Bewildering Stories welcomes...

James Rumpel

James lives with his family in Wisconsin. He is a retired high-school math teacher and tennis coach. He loves science fiction and has begun writing down the many stories he has accumulated mentally over the years.

“High-Stakes Testing” takes a present-day problem to an extreme. The problem is overreliance on tests — or even a single test — to determine the academic worth of both students and teachers. Okay, what if reliance on a single test score is literally a matter of life or death for students and their kind-hearted teacher? How fair is that?

The story’s ecological and social setting will cause problems for readers, but be careful not to misplace emphasis. The society depicted in the story must have a better way to treat children and teachers; it could hardly think of anything worse.

James Rumpel’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, James. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!