This Week in Education 1st Week of February

What A Week

We have benchmark testing coming up next week.  Benchmark testing is meant to be a diagnostic test to inform the administration and teachers of any weaknesses that the students have in their learning of the content standards.  There are several reasons that this kind of testing doesn’t work.  First, the students know that the test doesn’t count toward their grade.  Some just don’t care.  They don’t take the time to read all the passages or figure out the steps of the math problems.  They look at seventy-five problems and they look at the answers and bubble in C or create a pattern.  I’ve seen some great visual effects on their answer documents over the years.  One column all A and the next all B and so always gives me a giggle.

The wave is also amusing.

I remember one time I was giving my students a formative assessment.  I was using generic scanable answer documents.  The choices were only A, B, C, and D, but the bubble sheet had A, B, C, D, and E.  it was a thirty-six problem test.  I passed out the test and told them to begin.  I use to sit am my desk and take the test myself. After three minutes, this student announced “I’m done.”

I said, “You cannot be done.  I’m not even done. You must have guessed.”

“I didn’t guess,” he insisted.

When I corrected the test he got six right.  I then looked to see which ones he missed.  To my astonishment he marked the E choice ten times.  Sure he did the test without guessing.

Today there is an extremely high priority placed on testing.  This was built into the No Child Left Behind law.  If the student isn’t performing at proficient at their grade level, it is automatically the teacher’s fault.  Even little guesser boy and the pattern makers are not to blame.  Blaming teachers for the students test score is not at all fair.  Some students choose not to learn.  Blaming the teacher would be like the student blaming their pencils for not marking the right answer or bubbling E when it doesn’t even exist.

Student Work

We had a fun activity in science this week.  They had to draw an annotate a picture depicting the rock cycle.  The assignment was given to all students but only a handful completed the project.  I have about ten really high performing students.  Their projects were beautiful.  I had them, while the other were trying to finish or loose theirs, do a poster sized rock cycle to put on the wall.  They left an area that we could fill in with actual examples of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.

I went to the local shop that specializes in marble and granite counter tops.  The shop owner was happy to give me some small samples and we cut off pieces that we glued to the poster they made.  Maybe one of these students will become a geologist one.

However, some students still act out and are argumentative.  They talk about the problem with obesity in our youth today.  I have students who fall into this category.  One of my students who is 10 years old and 200 pounds, is also unable to sit still for more than minutes.  One day last week he got out of his seat and pretended to be slapped around and chocked out by his “invisible friend”.  The other students started to yell at me, “It’s Casper”.  Try teaching American History with this type of distraction.

When we talk of teaching modalities, we say some learners are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.  Well, he met all three styles.  A blind person could have heard the noise as he simulated being slapped and choked and know just exactly what he was doing.  A deaf person would understand the gyrations and flailing on the floor and know what he was doing.  And somewhere on some seismic detector the needle was bouncing as wildly as he was.

So we wage two battle in our classrooms. One is the constant battle to motivate and teach. The second is modifying their behavior so that they can sit in a classroom through high school.


RAWR