The night before I took the ACT in 1979, I was attending a prestigious party in a cornfield just east of town. Shortly after midnight, my friends and I piled into the car and wended our way back to Lincoln. Halfway home, someone in the backseat rolled down the window and threw up. It was a vivid science lesson for all of us, one that proved just how hard it is to throw liquid into a stiff, 60-mile-an-hour wind.
Back then, there were no John Baylors or Sylvan Learning Centers. In fact, I'm not sure I knew of one classmate who retook the ACT. And yet, colleges seemed more than happy to take in our warm, flatulent bodies. In fact, for some colleges, those qualities alone seemed to be their only requirements for admittance.
Boy, have times changed.
I pity today's students, who take more tests than a heroin addict in a methadone clinic. And what really chaps my educator hide is the seemingly endless compost pile of ever more standardized tests being heaped upon these voiceless victims.
You'd think that, in a society now bombarded by a bevy of bulbous boys and girls, we'd finally understand that "more" does not mean "better." And yet, I have seen nothing taken off of the "standardized testing" plate; rather, only additional servings heaped one upon the other.
Sure, the public is always free to blame students' failures on incompetent teachers, much as Charlie Sheen is free to believe he has tiger blood and is a rock star from Mars. Still, there's something to be said for spending some time on the front lines.
When, exactly, did the act of spending five hours a week with a teenager and evaluating that teenager based upon that time together get usurped by the idea that a standardized test, mandated by part-time legislators who meet 60 days a year, would provide a better measure of that teen's knowledge?
Worse yet, today's standardized tests require incredibly expensive delivery devices--namely, computers and high-speed Internet access. Gone are the days of #2 pencils and bubble sheets, neither of which had ever crashed or seized up midway through a test. These days, school libraries and labs are shut down for weeks at a time, and class times swell or shrink, all to accommodate the unwieldy way we now test our kids.
Plugged in? Hardly. "Plugged up" is more like it. Show me one thing--education included--that can thrive for long with a backed-up system.
No comments:
Post a Comment