This is That Very Picture of Enthusiasm You've Heard About

I want to know how my teaching compares to the teaching of my peers—if someone else is doing a better job at teaching a topic, I will run to that teacher to learn how they’re doing it. Teachers want to help their students.

I especially want objective evidence of the great work I do!

Some teachers will tell me “Oh, I don’t pay any attention to tests. I know how my kids are doing, and that’s how I grade them.”

Some teachers just can’t face how little impact they’re having. Some would rather mistrust test results than accept that many inner-city students don’t learn very much at all because their un-parenting has very effectively taught them to ignore or disrespect the adult world.

Then, there’s also this:

Teachers have seen too many tests of suspect quality. These focus on picayune skills, use confusing wording, or have errors that remain uncorrected despite multiple teacher requests.

• Skills tests should gradually progress in challenge through the year as students’ skills presumably increase. Instead, our school saw District-designed reading test scores rise, fall, rise, then fall. Which is more likely: That all students’ skills rose and fell at exactly the same times of year, or that the tests were poorly-designed?

• One-fourth of the questions on one Math test were about prime numbers–fascinating to mathematicians, but absolutely non-essential until calculus.  Shouldn’t elementary years focus on the Big Four (+ – x /) and whether a student can apply these to realistic situations, before worrying about prime numbers?

• On one District test, our students were supposed to find two prepositional phrases in the sentence He had to go to the store. Good luck. There is only one preposition.

• Kids don’t reed gud nowadays, and their vocabularies are teeny. Math word problems are too often written too obtusely for today’s children. Why not use age-friendly “kid-speak”? The goal in Math learning is not to simultaneously challenge vocabulary and syntax, is it?
   

  And typical unit conversion questions use dimes, dimes, dimes, then ask for the answer in pennies. No problem, except that many adults, much less children, miss such switcheroos when reading a lengthy question. Why not bold that word “pennies“, or just say right out “Don’t forget to convert your answer to pennies from dimes.”?
   

  

  Adult-Speak Equivalent:

  “Initially having four of the above items, purchase a 25-cent gumball, and, by non-chemical means, transform your change to different decimal coinage, each coin of which has a value one-tenth as great as the original. Select the appropriate combination of coins and denomination from the choices shown below.“

   
  So, stop blaming teachers for mistrusting standardized tests.

  I was in the minority. When I was a teacher, with every test, I analyzed which questions were missed by most students and planned my new teaching around that. But then, I is a nerd. And my extreme efforts cost me time and my health and, in part, my family.

  But I was paid less than any newly-hired high-school city garbage collectors lacking high school diplomas. That made it all worthwhile. 🙂
   
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