One of my high school English teachers liked to remind us students that he had more control over our grades than we did. We spent about 3/4 of one marking period working only on grammar and sentence diagramming, which most of the class learned well enough to get high scores on the quizzes and tests. After we finished our grammar section, I had a very high A average, as did most of my friends.

But I didn’t get an A for the marking period. The teacher designed the grammar section to end with enough time left in the marking period for us to read and be tested on “Death of a Salesman.” The teacher himself called the test “the death test” and bragged that nobody ever got an A on it. The goal of the test was to pull down our grades and reduce the number of A’s given out that marking period. I scored in the low 50s on the test and, as a result, got a B on my report card, in spite of the fact that I’d gotten a high A on everything except that one test. The same thing happened to a bunch of my classmates, too.

Imagine if my teacher had been required to give not grades but a specific evaluation of what we’d learned that marking period. He would have had to admit that I’d mastered the entire grammar curriculum and that I’d done poorly only on the literature test (which tested the the singular skill of regurgitating, word for word, the teacher’s interpretation of the play). Such a system would have completely emasculated this guy’s power play with our grades.
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The office mice will play. For example, a few years ago, my husband’s boss got a special treat for his 40th birthday. My husband and a few friends:

• Turned his bookshelf backwards, after turning the books on the shelf so the bindings faced in, of course.
• Turned his desk around, but also switched everything on top of the desk so it looked normal until he sat down.
• Set the guy’s mouse to the left-handed setting, which reverses how the buttons work.
• Ran a utility to turn his Windows desktop upside down.
• Filled the overhead light with glitter so it would fall if he tried to clean it out.
• Closed and locked the door because he didn’t have a key.

The idea behind it was to make the office appear unchanged and to annoy this guy every time he tried to do an everyday task.

Now, that was good, but a friend of mine has taken the opposite approach to office decor. Her co-worker took a month’s leave of absence to visit his wife, who’s in the military stationed in Japan. He’s coming back to work today, and unlike my husband’s boss, this guy is definitely going to notice a change.

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But I’m not quite sane, either.

At least according to this learning style quiz at CNN.com.

I thought it would be fun to take the quiz to see what learning style(s) it would assign to me. I’m pretty self-conscious about how I learn, so I was mostly curious about the quiz itself.

The first sign that trouble was brewing: the quiz has a total of five questions. You can’t get a very good sense for someone’s learning style(s) from five questions, but I figured I’d give it a shot anyway. Then, when I clicked “submit,” I got this message:

Now, I’m not saying I’m not split between two personalities. What I’m saying, Mr. Invisible Quiz Maker, is that I don’t need to examine my choices again. I know exactly how I answered each question. My answers weren’t wrong; your quiz stinks!

Nice try at saying “No two learners have the same style or personality,” on the one hand and then on the other, telling me that you can’t cram my square peg into one of the few round holes you’ve decided everyone should fit into.

I guess it didn’t occur to Mr. Quiz Maker that someone might learn in more than one way, that not everyone would fit neatly into a single learning style category.

If I’d tried to think of a better way to disprove the point of the quiz, I don’t think I could have.