Yesterday, we did a practice for the vile standardized test the sophs will be taking next week. The passage was a biography of Jocelyn Elders.

It was an innocuous chronological piece with zero pizzaz. Elders was born in 1933 on a cotton farm, got a scholarship to college, was the only African-American person in her medical school class, and later was named Surgeon General by Bill Clinton. She overcame many obstacles in her life.

Isn’t that great and admirable?

I let the kids answer all the multiple choice questions – compelling questions like “What does the word segregated mean in paragraph three?” – before I told them the reasons I remembered Elders from her short, 1993 stint as Surgeon General: her supposed support of masturbation education, and her penchant for saying things that made pro-lifers’ salivary glands spring to life with blood thirst. Things like, “We must end our love affair with the fetus.” Someone so attached to blasphemy was a big topic of conversation at my Catholic high school.

“Don’t you think you would have been more interested in this article if it included that stuff?” I asked them.

“Oh, for sure,” they said, nodding. “Absolutely.”