I was lurking around in an #edchat Twitter conversation this morning when the discussion turned to the question of why parents do not cry out against standardized testing in education. I began thinking about the 15 (yes, that is a number high enough I don’t have to spell it out according to grammatical rules) tests that each student in Texas must now pass in order to graduate from high school. It has taken a long evolution to get us here, but here we are, expecting every student (in some districts) to grasp the concepts of physics, every student to understand more Chemistry than I did as a second year science major in college, every student to embrace the concepts of pre-calculus to the extent that they can pass an exam at the “end” of the year (the tests are mostly finished by the end of April).
I am old enough to remember the movement that started all of this. I remember hearing news stories about people graduating from high school who couldn’t read or sign their own name, perform simple addition and subtraction, or compose a complete sentence. Appalling, yes. How did we get from there to here?
I believe it has a lot to do with trust.
Parents trust the education community to be the experts – to know the best practices that facilitate student achievement. The slow evolution of testing from making sure every student has the basics – reading, writing, and arithmetic – to this expectation that every student is a carbon copy of the next one, and therefore, should know exactly the same things before graduating from high school has effectively desensitized parents (and I say this as a parent myself). It simply doesn’t register when our 3rd grader wakes up one morning, begging us to cook a huge breakfast for him because his teacher said he would fail his high-stakes test if he didn’t eat well, that there is something wrong with a child this age being stressed about performance. We don’t connect the dots when our sixth grader calls herself stupid in math when it used to be the subject she loved the most that her confidence level is directly proportional to the score she got on the district benchmark test.
Parents trust that the institution forced upon every child in America knows what it’s doing, and the fancy titles “Exemplary”, “Recognized”, an “A+ school” are indicators of student success, but what they don’t know is that these titles are only measures in a moment of time. These measures only reflect how much that student knew in that moment when they were taking their test. It has more to do with “cramming” and test-taking strategies than it does with any skill needed to live a successful, productive life.
As a parent, I am disgusted with the importance that is placed on test scores. I am disgusted with grading policies that reflect how well my kids can comply with their teachers’ directives than how well they can apply what they know.
I have wished that I didn’t know – that I could just trust.
The good news is, I see a revolution on the way. I see more and more parents saying “wait a minute!” and asking the questions that need to be asked, giving their children the okay to not stress about the test, and demanding recognition that each student be seen as an individual, not one who came from the same blueprint as the next one, but one whose unique abilities and interests should be championed. Even students are keenly aware of the impact this reduction in their individual worth has had on their own futures and are speaking out.
Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long for them to be heard.







Because I am a teacher
When I was in college, I had a professor tell me that I was made to be a science teacher. At the time, I was an English major and science was the furthest thing from my mind. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that she was right. It was my Biology class that I was excited to go to each week and my English classes I dreaded.
Still, she had said “teacher”, and I wasn’t so sure about that. I had teachers through my K-12 education who had made me want to be a teacher and I had teachers during that same time that made me want to have nothing to do with education. I was skeptical.
During my sophomore year, I got a paid gig doing supplemental instruction for Biology students. This wasn’t tutoring, per se, it involved planning on my part. I had to attend various Bio lectures, then create a supplemental lesson plan designed to revisit the content from lecture in more visual or hands-on ways. My students were usually either athletes who were being forced to attend by their coaches or non-traditional students who really didn’t want to have to pay for the class more than once.
I found that I loved those classes. I loved sitting in the lectures, I loved planning, I loved getting to know my students, and I loved differentiating for them (before I had ever heard that word in reference to education).
I changed my major to Science Education, then Biology itself, and happily continued pursuit of a degree. During my senior year, I found myself restless and anxious to finish, anxious to have my own students. At the time, Yahoo had a feature that allowed users to create chat rooms and I began to create one called “Biology tutoring”. I would get students from all over the word and of all ages. A few continued to chat with me throughout their Biology experience (and two of them still contact me from time to time, all grown up). I found these little snippets of “teaching” to be something like sustenance.
Fast forward through my high school science teacher career to where I am today, an instructional technology specialist. This means I don’t have a classroom – or students. I take on teaching gigs for online classes, which helps to sate my appetite for teaching young people. However, I have discovered one way that also satisfies that need without any effort on my part – a YouTube video.
Yes, a YouTube video. Not just any video, but one that I uploaded three years ago. This thing is embarrassingly simple and goofy-looking. I created it quickly to help some of my online Chemistry students learn an alternative to dimensional analysis. I posted it to YouTube for them. I never thought that three years later, I would be approaching 20,000 views.
The part about the video that satisfies me are the comments. They ebb and flow. Sometimes I will get a new comment each week. Other times, I might have to wait a month, but those comments always give me that warm fuzzy feeling all over again. Sometimes they just tell me thanks, sometimes they ask me questions (which I try to always respond to), and sometimes they share the video with their friends or teachers.
I have the heart of a teacher. I might not be in a classroom. There might not be any students who even know my name, but I have made a difference to, surprisingly, mostly college students who are struggling through Chemistry and find my video.
When we are struggling with whatever stresses are coming our way – and as educators, this is an ongoing flow – we must always remember that we are making a difference – because we are teachers.
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