I want to make some notes about my last job as a test grader for high school standardized exams. I worked at this mass grading facility for ten days sometime within the last couple of months, and I read essays by kids around 12 years old. I do not know the standards, but the grades for the essays were supposed to have some impact on the person being able to pass into high school (grades 9-12).
It was a boring job and I spent a lot of time there not working. I brought my own books and spent the majority of my time on the clock reading material other than student essays, and one day I slept for most of my shift. I did not even have a cubicle in this office; all the workers just sat in a big room with hundreds of computers and no one ever checked on us. I doubt that before a hundred years ago there was ever a need for a person to stay in a sitting position on a chair and go to sleep, but I can still do this comfortably. Even through all this I got work bonuses for accuracy and number of essays read.
The content quality grading is on a five-point scale, where one means that a person wrote at least a sentence expressing a relevant idea and five means good essay. The breakdown for content falls on a curve with about 50% 3s, 15% 2s and 4s, and 10% 1s and 5s. Besides content I checked grammar and ranked it on a 3 point scale, with 1 being horrible and three being like normal writing. About 70% of people got 3s.
I took notes about what people wrote about. The students had a prompt that said something like, “If you could spend a day with any fictional character, who would you choose and why? What would you do during that day?” I tried to detect patterns in the topics covered by writing characters’ names and activities to be done, then checking each time those items were a topic in an essay. Also I tracked the total number of essays read. Frequently I would check the tally for total essays without checking anything for characters and activities just because I did not appreciate a similarity worth tracking. This happened most frequently when some student talked about characters of minor fiction works unknown to me, or when they wanted to do something that was uncommon but not exceptional.
I took notes for 5 days and graded about 120 essays on each of those days, so 600 essays total are part of this study. I spent an average of 2 minutes on each essay, and that was not evenly distributed because I never read more than a few lines out of any essay due to them being written by boring adolescents. Some essays were really good, and those I would read more than once. The check on this process was that 20% of all essays get sent to other graders, and they should issue the same grades that I gave to insure consistency in grading.
The single most popular character chosen was Spongebob Squarepants and with that, the single most popular activity was eatting krabby patties. I have never seen an episode of that television show but I had heard of it. From what I gather it is about an anthropomorphic sponge who works as a cook in fast-food restaurant called the Krusty Krab that serves a type of food called a krabby patty. About 120 out of the 600 essays I read were about Spongebob. Of those, 25 mentioned going to the Krusty Krab without talking about krabby patties, and 25 had not no mention of either Krusty Krab or crabby patties. 20 of them misspelled either Krusty Krab or krabby patties as “Crusty Crab” or “crabby patties.”
Any details I recorded about eating with Spongebob did not carry into my tallies about the most popular activities to do with other fictional characters, that being eating. Most preteens, given the opportunity to do anything with any character, chose to share a meal with them. About 170 of the stories involved going somewhere and eating, and of those, 110 specified that the eating be done at a particular fast food restaurant. The others may have specified fast food, or may have specified a restaurant, but if I did not recognized the name of a chain fast food restaurant I did not tally it as being included in the 110.
Going shopping was another major interest in meeting fictional characters. About 50 of the 600 said they wanted to go shopping, and 35 of those specified that the shopping be done at the mall by using the word “mall.” Most of these shopping adventures involved mass purchasing of mall product. I made a tally of when the writer said that either the fictional character picked up the tab, and also in this category I noted when the fictional character gave large material wealth to the writer as a non-sequitor without context. 60 stories included that plot point, but unfortunately I did not note when this was tied to shopping and when it was not. I do remember that no one ever said that they bought anything for the primary fictional character, although sometimes fictional characters were treated to the authors’ parents’ meal generosity or invitations to visit again. When the authors did give to fictional characters, it was to nameless aggregate characters such as when the author spent the day with a genie and wished to end global problems. I do not have tallies about these things.
About 25 papers said that the author would spend at least part of the day watching TV, about 30 talked about going to movies, and about 35 talked about playing video games. From those three categories combined, about 15 of the 90 said that they would like to engage in the media product with the character performing in it – that is, they would watch a superhero’s own movie with that superhero, or play a video game character’s own game with that character.
About 60 of the 600 papers had the fictional character enabling fantastic flight abilities to the author. Some of these include being carried by or riding the back of the fictional character, but most of these were about the person flying on their own. When the author chose to spend the day with Spiderman, a popular superhero who has the super power to swing quickly through cities using spiderwebs that he throws, about half the time the author wanted to be carried by Spiderman while he swung around. About 10 stories talked about this, and 20 talked about meeting Spiderman.
As I said, Spongebob was the most popular character. Other characters were less popular to approximately the same extent, with Superman, Spiderman, Harry Potter, Naruto, Bugs Bunny, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Scooby Doo, and Jimmy Neutron all getting mention in about 20 papers each. Peter and Stewie from the TV show family guy each got about 10 papers. Various wish-granting creatures, mostly genies, accounted for about 20 papers. About 40 kids wrote about non-fictional sports stars, with famous skateboarders accounting for about 20; and about 55 kids wrote about non-fictional movie and music starts, with about 15 of those being Hannah Montana (a pop music teen idol) and 10 being the Jonas Brothers (pop music idols).
Less popular characters accounting for about 5-10 of the 600 papers include the Simpsons, Sleeping Beauty, Shrek, various vampires, Huckleberry Finn / Tom Sawyer, Goku, a real-life friend, Narnia characters, Disney’s Goofy, and Tom & Jerry. About 25 kids just used the word “character” and made up activities to do with just any character. About 5 kids wrote that they wanted to spend the day with their lost fathers; no one said the same of mothers.
Travel to specific places was a popular activity choice. About 30 authors wrote this, with Paris and Japan being the most popular places at about 8 papers each. I did not make a tally about how often the places had any relevance to the characters or whether the activities done had any relationship to the place, but my memory is that authors typically chose a place unrelated to the character and then said nothing about doing anything specifically related to the place.
There is this subculture of people called “furries.” Furries are people who like to dress up like animals, like a person in a Mickey Mouse suit at Disneyland. Part of this subculture is a literature tradition involving animals within an anthropomorphic society. I have trouble categorizing this but typically these stories involve the animals living in a tribal hierarchy and utilizing primitive but human technology like fire-making, writing, city life, and medicinal arts. Apparently these concepts get ingrained in kids early because about 20 kids wrote furry stories where either they were animals or they joined animals in activities. Two common features in these stories was that one leader animal would order another animal to do something, like gather food or patrol a warzone for enemies. The furry authors never made themselves the leaders in these fantasies; they always took orders. Another feature that was frequent was that someone in the stories would get hurt. In about half of the stories that involved wounding, the injury would be licked by some animal. I have no idea how these memes can run so consistently to so many kids. I took good notes about these things, and only about 5 of the 20 furry stories had no orders or injury. Most of these were well-written, and the only one that included a famous furry character involved Bugs Bunny. Strangely in this person’s story, Bugs Bunny was physically a regular rabbit instead of human-like as in the cartoon, and Bugs Bunny had gone feral and bit the author with intent to make him bleed. I did not include other mentions of characters like Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse in with these furry stories because in my mind, a furry story involves a character more animal than human in behavior.
About 10 kids copied the instructions for the essay without adding anything to their copying. About 5 kids wrote strange things that had nothing to do with the essay, and seemed to be just copies of educational sentences of the sort one might see on the walls of a classroom. 1 writer evidently smuggled an ad about automotive paint sealant into the exam room and copied it verbatim.
About 5 kids wrote about drinking alcohol or being drunk. No one talked about using cigarettes or other drugs, although 1 person wrote about a character with AIDS who takes AZT; this was the also the only definite mention of a homosexual character. About 15 writers, presumably girls, wrote about boy chasing. About half of those stories ended in committed dating relationships or marriage. About 5 writers, presumably boys, wrote about girl chasing. All of those stories ended in sex, and 2 of those involved multiple girls. About 5 kids wrote about killing someone in a personal rather than wartime context, although participation in war or mass destruction was a common topic that I did not record. About 50 stories ended with the author and the character becoming “BFFs,” (best friends forever), and about 40 stories ended with a line something like “…and then I went home and went to sleep.”
In about 5 of the stories the fictional character was an enemy to the author/protagonist. In all of these stories, the author was totally doomed with death by the character. In four of the stories the author fled and in three of those the author died. In the other 1 of those four the author expressed eminent death occurring after the story. In the 5th paper the author sought out the fictional character, expecting to martyr himself while killing the character.
Some papers were very well written, and by that I mean with better word choice, vocabulary, and plot than anything I could come up with. It seems to me that an adult-level of fantasy fiction writing is attainable by kids entering highschool. Most papers were just lists of activities, wherein the author would name a character and then write lists of things they would do together, with no sentence having any relationship to any other sentence.
Some papers were weird. I took notes about these. One person said he wanted to drink Superman’s blood to get his superpowers. One person said he wanted to spend the day with any Wal-Mart employee, and they would go to his house and watch TV. One person listed a bunch of boring activities, just like I had read 100s of times before, and then wrote about going home and finding the cops had trashed his house trying to make a drug bust, but that no one in his family used or sold drugs. One person listed a bunch of boring activities, then said he got a call from the hospital saying his parents were dead, then without comment he listed doing more boring activities. One person wrote about watching the character die in an accident unrelated to any risk taken in the story, then the protagonist died in a similar way in another accident.
After reading so many Spongebob papers, I was happy to read one particular one. It started, “If I could spend a day with any fictional character I would choose Spongebob Squarepants. The reason I would do this is so I could wash my floor with his face.” The paper went on about using the character as a sponge for cleaning, as a dogtoy, and eventually for discard.
One person won about winning a day with Scooby Doo. Winning a contest was a common pretext for meeting the character, although I did not track this. Anyway, the following exchange took place:
“Excuse me, are you Scooby?”
He whirled around nonchalantly and glared at me and said, “Who do I look like, Hello Kitty?”
The story went on with the protagonist being submissive to Scooby’s crude ways and star fits, and was one of the few stories that did not take itself seriously.
In the most bizarre story I read the author choose to meet Ronald McDonald. The story started with some boy walking down the street and then falls after Ronald McDonald collides into him while he is carting a wheelbarrow full of burgers from somewhere with intent to bring them to a McDonald’s restaurant. The boy is scuffed up and wants pity, but when he asks for help Ronald tells him to get up on his own. The boy then starts to cry, saying that he is ridiculed at school for wearing black clothes, dyeing his hair black, and being fat. He tells Ronald that he has no friends and that everyone calls him an emo. Ronald laughs at this, and then advises the boy to just be himself and then people will eventually like him. Then he offers the kid burgers. The boys gets up and stands on the sidewalk and eats three burgers, then asks Ronald if they can hang out. Ronald says no, then proceeds on with his delivery of burgers to the restaurant. It is hard for me to capture the seriousness conveyed in the wording of this story as I summarize it, but it is my belief that the author was sincere in writing this.
There is a certain amount of irony between this story and real life that would be apparent to most of my peers in Seattle where I live. I need to finish this post so I am not going to explain it, but I want to state that reading this paper gave me a deep sense of having been exposed to something profane.