TESTING, TESTING

So.  We looked through all the bajillion standards of the TEKS as well as the Common Core (I feel like that sounds very ominous...the COMMON COREEEE), as well as the hippy-dippy stuff of the NCTE.  I'd like to say that I don't see the point in standards, but honestly, my rule-following heart-n-soul can see the good in such things.  I think that they're a little outlandish on some accounts (the silly titles that the CC gives as examples for what your class should be reading are a bit outdated and blah), but I do think that we need to make sure that students are learning helpful skills in each grade.  And honestly, I think test prep is part of that.

Yes, yell at me, call me a Republican (yikes), but we can't escape one simple fact: at this point, and for the foreseeable future, success in America (not necessarily real success, but what we like to measure as success) is based on test scores.  They're silly anti-measures of true knowledge, but that's how the people in charge like to see that kids are learning stuff.  I think we do a disservice to our students if we DON'T prepare them for this stuff.  When I was in 7th grade, my mom knew that we were going to take SATs in preparation for the TIP (Talent Identification Program) thing.  We didn't have money, but my mom (who is college educated and played the game herself) knew that doing well on this test would be good for me.  She checked out a thick test prep volume for the SAT for me, and I did all the practice tests.  And I made a 1210 on the SAT, in the 7th grade.  Was I brilliant?  Probably not.  But I knew how to take the test.

My CT told her classes the other day that while tests aren't the end-all be-all of knowledge, "there's power in doing well on tests."  She's right.  Whether or not we should be giving power to standards and tests, there is certainly power in that right now.  And I think that my CT is going about the test prep game in a helpful way.  She and her co-teacher made up a test with just poems in it, and they reviewed how to read a poem, and how to explore a poem.  Even while the students were working on the test, they talked about how to really get down to what a poem is saying.  So it's not just about being able to answer the test questions in class, but it's also about the reading and analyzing process.  While I think one is certainly more important than the other, we're explicitly helping our not-so-advantaged students access power.  So while standards are certainly not going to facilitate standardized learning, we do need to make sure that all of our students have access to similar levels of knowledge, and, perhaps more importantly, power.  Because isn't all knowledge power?