Give a fish a test….

Likely no one wants to read a rant on testing…after all schools are now mandated into accountablity lockstepped into proving at any one moment any of us are doing anything and know anything…tests of course provide “evidence of learning” …….we need a lot of evidence evidentally in current culture to justify schools existing.
Anyway I’m a teacher that has to hold up my end of the the myth of testing, doing, meaning making, schooling ..in the current dialogs…. I’m persona non grata.

But being here (on a never read blog) I’m thinking about what I value more. A test result or a student affirmation…even years later….especially years later.
I would say that hearing from kids that are grown, that in my 20 year career I affected, is a very wonderful thing. Better still when they talk to me about what they recall from our experiences-so far the shocker is that it is not grades nor tests nor even a particular love of test prepping, which now is our consumptive drive. Which of course is no shocker is it…we know teachers , really great ones, connect to your inner core and give you something to live with and weave through your life. I’m pretty much convinced that the great teachers, life altering ones, see your capacities and abilities and develop them maybe most strongly by listening, encouraging and framing days around doing interesting things together.

All the rest seems like play acting.

But of course we are getting away from that simple nugget of truth …..moving the experience into one where you are judged by a test, loaded with memorization, and then of course, found wanting. This is the “prescription model”. You need to be fixed and the teacher assesses your wanting , plugs the holes after diagnosis with her tools..and off you go.
I so recall when working his magic in Texas Bush recounting his visits to parent conferences saying he had no idea where his girls stood and needed all that test data so he’d know “what they knew.” Yeah, that kind of quality parenting, that kind of view of the educational experience, probably does explain why NCLB flew from his brilliant mind aided by beings that think alike. (Let’s get some real proof my girls aren’t just bar jumping ….as of course we knew they were). That’s mean but what I’m doing to kids in my class is way meaner and they require it of me everyday….. Somehow I want learning in my own two girls to be less imposed and more self generated…I want not proof of what they know but opportunities to interact with their knowing. I don’t want to proscribe a course of study that exists independent of them and their interaction, but I do want to delight in listening to their thinking. I’m much more interested in seeing their capacities developed than in learning they missed an assignment on a sick day and their grade dropped a letter as the teacher couldn’t figure out how to get it recorded in later. I’m not a points person. It’s a complete miss….Bush went to a conference on his children so unevolved and uninvolved evidentally that he mistook it for a “report” on them needing corrective responses, when it is fairer to look at it as an opportunity for home and teacher to connect and bond. What a statement on test based ed. Now you know your kids are doing something.
…………..Take writing. More good writing is going on via internet cultures than I can believe. Kids write poetry, songs, rants, grumbles, mood pieces, elegies, hommages, banes, philosophies, giggles, debates…on and on, fan fics…yet we hear the lament of the outrage of “poor student writing”. Your’re not looking in the right places and in the ways people want to write. Such is the big miss going on. Or hung up on the grammar-always hung on the grammar . Tests aren’t assessing the volume of any of this cultural phenonomen. Schools are locking assess. And that’s stupid. Because reading, accessing info, writing, it’s a rapidly developing, indu-vidualizing empowering thing …Noesphere …I’m rather awed by it. And not worried.
What does worry me however is access. Money, power, test driven access and its correlation to family money and real estate-let’s just say in education now you “buy your way in”. That’s a very defining thing, completely accepted in culture today. That is, I’m afraid chimera like. And it’s where I spend my career working. Here in the land of poverty/immigration/American Dreaming I did not see, hear, or get a Bush able to articulate with sophistication and clarity really why some of my kids were behind (bad schools and teachers his party rant) and what might close the divide. Called of course the achievement gap which under this testing of NCLB is clearly widening, so now we know that you can’t test a kid into higher achievement unless they are affluent…hum. Oh yes, they have access. And they have something else too….

Maybe it’ll come as no surprise when “motivation” is trolled out here in a few years…

…..and hope and possiblity and finding how to work out of talents and the importance of a concept like fairness and the corruption of corporation and money in capitalistically based thinking when it dictates school models to a nation that once used public education as a place to bring hope and opportunity to all. One day it might be that instead of desiring things, and being gorgeous and getting sexual, botoxed and being all that…….it is slowly seen as shallower than finding a way to help all of man, Africa to Istanbul to next door in Alameda into less stressful, more wholesome opportunity to live a life in harmony. Maybe one day schools will test our capacity to listen, cooperate, create concern for another, find uniqueness in every child and use our resources not to “have it all” but to give it all. Because this is where children are left behind in that race to be first in line, we have forgotten public education’s ability to provide equal opportunity for all , this essentially test based culture has left our planet with no vehicle for mutual survival and mutual success or understanding of why that matters.

And of course….if you take something to its end point you can see more clearly…would you really want to see you child tested or your child prove they are worthy of a college or an opportunity or like them to be in a context where it is driven by allowing them to find the pure joy and drive in learning and discover they can construct a world where everyone wins….hum.
A rant complete.

Just so you know, this blog is only a place for me to burn off steam, and try to salvage some meaning from a teaching career that seems to be imploding under the weight of bureaucratic oversight - while I’m refusing to either get in line or step out of the way.

The writing doesn’t come easily for me, either. I have to grit my teeth and push hard on the publish button to get it out there.

You honor me with your visit. We can bask in each others’ mutual admiration.

Mostly, new ideas seem to suggest paths for me to avoid, rather than destinations to head for. You’re right. Borderland is about possibilities. Certainty seems a dead-end…I’ve said before that when the world is perfect, I’ll shut up.