Holy Freaking Crap, TAKS Sucks!

[omorka]

Yes, it was that time again today. Somehow, I got assigned to be an assistant proctor in someone else's room. (This is probably because my room (a) doesn't have 30 chairs, and (b) is right next to a sp. ed. life skills classroom that is traditionally pretty noisy.) The someone was a first-year senior English teacher who has twenty-four years on me. He firmly believes that the entire standardized testing movement in education is a conspiracy on the part of the people who produce the scoring machines, which I'll admit I can't argue against.


One of the most striking things about the modern standardized testing environment is how artificial it is.

I mean, any academic testing environment is by its nature artificial anyway. There is no other reason, ever, to arrange ourselves in rows, in silence save for fidgeting and the shuffling of paper, focussed on a single externally imposed task of purely responsive marking on paper. This is difficult enough for most of our kids, who find silence more distracting (because it's more unusual) than constant background noise and have difficulty sitting still for more than half an hour at a stretch.

Now add the standardized part. This is not a room that you know (for most of you, anyway). The rest of the test-takers in the room are not your learning-peers, but instead mostly people you don't know who happen to share your age-level and name-level. Your proctors are not your normal teachers, and had no hand in either writing the exam nor preparing you to take it - they may not even have a direct state in its outcome (as neither a senior English teacher or an upper-level math teacher do for a junior-level language arts test).

This environment only exists for high-stakes and entrance exams. (The AP tests come close, but at least there you're with your learning-peers and it's a self-chosen exam.) How can you possibly do your best work in such an abnormal environment? Especially for 5 hours straight?

I'm not sure yet if breaking for a meal is a hideously bad idea or not. (Edit: It actually worked better than I thought it would, although I still think it's at best an inelegant solution to the problem.) I suspect it would be better to let them snack through the exam and make sure it ends. I think the AP 3-hour is about as much concentration as anyone can reasonably master on a high-school examination, and again, the AP tests at least are self-chosen, taken with a familiar peer group.

If I had a laminating machine,
I'd laminate everythng-

     Pressed flowers,

          business cards,

               cat hair,

                    cool-looking leaves,

                         fingerprints,

All would be pressed,

     preserved,

     Between two sheets of searing plastic

Just because I, packrat, could

All 28 of you,

     in 3 months' time

I will call up, like a demon, from the ether(net)

     a fresh batch of numbers, newly minted,

     and a score, churned out of this test,

           graphite ground to electrons turned to bits,

Will record this morning,

     a part of your permanent record

          sealing your diploma (or a lack of one)

and I, Datakeeper, Scroll-Holder,

     will keep 13 bits' worth of you

          frozen forever in a spreadsheet formed of photons

               like a dried flower petal pressed in plastic

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

What do the 13 bits represent?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

That's my back-of-the-envelope calculation for how many bigits are necessary to represent a TAKS Scaled Score. "Bits" sounded better than "bigits," so consider that poetic license.