Last week one of the local school districts held a district-wide PEP RALLY for all the kids to get them “ready” to take the LEAP test, whatever that is. A PEP RALLY. What happened to, oh, teaching them something? We’re talking the kids being given hats, flags, there were hundreds of cheerleaders…all to try to convince the kids that the test is a BIG DEAL and VERY IMPORTANT. It may well be that, but I was horrified. My mother told me she wouldn’t have let me or my brother attend something like that.
I had to take some standardized tests, but nothing like what kids have to go through now. I always found them insultingly easy, aside from the math parts.
I know there’s got to be some way to figure out how the schools are doing, but from what I’ve been hearing the last few years, pushing standardized tests just isn’t working.
I’ve always been skeptical of the ‘no, tests won’t accomplish anything’ argument. It always hit me that those doing the work were arguing that there was no measurable means to evaluate the effectiveness of the workers. I don’t think any of us would accept an analog number like grades for such a thing. An independent outside measure is worth pursuing.
I hate the idea of ‘teaching to the tests’ as well (and I speak as one who taught in grad school).
Seriously, I’d love to see some other measure of school and student performance. But I don’t see anything other than standardized testing that would be cost effective.
Awwwwwww… aren’t you just the cutest little thing. So much intelligence, class, fire. Don’t even get me started on the blinding originality (you know, with the whole ‘people I don’t like are only fit for menial work’ angle. It really takes the breath away.)
Lemme explain this to you nice and slow, and hopefully, it might just sink into your insanely dense cranium. Government standardized testing is used primarily to indicate a school’s performance, not an individual’s. These scores will be on my record, and will be reported to me, but other than that, they don’t matter. I don’t ever have to show them to an college admittance officer or an employer (there’s an ongoing debate on the weight they should carry, but the ‘not much’ side is still winning.) So using them as a medium of protest is a very safe prospect.
What matters to my career is my GPA (very high currently) and my boards; ACT, SAT, SAT2. As far as they go, I’ve already scored well enough on the SAT’s to get me into a good school, and this was in 8th grade. I know the dynamics of this situation very well, and I know when to stand straight and salute, and I know when I can show a little steel.
And yes, I will enjoy these anecdotes, with friends, doing a job I love and supporting myself. I imagine you’ll be getting through the way you always have: by the ceaseless fellation of the officials and your superiors.
Whatever the practical reasons, whatever they are trying to prepare us for, the school is still wrong. I will not smile over civil rights violations and the starvation of creativity here because it is the same way there. And do not believe that I’m so naive that I think the world is a bed of roses. Rose fertilizer more like.
Civil rights violations? Civil rights violations? Sorry, you lost me there, Sport. Clearly you are way too smart to have to deal with the banalities of such things as a uniform policy, so maybe you can articulate exactly where your civil rights are being violated. Be specific, now.
Newsflash: In high-school, you are not entitled to the same rights as adults. Minors are under the watch of the grown-ups, and until you become a grownup, we (the adults) have the right - and the responsibility - to determine which “civil rights” you get to have. Sorry about that.
Also, the real world isn’t all about getting to flaunt your creativity. Hell, I’m in an industry that is pretty much nothing but creativity, and I still don’t get to do whatever the heck I want. There’s always going to be someone telling you what to do. Even Bill Gates has to answer to others (namely, his stockholders his customers). You may as well get used to it now.
And frankly, as a form of protest, intentionally screwing up on your test ranks right up there with scrawling dirty limericks on the bathroom wall in terms of effectiveness. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Jeff
This is a bit of a hijack, but do you have any idea how they treat kids nowdays? It’s been a few years since I’ve been in high school, but I remember a lot more than uniforms. I remember drug sniffing dogs roaming the hallways. I remember people pushing for random drug tests for all students. I remember being told that speaking out against school policy could result in severe and unrelated academic consequences. I remember being forced to sign up for less advanced classes because I was a girl (this got fixed when I got my mom to call). I remember being treated like a child. I remember being treated like a criminal. What I do not remember is being treated like a fully conscious human being learning how to be an adult.
Check it out one day. Talk to some teenagers. You’d be surprised just how much schools resemble prisons. And I think you’d be surprised at how unwarrented all the contempt against youth is- they really are intellegent, fully-human creatures with thoughts and ideas that have merit and growing maturity.
A couple of thigs without reference to any names…I’m a bit too tired now to reference anyone…
School Testing: I’m on the fence here. I understand that schools have to be improved and there has to be some sort of ranking to see whether students are being taught well. If students can do well on basic math or w\english exams, then at least they can function in the real world.
Caveat here: it doesn’t always work so objectively. I remember teachers actually coming around when I was in elementary school and going “you’d better check #4 over again” just so that more students scored better. If you pay schools more for students doing better on tests, schools will begin to cheat. I’m just not sure how else students can be tested and schools compared…if anyone has ideas then be my guest…if not., the I say keep the system.
I just took my SATs this year and did very well. I’ve found it amazing that so many of the wordfs I learned when studying for the SATs are in the NYTimes, WSJ, books I read, magazines, etc. If you think that increasing your vocabulary is a waste of time, you’re absolutely wrong. Studying for the SAT, at least for me, was a start. Now that I encounter so many of these words in daily activities, I get a more concrete sense of what they mean and how they should be used. I’m also finding that I can read progressively “harder” texts as I continue to try to learn words.
The school as a prison thing - failing tests is just going to make the faculty more pissed off because the district will come down harder on the principal, principal will come down harder on the teachers, etc.
The students at my school actually staged a sit-in to protest policy at school, and got parents and teachers involved. We were successful for the most part.
Nevertheless, I totally agree with this one. Students are being treated like criminals, and being treated thusly just causes more animosity and crime. Totally unacceptable how schools are being run.
Seems like faculty just doesn’t care enough to take care of problems at school in other ways, and just choose to hire security guards to harass students into being model students.
Maybe high school has changed a lot since my time there, but it sounds like you still haven’t learned the diference between “civil rights” and doing whatever the hell you please. I’m sure there are still plenty on nonsensical rules that restrict the length of skirts or beer T-shirts. The problem is that there are 30 students to each teacher and the rules (idiotic and imperfect as they seem) are there to make managing the whole process easier. The whole thing seems like a prison because it basically has to be.
Besides, it will make college seem that much more fun.
First of all, pertaining to testing in schools, I just want to say I have both intelligence and ambition, in comparison to many of my friends.
I really hate it when kids say “I am intelligent enough, I just chose not to be”
It’s not that I think that these kids are dumb, they usually have the same innate abilities to rationalize that I do, or at least somewhat nearing this. I share more in common with them than the kids who have great ambition and yet have a sort of mental barrier on their ability to learn, or their speed of learning.
However, these kids are participating in what I like to refer to as compounded ignorance. Basically, whereas I learn chapter 1 to help me through chapter 2, they never really learn chapter 1, thus chapter 2 is out of the question. Compound this to years of high school and you end up getting kids who have no practical knowledge, no impractical knowledge (or knowledge specifically useful for limited job occupations), yet still “able” to learn this.
In my opinion, these tests pick up on kids who have enough ambition and intelligence; these two skills are important to most people’s future jobs. Both are somewhat innate, but are able to be encouraged by testing.
One of my good friends is completely unambitious, but perhaps it isn’t out of lack of ambition in any general sense; perhaps it’s unwillingness to accept how practical the knowledge he is learning is. I guess I understand that, musicians don’t need calculus any more than I need band, but until any person is ready to make the decision on what his or her profession is, ie: junior-senior in high school, or even later, I think they should take all knowledge gained in school as practical.