CP: "Culminating Project" or "Cultivating Paranoia"?

In order to graduate, all seniors in our school district must complete something called the Culminating Project, otherwise known as the "CP." Completing the CP takes three years, with the biggest push happening during first semester of senior year, when students turn in their final thesis paper and also give an oral presentation, complete with "findings," before the CP board.

After having his original proposal on socialism rejected, most likely for being too controversial, Aleks (who is more knowledgeable and passionate about politics than any adult I know) agreed to '''tone things down a bit" and presented his oral dissertation yesterday. His presentation was approved, so now Aleks (along with Kat, whose CP project was on the less controversial topic of CPR) is one step closer to graduating in the Spring.

Yesterday Kat and Aleks came home from school and told me that their friend Matt had been given a failing grade on his CP project, even though he had received a passing score on each of the individual components of the project. His report was on some aspect of interior design (feng shui, I think), and as part of his visual "findings," Matt presented a photo of his bedroom. Way off in the corner of the photo was a poster with a large marijuana leaf on it. It was inclusion of that photo, with that poster in it, that was the cause of his failing grade.

WTF??!! Are you frikkin KIDDING me?

We live in progressive, education-oriented Washington State, in a highly-performing district with high achieving, committed kids who take school seriously and generally go on to be professionally oriented, contributing citizens. Yeah, they also party... generally responsibly.

But that's not even the point! The point is that Matt completed and presented an acceptable CP report, containing all required components. It was judged by the graders as a passing project, but failed because one of the graders apparently had a personal qualm with a photo of something in Matt's own bedroom! The photo itself obviously was presented to show how the furniture in his room was arranged in a feng shui-compatible configuration, so the poster and its contents had no bearing whatsoever on the theme of his CP. How dare they fail him for this!

I sincerely hope his parents are up in arms about this -- no matter how they feel about weed and their kid's obvious affinity for it. (And heck, maybe he just likes the poster! Hmmm, nah...) If that happened to our kids, we'd be in the principal's office so fast! And from there we'd take it to the superintendent's office, if need be. THIS is exactly the problem with education (and, if you ask me, with politics): we get diverted and distracted by stuff that doesn't matter to the task at hand! We say we want kids to learn to think constructively and independently, and then we (and by "we," I mean the decision-making adults in charge) do inane things like this. How the hell did the contents of the poster determine or influence Matt's knowledge of feng shui? How was it even pertinent in any way to the content of his report -- other than that it was in a room with furniture arranged in a specific orientation? That's what his report was about; the poster had absolutely no bearing to anything! If it had been a poster of a cute kitten, would Matt have passed the CP?

And hey, come to think of it, someone DID do a CP report on cannibus and other drugs, and surely a picture of a marijuana leaf was (and should have been) part of that report! Did they fail that student too? And two years ago Kat did a report on her uncle, my brother, who was an activist in Berkeley in the 60's. She definitely covered all kinds of "questionable" things in that report, talking about how Michael broke the law along with all the other People's Park protesters, and how acid (FAR, far worse that weed, in my opinion) was a regular part of their culture. And Kat got an A on her report! If this particular grader had been assigned to her report, would she have received a failing grade because the report mentioned "icky stuff"?

Do you see where this is going? It's absolutely terrifying to me, and I can only hope that somehow, some information has been misconstrued.