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148 Where Your Standardized Testing Money Goes The Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, bills itself as part of the “grand legacy of southern hospitality and excellence.”The legacy part refers to the fact that Dickens stayed in the original Galt House in 1842, and Sherman and Grant “met here in March 1864 to plan the . . . ‘March to the Sea.’” But that building burned down the next year. Another was built and was razed in 1921. This version was built in the Nixon era and would house a thousand of us in town to grade high school students’essays for the College Board’s ap Exams. Our reading of them started on a Sunday and would last a week. It was a pleasant drive down from Inner Station in my rented Dodge Something, which looked like it was built from leftover pt Cruisers. Clearly some designer thought it was pretty sexy, and mine was painted candy-apple red. I stepped hard on the accelerator to escape the glare of truckers, and the engine gave a mild growl like a housecat in heat. I passed billboards along the way for Indiana’s Biggest Joint Surgery Unit; a giant cafeteria with a Norman Rockwell collection; the nation’s largest indoor rv showroom; and James Joyce’s i-65 Truck Sales. The literary connection was a good omen, I thought. Fields of young corn the color of absinthe gave way to weedy floodplains, and I saw the bridges and high-rises of Louisville. The hotel was on the waterfront, and two paddle wheelers were docked below it. Because housing was provided we had been assigned roommates,though I didn’t know who mine would be, and he wasn’t in the room when I where standardized testing money goes 149 checked in. It had been a while—a long while—since I had to share a room with a stranger, and of course I thought of Ishmael meeting his new roommate ,Queequeg,who comes in late after selling embalmed human heads in the street. My own preference was for someone who was not just quiet, but absent. I’d signed up for seven more full days of grading after just finishing grading at the end of my own semester and was thinking maybe I should have gone to med school as I’d planned. Buffet meals were also provided, and dinner that night was in an enormous space in the convention center. I sat at a table with three stats guys and two English lit women.The women had read before; one called this the “seven-day migraine.” The other said it wasn’t so bad but warned that the breaking point was day three. I laughed uncertainly. The young stats guy from Minnesota, wanting badly to be positive, said to me, “You must like grading or you wouldn’t be here.” I didn’t mean to snap. “I like being paid money or I wouldn’t be here,” I said. He looked hurt. Afterward I stopped in at Al J’s Bar in the hotel. “I’m here for the ap grading!” customers announced before giving their drink orders, as if they were the vips the cocktail waitresses had been waiting for all week. The room looked out over the stacks of the steamboats to the big octagonal clock on the Colgate factory on the opposite bank. The bar counter was a thirty-foot long aquarium, maybe five inches deep, with a Plexiglas top to rest your drink on. I sat at the only open seat. Under my drink, one of the fish was dead and the other fish were pecking at its remaining eyeball. “Ah cain’t git it,” the bartender told me. “Hon, ah cain’t fahnd mah fish net.” I put my cocktail napkin over the scene, but there were some pretty big koi that kept dragging the corpse around so I was forced to look. I finished up my beer and left. Is it the fate of all parents of young children to start wishing they were home as soon as they’ve made their long-anticipated escape? I took a walk along the riverbank and up to the burgeoning Fourth Street Live area,a block of restaurants and bars with open street-drinking and live music. I walked as long as I could before I returned to my room, where I sat on my bed, reading the essay questions and reviewing other materials [3.15.226.173...

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