I was six, sitting in a spinning chair in a college classroom, facing the teacher’s desk, with my head propped on my arm, with about thirty other kids my age, listening to my Sunday chinese school teacher drone on about chinese characters. We kids had our textbooks open, but we whispered to each other at random times, giggled at second-grader nonsense, and poked each other when we were bored, which was frequently. Pencils flew across the room when the teacher turned to write a word on the clean black chalkboard; our textbook contained countless doodles filling the pages; and many of the black-and-white pictures were virtually black, because we’d colored the white parts in with our pens.

Chinese, at that time, wasn’t anything too hard. School was once a week, Sunday, at one of the University of Michigan buildings on campus. The class atmosphere was lax, and there was a fifteen-minute break time between the first hour and the second hour of classtime. We would play tag in the halls, goof off while standing in line in the bathroom, and buy snacks at the nearby vending machine, which, if you shook it hard enough, gave you a free bag of chips. No one took Sunday school very seriously, because it didn’t exactly “count” as a school class, and all we had to do for homework was copy down and learn a few words. Our parents, however, still made us practice what we learned, and it was excruciating to sit at the dinner table and re-write the words.

I did the homework obediently, and carefully wrote down all the vocab words without a single care in the world about what they meant; they were still unrecognizable groups of squiggly lines despite my re-writing them down everyday. Each word of Chinese was a little picture, and had a “stroke order,” an order of which line of the word you were supposed to write first, but no one really cared (or knew) if you followed it or not. My workbook, like others’, was always handed back with a sticker and a smiley face.

Within two weeks of starting the class we had learned about twenty new vocabulary words, an impressive accomplishment. The teacher, a stern-faced but not intimidating woman, announced that there would be a vocabulary test the next week. We all recorded it into our workbooks, but there was no reaction at all. No one really cared; we kids didn’t exactly understand what a “test” was. Or at least I didn’t.

“Study hard!” the teacher exclaimed brightly, snapping her book shut. We packed our things and stampeded out the door, bidding the teacher an obedient farewell-- a manner strictly taught and asserted by parents.
A week passed, and we chased each other into the classroom again. The class buzzed with its usual level of excitement. We were spinning in our chairs, throwing paper wads at each other, crawling on the tables, and running around the large classroom. Some kids had crammed themselves in a corner of the room, sitting in a circle, watching one kid in the middle playing on a single Nintendo DS.

The teacher strode into the room, and the ruckus ceased. She shushed the kids who refused to calm down, and everyone shuffled into their seats. We hastily pulled out our workbooks, and began to pass them towards the teacher, muffling our giggles.

“Not now,” the teacher said. “Keep them. Turn to page thirteen of your workbooks-- you’ll find that there is a small section reserved for a vocabulary test.”

I flipped to it and saw that the page was filled with blank boxes. Confused, I turned to ask my friend what was going on, but the class had quieted down, and I snapped my head towards the teacher.

“All right,” the teacher began, as the class stared at her, for the first time, in dead silence, “we’re going to begin our first vocab test. When I say the word, you write it down. If you don’t know the word, leave the box blank and wait for the next word. If you need me to slow down, you may raise your hand to tell me so.”
I scratched my head. Didn’t know the word? What exactly happened if we didn’t know a word? A few kids began to hunch over their “tests,” and some drew a protective arm around their workbooks.

“First word--pig,” said the teacher. That one I knew--and I wrote it in the first box. Pencils clattered onto the desk as others finished.
“Second word--horse.”
Easy enough.
“Cow.”
So far so good. I smiled; I knew all the terms she was rattling off.
“Chicken.”
Uh-oh. I couldn’t recall that. I pondered what to do for a while. Sighing, I leaned back and stretched, trying to remember how to spell the it. What was I supposed to do? Should I make something up? I thought desperately.
Then, I saw the answer. My eyes spotted the all-too-familiar word on my neighbor’s paper. Oh, yeah. Now I remembered. Quickly, I copied it down onto my own test, and let out a sigh of relief. Thanks, I thought cheekily. There was nothing wrong with that, right? But something about the quiet tension of the class told me, deep down, that this action could not be done with impunity.

“Dog” was next, and I guess I should’ve studied because I couldn’t piece together the right lines that formed the word.
“How do you spell that?” I whispered to my friend.

“Be quiet,” said the teacher, looking around for the noise source, “this is a test.” I sunk into my chair. What was a test? I squirmed uncomfortably and played nervously with my pencil. The silence was unnerving. I looked around. There were kids gazing around in boredom, waiting for the teacher to move on. Others had their heads buried in their test, their pencils scribbling then erasing. It seemed like almost everyone knew what they were doing. Biting my lip, I returned to my own paper, with its empty boxes. It looked intimidating, and, quite literally, blank. There were no instructions except the ones the teacher gave us. And I still didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t know the word.

But why, I thought, would I need to worry if I can just look over to my friend’s paper if I don’t know how to spell something? I hadn’t gotten in trouble for looking before, and I saw no risk in doing it again. I craned my neck, still trying to search for “dog.”

My friend had wrapped her arm around her paper, an obvious movement to block me out. I frowned and shrugged. Well, there went my source for the answers. My heart started to pound a little again. The teacher had gone back to the book she held in her hand, and I peered over my friend’s shoulder to see the word. Ah, right. I was beginning to think that this was quite easy; if I didn’t know the word, then I could just take a look at my friend’s.

“Last word-- ‘farmer’,” the teacher concluded. I let out a frustrated sigh; I’d forgotten that one, too. I tried to look at my friend’s again, but she’d hidden her paper so well that I had to kind of stand up and look past her arm--

“Jessica, what are you doing?”

I looked up, and my stomach virtually dropped-- the teacher’s stern, hawk-like eyes were fixed upon me, like she’d finally spotted the piece of prey that had been scuffling in the forest. I dropped into my seat immediately and flushed, shrinking like a cornered mouse. I was probably doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what.
“I’m taking the test, teacher,” I said innocently, though my voice quavered. My classmates’ eyes were upon me, and I slid down slightly into my seat, swallowing nervously. My face was burning, and I could feel myself sweating. Everyone was quiet, and the tension was almost palpable.

“Yes, well, you know your test requires your individual thinking?”

“Um, really?” I said lamely. “But I can ask for help if I don’t know something…” I trailed off. It sounded feeble and wrong, and the teacher was shaking her head.

“A test doesn’t involve anyone else but yourself. It’s your own learning and studying that matters-- that’s the whole point of tests. To see what you’ve learned. After every test, we see if everyone has learned, and then we can move on to learn new things. Understand?”

I did, somewhat. No copying, no trouble. Numbly, I returned to my test, burying my head into the workbook and avoiding my classmates’ curious stares, hastily erasing the words I’d copied down. The blank boxes seemed to jeer at me from the paper, and all of a sudden, it didn’t look so easy anymore.