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"You're some kinda miracle" chorused the singers, and they had love on their side. School Districts or some of their personnel have only self-advancement as their primary motive. Check out Mississippi.

Statistics are such slippery things. It's all very well for Dr. Feynman to tell us about our opinions or guesses that "If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong" but we want to know a bit more of the story. Just for entertainment if nothing else. There are other jurisdictions that have been entertained or instructed by the Mississippi miracle and they have been hard at work engineering their own divine or diabolical statistical outcomes.

With testing times you know it's June. Up here in the northern hemisphere, it's time to get the kids out of school and into the fields for some kind of argicultural acculturation (OK, I made it up). I could see having the little blighters on the homestead in the fall when harvesting was on the agenda but I don't know what they did in the summer besides pester the livestock. My cousins on the prairies probably know. Tell me.

But in June a young person's fancy turns to thoughts of getting out of school. The only barrier to that happy occurrence might be some time spent slogging through those standardized tests. They're the ones that governments like to use to compare class results across schools in districts or larger jurisdictions.

Anyway, Mississippi (and now Texas) brought about wonderful gains in standardized test scores and that landed the state's Rod Paige a job at the national level. He and others staunchly maintain that everything was above board and it was their curriculum design changes that brought about the miraculous results. Critics cried "Hogwash!" and pointed to the elimination of a lot of low-scorers in the statistical analyses. Disallow poor grades and disallow any scores from retained students (Do they still do that?) and the residue will look pretty good, even miraculous.

As a pleasant aside, I just realized that this is my 27th year of retirement and I'm still collecting my invested savings from my salary of 35 classroom years. The additional Ontario portion I could recover if I wanted go east and back into harness for another year, but I don't think so. And it is so my money and I'm not leaching off the government and your pension plan (and your company should be compelled to give you one) ought to be offering you the same benefits. Where's all this going? Test scores and flim-flam.

Truth! That's the issue. Here was this short little essay in some post or substack or magazine and it twigged with a term I hadn't heard in a long time, probably not since my last failed journal submission way back in graduate school when I had this delusion that my thoughts on academic matters would be of great interest to the world of academe. Gatekeepers!

Here it is in a piece by one Jason Guriel about our William Gibson, prescient Canadian sci-fi-writer-turned-publisher and famously originator of the term "cyperpunk". During one of my summertime sessions at UVic (what else ya' gonna do in July when you're a young teacher struggling for advancement?) I wandered into the lecture hall to listen to Mr. Gibson give a talk on writing. His words in response to an enthusiastic admirerer stayed with me.

A young man was going on, telling Gibson how "Like really cool you are at telling such neat stories" – OK, I'm exaggetating for effect, but not much – "and how do you do that? Like what's the secret?" I do remember the questioner because he had blue-streaked hair and I didn't - have much hair, that is, blue or otherwise. Gibson's answer was much briefer than the question.

"I get up early and work hard at writing for some hours. Later in the day, I revise. This is my job and I love it but it takes work. Next question?"

And now, here in 2026, an older and still wise William Gibson is advocating for the return of the gatekeeper in publishing. He knows the diminished, and in many quarters vanished, role of the person who accepted or rejected material for publication in a particular media outlet. Think Editor Perry in Superman comics, or Dorothy Parker without the cigar. Cranky, caustic and omnipotent. And desperately needed - in Mississippi and everywhere.

Large Language Models or Artificial Intelligence applications or bots or algorithms or whatever you call them (I know I need a gatekeeper myself who is more conversant with the terminology - Steven, where are you?) - all those are not to be trusted in my opinion. They're not really working for me. Many writers have told us how outright sychophantic and dishonest their responses are, and that would get me and my writing into hot water or into the rejection bin if a real knowledgeable human being read my work.

Here's what the author (D. W. Wilson, an award-winning short story writer and novelist, a teacher, and an "avowed nerd") had to say, in part of a report in The Walrus. He was writing about the "scandal" of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize which faced credible allegations that several of its regional winners were AI generated

At its core, this is a debate about values. A short story implies a human artistic act with intentional imaginative labour—the exact practice whose future is now at risk if the literary world doesn’t take a stand.

Let's start with Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, whose response to the allegations included this sentence:

“Until a sufficient tool or process to reliably detect the use of AI emerges that can also grapple with the challenges pertaining to working with unpublished fiction, the Foundation and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize must operate on the principle of trust.”

This sounds reasonable only if we accept that the Commonwealth Foundation—and, indeed, any literary institution founded on interpretative judgment, which, last I checked, is all of them—is helpless as it awaits the invention of an imagined perfect machine. But the foundation is not helpless. It has the same tools it has always had, which still work and which literary journals and organizations use daily: analysis, comparison, critical reading, the ability to weigh evidence, to select, to not select, to take a principled stance. That is: the hard work, the human work, of assessing and appreciating art.

And at this point my pontificating needs some comic relief and aren't you a happy daughter that showed me how to put graphics into my posts? Soon I may learn how to sharpen the focus.