Silence has a sound. I heard it yesterday. I leaned into listen to its eerie presence in room 206 as my kids sat silently taking the state test in a room where silence is strange.

And in its strangeness, I found the muted voices of my little humans whose silence was not consent, but rather resignation. And it is that resignation that screams at me in its silent compliance, for it is not us. I knew it. The kids knew it. And I think on some level they thought maybe I could save the day, smite the stranger, but alas I was silent, too.

Oh, I tried to rebel a bit. We did Smiles and Frowns on sticky notes, posting them on the front board as I handed out test tickets–“wasting” valuable testing time–but even this was a muted moment, not the rousing rebellion I had imagined in my head.

No just silence. An administrator walking in may have lauded the absence of sound and marveled at the diligence of students. It was an ideal testing environment, but in their perceived assessment, they would have been deaf to the silent screams of “why?” reverberating around the room, deeply etching guilt into my being. For I know not why. Of course, I know the attempts to explain the why of testing; I have heard them all before, but they fall woefully short of reassuring me there is any real purpose or value to standardized testing.

Yet they persist. They talk the talk. And in their talk they make just enough noise to drown out those who would resist. And we are left in silence. But that silence is not empty, that silence is not dead. There is sound in that silence, and once that silence finds its ear, it will be the tree that falls in the forest. But that day is yet to come. For now, the silence lingers; it waits. And while it waits, it grows. It grows in me, waiting for an opening, waiting for a moment. And that moment may be sooner than later, for I am not sure I can bear the guilt of silence much longer as my kids look to me with “why” in their eye.

Happy Tuesday, all. Please bear with me. I swear it’s a near-schizophrenic experience to be a teacher during state testing.

Do. Reflect. Do Better.