was finally able to read the letter that Princeton Elementary sent him back in kindergarten. When he did, he realized that he could have been a pacifier engineer or a teddy bear doctor if he had just dealt with his competition and kept his mouth shut. Alone and regretful, the boy went to sleep every night dreaming of the sports he could never play and the life he could never have, all thanks to the alleged “stress” he had never felt all those years ago.