The corporate perversion of public schooling is making inroads here through what we are all coming to know as “progress monitoring,” delivered locally through an expensive corporately packaged iteration of RTI, which tracks meaningless data (counting words read correctly in a timed reading) and churns out pretty graphs, while doing nothing to increase the professional competency of teachers or the sense-making skills of students. I won’t dwell on the messy details of any of that now, except to say that under these conditions, learning – and teaching – are becoming more and more obviously political acts.
With this in mind, I conduct my own counter-testing program in which I promote play, passion, and useless skills that have no value other than to support physical and mental well-being, along with the added bonus of impressing people who appreciate whatever it is you learn to do.
I showed my students this video yesterday, and I told them that, more than anything, they should chase their dreams; that’s why we’re here. They talked about it the rest of the day.
The mom of one of my special-needs kids was in the room when I showed it, and I heard her say, “Just think how often he must have fallen, learning to do that.”
Yeah.
(h/t Bill Kerr)
13 Comments
My students will be watching this soon!!1 Thanks Doug for finding it and passing it on!
Brian
You’re a good teacher. Inspiration is the key!
Much better use of “corporately packaged” material and it was not brought to you by PsychCorp (Ewww. Are you sure you’re not trapped in a B-grade SciFi movie?). I knew I subscribed to this feed for good reason.
A B-grade movie wouldn’t be so bad if it was even a little bit funny.
Doug, what grabbed me here was not the (wonderful) video, but your words, “…I promote play, passion, and useless skills that have no value other than to support physical and mental well-being…”
Continuing a longstanding tradition, I recently played Spin the Turkey with my third graders the two days before our holiday break. Just plain zany fun. Not an objective or standard in sight. It is one of the highlights of the year. Thanks for this – Mark
“With this in mind, I conduct my own counter-testing program in which I promote play, passion, and useless skills that have no value other than to support physical and mental well-being, along with the added bonus of impressing people who appreciate whatever it is you learn to do.”
What gets me, where I am, is watching adults become the agents for that mindless data as if they’ve got the Grail.
And I would prefer to think, possibly to a Python re-run, that they have yet to ask/answer/contemplate what it is they’ve “got”. This is the great doing for a kid although a teacher (that took her year being our coach ( her third) prepping for National Certification then failing who told me she “does not help students” when I suggested she try working with some) , she told me that their RTI data driven, blind re-alocation of effort, funds, orientation “Now tells us where they are” (we already knew that “in poverty”) but with that big 10 pound binder I’ve got to slave to fill during instructional time, she then says….now we “know where to start”. This is for her the greatest of “news”. Of course she , herself, will not work with students. So we bought, mandated/unasked and took another hour of the day on old repackaged SRA in the form of Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading FOR ALL even kids that might not really need correction! And nothing points to that as an answer.
I tend to wonder what more insult can be dealt to what I “did” when I worked free of this some time back. Certainly this hasn’t pleased families-they think we stink I gather as anyone that can moves.. I tended to think I had a fair idea of student performance and differentiation.
Good and interesting post but I like that quote above the best and the video particularly.
Sarah, re. “…now we ‘know where to start:’” The place to begin is with eliminating the useless bloat of bean counters who have no direct contact with kids.
Mark, zany fun should be at the core of any counter-testing program. Kids get it; bureaucrats don’t.
i needed this. i’ve been teaching for 8 yrs. my third grade students are wonderful, but what has happened to our profession is not. sometimes i feel like i’m going insane. the McStandardization of education is breaking my spirit. posts like yours remind me my heart’s in the right place. i’m not crazy. you rock. thanks.
Thanks for the inspiring post and the reminder that we need to be advocates for our students.
I feel a bit like a lazy loser for not using caps in all of the right places above. It was nearly 2 a.m. in the midwest here, and I forgot I wasn’t on facebook anymore.
Our district has mandated quarterly benchmarks in addition to our weeks of state testing. The benchmarks are ridiculous. I’ve written two articles in protest. Thought you might be interested. I will not become, as Sarah states above, an agent for mindless data. Again, thank you for your words and insights. I heart your blog.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/22_03/benc223.shtml
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_01/data231.shtml
Thanks for the links, Amy. Your name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before. I look forward to re-reading your articles. Rethinking Schools is one of my favorites.
Wow. I couldn’t agree more about the bean counters. My AP is obsessed with benchmark and progress monitoring scores. I am so sick of being hounded for my data and told that I’ve missed another deadline. Oh that’s right…I was busy teaching instead of wasting my students’ time with meaningless timed reading passages. We dropped our school license for AIMSWeb (too expensive) but continue to use their fluency, comprehension, and math probes and benchmarks like they are the be-all, end-all for helping kids learn and improve academically. What a crock. I was actually told not to teach science and social studies because the time is better spent in grade-leveled intervention’ blocks for reading. Unless I am mistaken, kids must READ in order to learn social studies and science concepts. I actually teach reading skills and strategies during science and social studies. But no, there’s no time now. This isn’t just a mistake we are making with students at this one point in time; this is a mistake we are making with the future of our country. We are not helping kids learn decision-making skills, we are not teaching them to solve problems, and we certainly aren’t teaching them to CARE about the world around them. I am sick about it.
I’m sick about it too.
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