A Slow Day in Real Life

I have eight more days of school. Actually 7.5 days... the last day is a half day and then I can relax for almost two months of vacation, marred only by the need to do yard work and summer classes. Today is an easy day though. We are doing state mandated testing.

Ah testing. What can I say about this annual rite of passage? Not much really. I can't tell you how the test is given, what grade I was testing, who was in the room, or what was served in the cafeteria. Okay, the last part is a fib. The cafeteria menu is not secret, just disgusting.

What can I tell you about testing? Probably that it worries us teachers more than it does most of the kids. There are two adults in each room, even if there is only one student. One is the administrator and one is the proctor. That's to cover our butts. We can verify what the other did during testing and what the students did.

Because of the "No Child Left Behind" law, every year more students must pass these tests. Teachers who teach the core subjects are under the gun to have high pass rates (100% by 2014). The rest of us are expected to supplement our curriculums with English, math, science, and social studies materials to reinforce those core areas. And any discrepancy is the testing process can cause a teacher to be fired and lose his/her license.

I used to teach earth science years ago. I loved it. The units that I covered in class included geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy (my favorite). I had a curriculum to follow, what we call our Standards of Learning (SOL), but I was free to design my course around those goals. I loved to teach my meteorology unit at the beginning of the winter months when the students were interested in predicting when the next snow day was coming. I usually started the year with geology, but I loved to bring up current events of earthquakes or volcanos anytime of the year. If NASA was launching a space probe or a shuttle mission, you better believe that was the topic of the day in my class room.

But that all changed. Accountability in the class room lead to tighter standards. I could no longer be flexible in my teaching and my assessment of student progress. Field trips were limited to only those that could be justified under the SOL. A strict curriculum guide was written in every school outlining instruction down to the week and sometimes day. Tests and quizzes needed to conform to the style used in the state tests. In other words, we teachers were expected to become robots who taught to the test. The all important, unforgiving, inflexible test.

Now before you begin to think I am too bitter, cynical, and morose, there still is a lot of fun and creativity in teaching. We just have to work harder to pull it all together and educate our students as well as teach to the test. The younger teachers, God bless them, are better at that than I am (old dogs... new tricks). I am impressed with their energy and creativity. Was I that energetic once long ago?

Today was an easy day for me. The students were quiet after testing and laid their heads on their desks and slept. A few read their books (Twilight is very popular this year with the little girls). During the afternoon I only had four students in class while others were testing. When I finish this post in a minute, I'll load it and go online. Maybe my girlfriend will be there. I've missed her. Maybe one of my other friends will have time to talk. Maybe the lag will not be so bad tonight. LAG! UGH! But that is another story.