All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned from Mao

With two weeks left in the semester, I was just informed that I must give eleven more quizzes to my students by the end of the semester. Eleven. This translates into more than one quiz per day. This also translates into grading approximately 650 quizzes in next two weeks. Hence, my days will be spent hunched over sometimes incoherent, often incorrect scribblings with a red-ink pen.

In my initial frustration over my boss’s impossible expectations, I was sorely tempted to create a few quiz scores ex nihilo. But I was quickly dissuaded from this tactic by a) ethics, b) the knowledge that successfully forging relatively accurate, imaginary grades would be difficult, and c) Chinese history.

The first two reasons are rather transparent, but the third might take some explaining. In the late 1950’s, Chairman Mao Zedong of China began an ill-fated initiative called the Great Leap Forward. He formed citizens into agricultural collectives that reported to the government. The goal was to use the government’s monopoly on agriculture to finance nationwide industrialization. Unfortunately, the production quotas for the collectives were impossibly high. However, to save face each cadre would lie to his superior, stating that production quotas had not only been met, but exceeded. Such “success” led to increased production quotas and, predictably, the same lies. As a result of this lying epidemic, China reported phenomenal harvests for a while, only to have millions die of starvation a couple years later when people couldn’t subsist on imaginary grain.

Lesson learned: Forging numbers = starvation. Not exactly, but it could if I lost my job.