Test, rinse, repeat

Posted

No parent wants to tell a child that they had it easier than their kid. In “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the mom tells her daughter, “When I was your age, we didn’t have food!”

That’s what you want to say to your offspring — how much, much harder it was for you than her. But in the case of the state ELA and Mathematics tests, it’s not true.  

I didn’t take state tests in New York until I was in the 10th grade. My junior companion started this year, in third grade.  

She was worried about the tests some weeks beforehand, particularly when she worked on the practice ones at home, with me looking on. I told her what my mother told me, “Just do the best you can,” because it sounds comforting and I didn’t have anything better to say. I tried not to put too much pressure on her.

Right before the tests, she seemed pretty calm about these three-day marathons, to her credit.

I, on the other hand, felt little stabs of anxiety during my own workday, thinking about what she was facing and how she was dealing with the test questions. I also had conflicted feelings about the testing.

Do I want my junior companion to obtain an academically rigorous education?  Absolutely. But I wonder whether these tests are truly helping to achieve this goal.

To put it into contemporary technical terms, my junior companion has spent the last eight years downloading data into her central processing unit (CPU). She has used a great variety of extrinsic media and intrinsic sensory components to input this data into her CPU. New data is assimilated with old data to establish new wired connections. 

(In this process, she has an advantage over me, as my primary early childhood inputs consisted primarily of reading comic books and watching Popeye cartoons and old episodes of “The Little Rascals,” “Superman” and “The Three Stooges.”)

standardized testing, opt-outs, Mike Gold
Page 1 / 2

Comments