To pass a test or to know the material?I often read results where either this school or that is said to have gained some sort of recognition for being able to have enough of it's children pass the state mandated tests.
But in speaking with these children, one things screams out more loudly than others - these children may have passed the tests but very few actually know anything.
Why is this the case?
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z .
If one can recite this sequence, they probably know the alphabet.
A, Z .
This sequence still gets one from A-Z , and in less steps, but something is missing.
This second sequence seems to be the current learning model applied by many schools today.
Is teaching to the test really the best answer to education?
My man, that is a deep question. Well, it does require a little thought.
ReplyDeleteThis subject ties into my last post. When I go to MLK celebrations, I hear many people quote phrases from speeches of his. Yet, I doubt that many really understand the civil rights bill or has ever read it. I tend to look at the overall qualities of the man.
To ride with your example, I have a friend that went to take his drivers licence exam (a week ago). He didn't read the exam book. He went straight to the back and memorized the answers. He failed the test... miserably.
Teaching to the test doesn't mean you learn anything. I can study and memorize enough to pass any test and in about 4 days I'll forget it all.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I hate Math it is the recognition of patterns that are important. Algebra is like BS to me but i know Algebra is teaching a form of symbolism through analogy. So they remove the numbers so there isn't any calculation so you can recognize a pattern.
To me this is why people with these online degrees are f*cked because without explanation learning is just like reading a stop sign. It's practical amongst the simple things in life but the inability to apply, process and build upon leaves you just a step above the people who didn't go!
I think teaching to the test has "dumped down" education. It doesn't teach students how to think critically, problem-solve, or synthesize ideas. I can testify to this fact having worked in a community college. The students do not know how to wrtie a cohesive, well-thought essay or research paper. Some don't know how to do research. They can't come up with any original ideas that's a good number of the PhD candidates in this country is foreign-born. Not that many U.S.-born citizen are finishing PhD programs. What does that say about this country's education system?
ReplyDeleteOops, Excuse the typos.
ReplyDeleteSeason 4 of The Wire outlines what you are saying. The teachers spend so much time and effort teaching to a test that they aren't able to teach anything else. It's too bad Obama hasn't changed this Bush policy crap. It's killing an already dead educational system.
ReplyDeleteI can't fully place the blame on the educational system. School is designed to point people in the right direction. It is not the school's fault if students choose to leave the learning at school after the last bell of the day.
ReplyDeleteOf course now there are so many distractions in our daily life, it is harder than before for kids to develop and nuture their academic related curiosities.
But free public libraries still do exist.
Uncle John,
ReplyDeleteI been workin on this problem ~ 10 hours a week for five years now. {been tutoring cats in the 3 R's since 1988 - which is what led me to get started}
I work with a 37 year old all-volunteer organization, a school district, and the public library.
While teaching to the test is a surefire recipe for producing severe allergy to learning, all the John Taylor Gatto critiques of the structure, function, and purpose behind the current educational system apply in full force even prior to this final disgrace - i.e., teaching to the test.
As best I can summarize it, there has been an ergodization of the human psyche in the developed and highly networked world, brought on by teevee, video games, and the web.
By analogy, the fine art of sampling (which is not very old when you think about it, but significantly predates the web} is a harbinger of what has happened to the way in which people {children} assimilate and prefer to be presented with information.
The entire pedagogical culture and its many and varied institutional manifestations are decades behind the curve. Still presenting information in a way that would only appeal to minds unexposed or underexposed to all the ergodic stimuli, and, largely incapable of moving its vast human resource mass in the direction of the current state of child/adolescent psychology/learning preference.
That's why I love my law classes. In my Constitutional Law we didn't have test. Your participation in the debates and subjects our professor brought up is how we were graded same for my African-American History class. I still remember the information and this was all last year. Teach to the test is a big fail because those classes like the other said I knew it to ace the test then forgot it the next day.
ReplyDeleteBut I can't the parents of the children I tutor to understand these differences.
ReplyDeleteMost are satisfied with kids being able to pass their state tests.
Actually learning something seems secondary to them.