Sunday, April 19, 2009
testing
I'm gong to be honest, I cant stand standardized testing. Its absolutely irrelevant, some kids are good test takers and others not. Testing for us as teachers is a form of assessment. However, what form of assessment is our government testing for. Is it the standards, questions for future leaders, or benchmarks? The school I'm student teaching at has extremely poor reading skills, as a whole they will bomb on any of the sections related towards reading and comprehension. The tragedy is that we focus much of our class time preparing our students for parts of this test when we could focus more on developing better readers and critical thinkers. Yet it has become more important for the entire enterprise of our district to focus on rote memorization of words. The losers are our students, impoverished districts, and us as teachers since most of us have to follow this path towards creating standard students.
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I hear what you are saying Bob, since we teach at the same school I see the same things you do. When we read together in the classroom, many of the students have a hard time getting through simple sentences. Many of them still don't pause at the end of a sentence. They just read right through it. The standardized tests displayed these same problems. But what is the point? The tests aren't doing anything about it. They are only pointing out an already known problem.
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