Dear Exam Week: My Semi-Annual Butchering of a Famous Speech (apologies to Abe Lincoln)

Twelve score and six days ago our administrators brought forth on this campus, a new school year, conceived in scholarship, and dedicated to the proposition that all students are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great finals week, testing whether those students, or any student so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met in a great classroom for this week. We have come to dedicate a portion of that room, as a final resting place for those who here sold their souls that their exam grade might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The smart students, passing and failed, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above the poor power of true and false. The students will little note, nor long remember what the teachers say here, but they can never forget the tests they gave here. It is for us, the passing, rather, to be dedicated here to the failing work which they who fought here have come so close to advancing. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored fails we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full semester before graduation—that we here highly resolve that these failed shall not have failed in vain—that these exams, under-studied for, shall cause a new birth of optimism—and that America’s Ideological Foundation of the school, by Dr. Schoolfield, and for my A-, shall not cause me to perish from the earth.

Hope that was at least semi-interesting. Now that you'll never look at the Gettysburg Address the same again.....

-RST