Seven Broken Legs and Arms, Coming Up...

For any of you who know me well, since school recently started again, you’ll know exactly where to find me.

Yes, look up! That’s me! I’m up on the rooftop with an AK-47, and it’s loaded with sharpened number 2 pencils.

I’ve gotten this way every September for the last couple decades with a dreary regularity, because for the last fifteen years or so of my career in education, teachers never ever EVER get to start the school year without weight. Oh no! We start every school year the same way, with a big old, ugly-ass monkey on our back, and it’s called standardized testing.

I don’t have the slightest problem with testing. We all know that if you want to gauge how well you’re doing at teaching something, you test. It doesn’t even have to be with a number 2 pencil and a scantron sheet! It can be as easy as asking your students to demonstrate what they have just attempted to learn. The whole idea is to ensure that you don’t go one step further if the concept you’ve been trying to hammer home is still wobbly.

Now that just makes complete and total sense.

Let’s just pretend, for example, that as teachers, we’ve been asked to ensure that all of our students are able to strap on their own skis, board a ski lift, disembark at the top of the slope, and then ski down without smashing into each other, or into large trees or boulders. Even if just for safety purposes, no one in his right mind would even begin to move past the lessons on getting into skis and releasing them, because NOT being able to release them after a crash---where one leg has somehow managed to become firmly wedged behind one’s head---demands instant extrication through release of a ski, preferably in as painless a manner as possible.

So, a competent ski instructor, with humor and patience, would ask each of his students to demonstrate boot entrance into and release from skis before ever considering moving on to a skill more demanding.

It’s a test!

It’s designed to offer the teacher excellent information on how ready the students are to move on. If the entire class is lying in the snow making snow angels, sitting around weeping, or grasping their ankles in pain, it’s probably time to reteach!

The whole cycle of education is based on teach, assess, and then reteach; on the other hand, if everyone has the concept down, move on!

Now, I can only speak with some knowledge about the good state of California. Here’s what I think: Some nutball---and to be honest, I’m imagining someone who was a very poor student in school himself---got the idea that the way to make sure that every student in our public school system was learning what he should be learning, was to give every teacher a specific timeline that dictates exactly when each child must have acquired any given skill. They’re called Benchmark tests. By any given date, every student had better damn well be proficient at the measured skills or (Get this!) the teacher has failed!

So, grab your mittens and let’s head back to that ski slope. Ready? Let’s say there are twenty students (although most teachers would laugh at that ridiculously small number). Four of them have never even seen snow before, so they are spending a whole lot of time just staring at the vast, white, sparkling landscape. Six of the students were never taught the words boot, ski, push, catch, bindings, or release. Two students’ parents have recently been divorced, and another child’s mother was just incarcerated, so skiing is the last thing these three students have on their mind. Five of the students love the outdoors and are thrilled to be here, and they are raring to learn everything the instructor has to throw at them. And that would leave the two students who spent all last December’s vacation in Aspen with their folks, schussing down the black diamond slopes with glee.

(I’m not even going to open the whole can of worms that would show the public that at some schools in our district, almost all students in a classroom would have been skiing with affluent parents, perhaps taking private lessons, since they could walk! They’re giggling and singing “Benchmarks schmenchmarks...We don’t need no stinkin’ Benchmarks!” And they would be so right!)

But...Time for The Benchmarks! These are the tests that are rigidly timed throughout the year to ascertain which teachers are doing an excellent job at making sure all their charges are on target. (Administrators teach educators to actually call some of these students “targets,” as they are the ones at whom we should be aiming our absolute best efforts, because if successful, those pupils will earn the school coveted labels, like “proficient” and “advanced.”)

Oh oh. Those students---the ones who haven’t ever seen snow before, and those who don’t have the vocabulary to reach this first goal? Surprisingly enough, they have proven to be enormous slackers and have washed out completely. Not only can they not get into their skis, but they may have actually lost one somewhere!

And it’s the teacher’s fault! LOOOOOSER!

In spite of the fact that teachers put in extraordinary hours and work their heinies off to give every one of their students the opportunity to succeed, when the Benchmark scores come out, we all feel like abject failures. Okay, I can’t speak for anyone but myself: I feel like hell. I take a fresh black Sharpie and mark my forehead with a huge L.

But since I’m using the mirror as a template, it comes out backwards! UGH! Double loser!

So now what do the Benchmark creators demand that all these hard-working, compassionate, informed teachers do?

Move on.

Yes! Move on! Drag those kids to the ski lifts! Tie them on, if you have to! Get them up the mountain! Move it, move it, move it! There’s no way you’ll have those students skiing if you don’t hurry and get on to the next step in the process! They have to be skiing by the Big Test in May, fer cripessake!

*sigh*

I don’t know about anyone else, but I see educational broken legs and arms everywhere.

In fact, if I count back the years to when these imposed Benchmarks were first mandated, it coincides with my two of my current seniors who still haven’t mastered the concept of regrouping in subtraction. Could it be that, way back in elementary school, they were carried on to the next Benchmark material and test before they were actually ready?

Nah. Too freakish! Pure coincidence!