Week Three

Spring quarter sucks. Kids are constantly gone. Now prom is looming. It’s a nightmare to try and teach anything when on any given day 1/3 of my class is absent for activities.

You can’t blame the kids – it’s just par for the course. I’m just glad I don’t teach science. It’s not impossible for a kid to read a book or write a paper on a bus. But completing a lab?

*****

One of my students who has missed about 10 days so far this quarter just showed up. He wasn’t happy about all the reading he has to make up in Science Fiction – one long story “Herbert West – Reanimator” and one novella “The Great God Pan.”

Of course, he said the he never got time to read “Herbert West – Reanimator” since he was on his trip. Then he tried to lay the guilt trip on me that he supposedly stopped by before leaving to get his work, but I was gone.

I said, “Well, that’s too bad. I’m here most of the time. I was probably running off copies for someone else who was going to be gone on the trip.”

Lay that guilt trip right back at ‘em. I should have said, “What use would it have been? You didn’t even read “Reanimator,” so how are you going to get “The Great God Pan” read?”

Or (when he complained about the reading)

“This is an elective. That means you CHOSE to take this class. And since it’s an English elective, it means reading. If I were to take a math class, I wouldn’t complain about having to add, subtract, and do equations, right?”

But, alas, I didn’t think of any of that until now.

******

My fourth block Lit and Language class is bipolar.

Some days, like today, they work great. Other days, like last week, they want nothing to do with the novel or class.

I just enjoy the good days and suffer through the bad ones.

Today was a good one though.

******

I was listening to a podcast again this morning. It was a roundtable discussion with some of the most powerful administrators in the nation.

They discussed testing and the added emphasis on the results. This got me to thinking about the testing (well, the precious little I actually do) in my classes.

First, I swore in college that I would never give multiple choice tests. That lasted about a quarter. Reading through 200 essay tests was overwhelming. I made peace with my haughty attitude (from my undergraduate days) toward multiple choice tests after that.
I admit now that I use our test grading machine for nearly all my tests. Each test, though, does include an essay section which cannot be scored by anything other than me. But to keep my sanity, I include the multiple choice and score it with the machine.

Second, I have moved away from testing in general. A few years ago, I believed the more I raked the students over the coals with large end of the unit, midquarter, and final exams, the better I was teaching.

I was wrong.

I have moved toward projects and other tools to try and judge comprehension. Students find those more meaningful.

I can’t recall more than half a dozen tests I took in college. But I can remember – in depth – most of the projects or papers I wrote.

Third, I don’t think my tests accurately assess comprehension anyway. I don’t think I have ever believed this.

Let’s be honest here. Tests don’t always accurately measure what a student “comprehends.” They measure how much the kids can cram or memorize the night before. They measure how well the student knows how to “play the school game.”

(In terms of writing tests, they judge how a student can master a form and meet the prompt. I’m still bitter about my lowest score on the old tests we used to have to take before we began teaching (can’t think of their title right now), which was in writing. Ironic, right?)

Now I know if I teach well – and organize my curriculum properly – students will not need to cram or memorize the night before the test.

But this is pie in the sky thinking. I have never been so well prepared by a teacher that I have felt confident enough to just take any test without at least reviewing the information the night before – and I have had some phenomenal teachers. Students don’t think that way.

Tests just measure how well the student chooses to prepare themselves. Case in point – Casey scores off the chart on his NWEA tests (a broader type of test). Yet, his high school grades, of which tests are a key part, don’t equate to his natural ability. He simply doesn’t push himself for his smaller, more focused classroom tests.

It didn’t occur to me until this morning that I never thought of my tests as really accurate representations of what most of my students know. Does this make me a bad teacher?

I don’t know.

I once had a student, Amber, a Native American who had a very turbulent home life (in fact, her aunts were raising her). She called me over to her desk about a dozen times during her Julius Caesar test. She wanted to know if her answers were right – every single one was. She just didn’t trust herself because as she confessed, “I didn’t really study for the test.”

No. She just had paid attention and engaged herself in the play over the past month. True learning. But she didn’t feel that way because she hadn’t crammed the night before.

If a student crams it all in the night before a test and scores well on it, despite the fact that the information they crammed into their brain will basically ooze out their ears as they leave the classroom, is that an accurate record of what she/he “comprehends” or knows?

Is that type of ‘knowledge’ even worth testing?