WOW! How many of my buttons can you push in one short post?? :eek:

Fist off: Competition. My goal, and the goal of at least some other parents is to give our kids a well rounded upbringing. Try this, try that, see what sticks, some baseball, some soccer, chess club, etc... But there is a problem with that. In our area, we have baseball teams of 9 year olds that have a professional coach, A 15 Year old down the street plays professional soccer, a 12 Year old who is a nationally ranked fencer, a world class diver age 10, a kid that won (or placed second I forget) in the national chess federation youth championships and a violin soloist that performs with the National Symphony Orchestra. No matter what sport or endeavor your kid picks around here you always run across that small segment of the population that does NOTHING but that. Year in Year out, everyday. Soccer, Tennis, Chess, baseball, take your pick. The "average" kid gets stomped no matter what they try. Want to try baseball? Better be able to hit a 50mph fastball pitched by a 10 year old. It can be very frustrating for the kids.

Next up: Confidence. With my kids, right from the start I've heard about how we need to "build confidence" in our kids. Teachers would regularly rig events so that everyone won in order to build confidence. What a bunch of bunk. Confidence comes naturally from proficiency. Without proficiency, confidence is a house of cards just waiting for a stiff breeze. I'll never forget the look on my 3 Years old face when she asked me (eyes beaming!) how proud I was of a clay lump she had painted and I said, "I don't really like it". I knew she had not tried at all and it was no where near what she was capable of. I think it was a hard but important lesson for her (I know it was tuff on me..). However now when I tell her "good job" she knows it means something.

It amazes me that there are so many ways in which we encourage mediocrity in our children. Don't believe me? Just watch Higglytown Heroes on Playhouse Disney. There is a hero featured in each episode. Past heroes include: Grandma for knitting a sweater on a cold day, the baker for baking bread, the grocer for finding noodles in the store, and the pizza guy for lord knows what. I'm all for teaching civic responsibility, but lets not disguise it as heroism. Save a life? Hero. Give a kidney? Hero. Put out a fire? Hero. Deliver a pizza? Minimum wage earner probably on your way to something better.

Incidentally, Michael will watch the show with Indi while I'm sleeping on weekends. Indi's favorite is the pizza guy. He goes around saying, "Me pizza guy!" I'm hoping his ambitions aim a little higher in the future, lol.

Perhaps the problem is the desire/need/obsession to quantify everything. Every student must read 12 books, so let's give them 12 teeny 4-year-old picture books and have them plow through them in September. Then, all the kids will have fulfilled their reading requirement, and we can forget about that and move on to something else. :rolleyes:

The point is that the kids read, right? What happened to assigning the occasional book report? The stories in the class's English book? The dioramas? What about country reports and King Tut projects that required the students to do a little "research" reading? (Too busy prepping for standardized tests?)


P.S. That King Tut book was coooooooooool.

Well gosh, how do you expect parents and politicians, who have no concept of how education works, to tell teachers how to teach if you don't have test results? Do you even think your posts through before posting?

The punchline is that students still have to do all the reports and things of old, as well as meet new requirements that are thrown at them by politicians.

Just a thought.....we hear all the time about how we are falling behind other industrialized nations in areas of math and science. How we do know this? Standardized testing.

SATs are standardized testing. ACTs are standardized testing. So are the Stanford acheivement tests.

Is it not important to have a measurement of how we are doing in education? Isn't a large part of education an accumulation of knowledge and an ability to process information presented? Standardized testing seems to me to be a good way of doing that.

Part of education has to be rote memorization. Knowing facts. Part has to be deductive reasoning. In "teaching the test", aren't we giving them the ability to do that? To meet certain minimal requirements? For math, the students are not given the problems and given the answers and forced to memorize them. They are taught the process of how to come to the answer, and that is how they come up with the solutions to problems on standardized tests.

I guess I don't see the problem with expectations of students knowing certain things at a certain age and having tests to see if the educators are doing their jobs.

All standardized tests teach you to do is take tests.

Okay, that's a bit unfair, and a small amount of standardized testing is a necessary component of tracking student progress. However, it's become the be all and end all. No Child Left Behind was written with the belief that the entire education process can be distilled and analyzed based on standardized test results. It's a load of crap. And it means 2 things. 1) Decissions are now based almost solely on the incomplete picture that standardized testing provides and 2) As these decissions fail to fix the problem (because, again, they're based on an incomplete assessment), the "solution" is to attempt to make the picture more complete with more standardized testing. Soon, the only things that will be taught is how to pass a test. And teaching someone how to pass a test is NOT the same as teaching the subject.

With certain things I can certainly agree with that. However, in terms of basic knowledge, such as vocabulary, math skills, etc, the best way to measure whether someone knows it is to test them on it. If someone can sit down and do a basic quadratic equation on a test it is because they have been taught in algebra how to do quadratic equations.

(edited to add: Clinton)

That's one theory. Another one has shown that standardized tests, especially in things like vocabulary and reading comprehension, are biased based on socio-economic lines. They make certain assumptions about "common knowledge" that is only common if you're above a certain economic class. Assumptions about what a home looks like, who cooks meals, who takes care of kids, etc. It's subtle, but it's been shown to make a difference.

Never mind that these, by necessity, are multiple choice tests. There are techniques for taking these which can guarantee better scores, without necessiraly better knowledge. I'm a master of multiple choice tests, no matter how clever the test maker gets. They are good to a point, but are severely lacking.

Well, if teaching the test means teaching strategies for answering multiple choice questions, then that should not be done.

So....what is a better way than standardized testing? I've had enough really, really bad teachers (and also really, really good teachers) to know that we need something besides inconsistent measurement standards from teacher to teacher to assess what is being successfully taught and learned.