Teaching to the test

Education is best understood from the perspective of the student. We have all been students.

We have all done this... you know whats going to be on the test. You learn what you need to pass the test. You take the test. Then once the test is done, you forget it. We have all done this on subjects that we have no interest in or reason for learning.

It is quite possible that the PlainOldMe's students have learned all of the subjects that she wants them to know. It is likely that they have passed (and maybe even aced) tests by answering questions about syllogisms and the Enlightenment. PlainOldMe lists subjects that are of person interest to her, but I notice that her list doesn't include Physics or mathematics. I am sure that she has passed tests about factoring polynomials or calculating projectile motion... I wonder how much of this information she has retained.

If you tell kids that they need to pass tests... then they will learn to pass tests. It makes perfect sense. You are teaching them to cram their heads with information that they couldn't care less about. Other than passing the tests students don't care because they don't think this information will ever be important or relevant to their lives (and factually, as we all know as adults, it won't).

If you want me, as a student, to remember something; make it interesting, make it relevant to my life or my goals. And, better yet, let me choose what fascinates me (which is different for all of us). I am an engineer with a Physics degree so math and science always grab me, but there have been other classes that have also gotten my attention. I took a psychology class that covered Erickson and Kohlberg in an interesting way... I can still remember what was taught.

As a student, I have always been very good at passing tests. The strategy of learning whatever the teacher of the day feels I should know for a couple of weeks, and then dropping the irrelevant stuff shortly after the test has worked for millions of us.

This isn't what learning is.

My daughter is having the state capitals drilled into her head because state capitals are part of the curriculum standards. Knowing the state capitals will allow her to fill in a few more little ovals with a #2 lead pencil in the all important statewide exams.

Does anyone want to tell me why knowing every state capital by memory has ever helped anyone?

I must have at one time known them all (as I endured 4th grade once myself). Last week I went over them with my daughter. She soon discovered that I am unable to recite even half of them. I have never really cared about this. Somehow I have a successful career and a fulfilling life without the ability to recite state capitals by rote.

The lesson here for my daughter is that sometimes people in authority force you to do things for no reason. Even though she knows that this is a complete waste of her time she will do as she is told, without making a fuss, to please the person in authority and get good grades.

I explained to her that sometimes adults are faced with the same types of mindless tasks, and sometimes the best thing to do is get into line and do as you are told without questioning.

At least there is a teachable moment from this.

Maybe it is possible that I don't talk about physics because I don't teach physics although this past semester, I taught a class on writing in the biological sciences.

The things I write about are not just of interest to me but are part of the what I call the larger arc of history, or, the things one needs to know simply to understand the world today.

Here is something in answer to the criticism that I am asking too much of the students.

I taught developmental (remedial) writing at a community college. Many of those students -- who were not immigrants or the children of immigrants -- wrote and read on the 3rd grade level. I have heard teachers at other community colleges offer the same assessment.

When my oldest granddaughter was eight years old and in the third grade, she looked over my shoulder as I checked papers. She easily pointed out errors.

My daughter, a former Spanish and French teacher, took classes in science at a community college to facilitate a career change. She reported that some of her classmates were at the third grade level.

I am not demanding too much. The schools and the children's parents are demanding too little.

You are teaching remedial reading at a Community college. These students come to you exactly because they need help on their reading and writing. This is a self-selected group of the students who most need help. What do you expect?

This is hardly the broad condemnation of the student body as a whole that you are trying to make it.

I taught science and computer programming for a couple of semesters at a community college. I had quite a diverse group, from very bright and fairly well-prepared students to people who were ill-prepared and had trouble with basic academic schools. I had to be patient and flexible to meet the needs of my students where they were. That was my job.

As I pointed out before, we are offering education to a greater portion of the population than ever before. Many of the people in community colleges are people who wouldn't have ever had access to any education in any previous era. That they are getting education at all is amazing.

The US is producing many bright, well-prepared, highly motivated and capable students, just as it always has.

Of course there are also students who are ill-prepared for academic work who pass through the system into adulthood. In the old days, these students would be dropped from the education system into working class jobs that didn't require education (i.e. farm hands, miners or factory workers).

These days, they end up in your remedial writing course. You seem to think that this is a bad thing. I think this is a great improvement.

Should a high school diploma be given to someone who reads on the 3 rd grade level?

I am not now teaching remedial writing at a community college. I believe I used the past tense.

Furthermore, those students are NOT self-selected. They are placed there as the result of a test.

I do not think it is a bad thing that they are taking remedial writing classes. You seem to misunderstand me and I have to ask if it is purposeful. I am angry that they were not taught earlier.

I had three knock-outs who were best friends in a developmental writing class. All were petite and extremely beautiful. One was white, one black and one Hispanic. When I asked on the second day of class, what is a sentence, the white girl answered, "Four words."

I suspect that they were all special education kids. That is what they were taught, largely because they were SPED kids, and, secondarily, because of their physical beauty. I would bet the teachers said, they will model or become hairdressers but they will find men to take care of them.

Of course, a sentence is, "A group of words expressing a complete thought and containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb)."

Each of those girls earned a B. And, sure, the grading is on the curve because they were still learning but the rate at which they learned was amazing. I would bet no other teacher bothered to see potential in them.

Then there was a kid everyone loved . . . including me. He was the star of the basketball team, a genuinely nice person with a super work ethic, and a handsome young black man. He happened to look up during one class -- the students all sat behind computers, arranged in rows -- and saw the student in front of him who earned an A-. He spoke out loud and said, "I barely have three sentences and he is one his second page!"

I am also angry at the comments -- some of them so far out of line that belong in some sort of satire -- that I hate my students and that I blame them for being unable to do middle school work, let alone college or even high school work.

I blame the parents who are not necessarily immigrants, as one writer suggested, but often middle class people who could care less. I blame the conservative politicians for pushing a testing agenda on the nation. And, yes, there were standardized tests when I was in school but, as I explained many times, they were only in English and math and were given twice annually and meant for the students, their parents and their teacher to determine with precision that the students were on grade level.

I blame the publishing houses for seeing money to be made in standardized testing. I blame the parents again for not standing up to the system and opting their children out of the tests. I blame the school administrators for not standing up to the conservative politicians, to the publishing houses and to any other promoter of tests to say NO, loud and clear.

Yes. High school diplomas should be given to special education students who are unable to read beyond the 3rd grade level. High schools have diverse populations. Any public high school community that will have some students who have trouble reading.

The high school should serve these students by providing a program that is appropriate for their abilities. When these kids have finished this program, they should be given a high school diploma.

This is a great thing. These kids would never have had the chance at any sort of education in the old days.

There was once a person who participated in abuzz whose sister was a SPED student who received a high school diploma. He was angry at the school for having awarded it.

I asked if he had ever helped his sister with her math or read to her. He did not and, if I remember correctly, he was about 9 years older than she. I asked if his parents had helped their daughter and they did not.

I feel you may be arguing for the sake of argument because you support mediocrity and failure.

I took this from the writing of Lilian Katz, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Here, she argues against the trend to early learning which I say is failing because kids can neither think nor imagine nor remember.

I would love to see us go "forward into the past." There needs to be memorizing in school because the brain does not develop otherwise. As I have said many, many times, teachers complained in the 70s and 80s because children came to school without knowing the alphabet, colors or nursery rhymes.

But, you will find something silly to whine about.

Here is Dr. Katz:

INTELLECTUAL GOALS
Intellectual goals and their related activities, on the other hand, are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.), including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to the questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.

An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that includes the focus on supporting children’s in-born intellectual dispositions, their natural inclinations. An appropriate curriculum in the early years then is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills,e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits. Extensive experience of involving preschool and kindergarten children in in-depth investigation projects has clearly supported the assumption that the children come to appreciate the usefulness of a range of basic academic skills related to literacy and mathematics as they strive to share their findings from their investigations with classmates and others. It is useful to assume that all the basic intellectual skills and dispositions are in-born in all children, though, granted, stronger in some individuals than in others…like everything else.

I think you are mashing up two different problems

1) teachers teach the test rather than teach how to learn

2) very little work of any type gets done increasingly as the kids advance. I think that most high schools are now so bad that only about a quarter of the workload that should get done does get done. This has to do with laziness from all participants. My kids used to skip class a lot in HS, but I did not care, so little was expected of them that they could get it done barely touching the classroom.

And what do we get out of spending the money to have these idiots sit in class long enough to "earn" a diploma? They are still useless. Ok, maybe they feel better about themselves without merit but that is not a good enough reason to rub out standards and to spend $15K a year or more doing it.

you need to blame the education profession, they who are now willing to award advancement and diplomas for time served rather than proficiency in mastering a challenging and worthwhile syllabus. Education has become a scam for the most part, but those running the schools hold more blame for the failure of the schools than anyone else does.

Odd that you don't also blame the teachers unions which have resisted every proposed action to get rid of ineffective teachers who can't themselves even pass an exam in the subjects they "teach", and which have resisted every attempt at getting teacher and/or school level accountability for the results they achieve (or don't achieve). I suspect your frustrations with the situation you are dealing with are very real, and I agree with some of the remedies you propose - for example diplomas or passing to the next grade for those who don't meet the standards. However the sources of these problems are in the teachers unionsl the educational establishment; and in the parents of communities that believe they are owed somethng by the rest of us, and which too often don't make the efforts required for the success they demand.

First, max used the present tense for my teaching situation when I used the past. What does that say about him?

Second, you just said that I am "mashing up two different problems." The problem is that thousands of kids are graduating from high school who should not have graduated. What I gave are examples of the process which allows these kids to graduate and you called those examples statements of problems.

I am going to add a link that further explains the process of how these kids end up with diplomas. See below.

Good point!

This piece aired this morning. It illustrates how many school districts have totally devalued their high school diplomas for the sake of a statistic.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/06/10/412240568/raising-graduation-rates-with-questionable-quick-fixes

I do blame the education profession BUT consider two things.

First, the teachers are doing as they are told do (this is not a statement that they are only following orders!) by layers of administrators. Surely, you must have seen the threads here full of defenders of standardized tests. The administrators here are not those who supervise the taking of the tests but the school administrators who approve test prep classes during school time and do not stand up to the other bureaucrats -- the members of Congress, the executives of the publishing houses, the superintendents of the many school systems -- and say I will not administer these tests but will teach a real curriculum.

Now, the second is an effect. The first group of students to have taken standardized tests here in MA are now 30 years old. The group has to include many classroom teachers. See where I am going?

Plainoldme,

Am I right (or wrong) that you think that fewer people should be getting high school diplomas?

It is a fact, if we make high school diplomas more difficult to get, fewer students will get them. (The Utopian position that we can have it all, higher test scores without spending significantly more money is a fantasy).

There is a public policy choice to be made here. If you make a high school diploma dependent on some arbitrary measure of knowledge... the more difficult you make it the fewer people will earn a diploma. Of course the people being denied a diploma will largely come from low-income and minority groups.

If your solution involves giving classroom teachers more respect, more authority, more resources and higher pay.. particularly in low income communities... than I am all for it.

If there is a problem with American education... it is that Americans don't want to pay for it.

What is your argument that the American people who DO PAY NOW on the order of $15,000 per kid per year or almost $200,000 per high school graduate (plus head start and school lunches for some) dont want to pay for education?

I spent 3 years as a classroom teacher. I taught about 130 kids a day. I wrote curricula, I taught classes, I worked with kids after school, I graded papers, I met with parents, I broke up fights. During the summer I took classes, researched equipment, prepared for new classes and arranged a lab. After three years I was burnt out. I realized there are very good teachers, and I wasn't one of them (although my supervisor was very kind and tried to persuade me to stay).

It was, by far, the most difficult job I have ever had. Never have I worked so hard.

I now work as a software engineer. I have deadlines and 50 hour weeks, but my job much easier than the work of a teacher. And I get paid well over twice the amount I made as a teacher.

Listening to people who have no idea what education in the classroom actually entails complain about teachers really bothers me.

(and your numbers are a little off... the actual number is $6,700 per student per year)