I wonder how many Americans realize that we have classrooms of clinically anxious kids nowadays? I subbed in one today. The sub instructions for one class said that all the kids had access to fidget toys* and all were allowed to go out for walks if they felt tense and needed a break. I had specific diagnoses in my sub file for Generalized Anxiety Disorder and other emotional challenges.

I had a great time with that class. We discussed emotional issues of today and the recent past, the Holocaust, heroism and self-sacrifice. I’ll sub in that room any time.

But I nonetheless found myself sobered by the very existence of that classroom. When we can build whole classrooms around fear, anxiety and emotional distress, we ought to be looking at the environment our children inhabit. Yahoo today contains stories on broken marriages, dirty school water, a 13-year-old girl abducted from a park and raped, parents killed and daughters critically injured on a dream vacation to Disneyworld, a mall shooting, brain-hostile education, and a woman who has lost four sons to gun violence. New HIV information has become available, and research suggests that anxiety increases men’s cancer risk. I hated “Devastated Mom Writes Open Letter to the Man Who Killed Her Family’s Dog,” but I read it. If I wanted to further depress myself, I could read about the 40 celebrities who committed suicide. My phone just gave me a list of leprosy risk factors. I plan to redouble my efforts to avoid armadillos.

Playing Mortal Combat, Battle with the Mist Zombies, or whatever new title has come out, seems wholesome in comparison to the news today. At least our students know that Grand Theft Auto sprang from the minds of well-paid computer programmers. I am getting close to deciding that playing games may be an emotionally healthier use of the internet than random surfing.

Eduhonesty: I have few recommendations here. I see no way to get the genie back in the bottle.  But I would like to make an observation: One of the most compelling reasons I can see to cut back on this decade’s deluge of standardized testing rests in that basket of fidget toys. These kids are stressed enough. They don’t need additional text anxiety to load on top of the mother who killed her two kids and the brain tumor symptom — headaches! — you should never ignore.

We talk about safe classrooms. If we want to create safe classrooms, we should recognize that high-stakes tests are landmines in our educational landscape, potent sources of anxiety for lower-scoring, less-resilient children. No data justifies rubbing kids’ noses in their inability to hit ever-rising targets.

Readers, please put yourself in our kid’s shoes. How can we help escalating stress levels in middle school and high school especially, those years when kids get nearly open access to the whole of the internet, through their phones, if not at school?

One recommendation I will make: When you know your kids will not do well on those tests, opt out. When you know your kids may do well, but can see those kids becoming more scared by the month or year, opt out. We have to shut the data train down. One unemphasized test requiring two school days at most toward the end of each year, combined with an unemphasized benchmark test given at the beginning and middle of the year to track individual student progress ought to be all the standardized testing the state and federal governments need.

These weeks of high-stakes data-mongering must be shut down. If we don’t have enough data by now, our incompetence at testing and data analysis should not become a hammer we use to pound down our students, some of whom are already medicated for panic attacks in their teens, and others of whom are self-medicating through blunts and bongs, alcohol, and random drugs of the street.

* Check out http://theinspiredtreehouse.com/child-develoment-what-is-a-fidget-toy/ for a good, quick definition of a fidget toy.