“Hate” is a rather strong word. I use it sparingly, typically reserving it to describe my feelings about mayonnaise, the squirrel that keeps devouring the stash in my bird feeder, and the sitcom “According to Jim.”
As a teacher, I believe that one of the most valuable weapons in my arsenal is my ability – most of the time, anyway – to roll with the punches. However, on certain occasions, the “h-word” comes bubbling to the service.
One such occasion was last week during our morning of standardized testing. Okay, I don’t quite hate it, but to call my feelings “intense dislike” would not be an overstatement.
It’s not the way my school handles the process, or the fact that the tests are given at all. Standardized assessments are important and provide key data to help guide instruction. But after spending a morning with a roomful of sophomores filling in ovals for over three hours, one tends to come away with a few opinions.
One of the key components of standardized testing is that the exact same instructions be given to all students. It’s fair, but it’s sure not fun. There is really no career satisfaction to be derived from reciting pages upon pages of directions that most kids consider to be painfully obvious by this stage in their academic careers. And don’t even get me started on the confused faces of the students who know me well and thus expected a wisecrack rather than my robotic monotone as I read from the test manual.
After a grueling morning of testing, the students returned to their afternoon classes looking numb and weary. As the bell rang, I jokingly asked my students to take out a #2 pencil. My ears are still ringing from the din of their collective groan. We then moved on to the actual lesson of the day – a low-key listening activity coupled with the viewing of a cartoon in Spanish. That’s really all they could take at that point.
And the funny thing is that I felt exhausted after that morning, even more so than if I’d been teaching. I could only imagine how tired the kids were, tethered to their desks, nibbling the edges of their pencils, filling in yet another bubble. And I wondered how my students with test anxiety, the ones who excel on projects and in class but freeze in testing situations, were doing over that morning.
I would love it if the proponents of even more testing could spend some real time in our schools to see how a proliferation of testing can impede the learning process. “Teaching to the test” is a phrase that’s thrown around casually, but when that happens, learning doesn’t always follow. I would liken it to cramming for a test or quiz. The grade I earn might be just fine, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve learned the material or made it my own, or that I’ve learned how to think through a process beyond one I’ve seen on a testing booklet.
As I said at the beginning of this blog, “hate” is a pretty strong word. I don’t hate standardized testing, but it’s nice to dream once in a while about an education system whose sun rises and sets – and where the kids learn happily – with nary a #2 pencil in sight.
