fat men from space

stickschicksandrobotdicks:

if you don’t know what that means, I don’t want to be friends with you.

hopans:

My previous post might have been a little vague.  

THIS IS A BIG DEAL!

Well, it’s a big deal to me.

An author created a piece of literature that is a little surreal and, in my opinion, parodies the struggles of teachers everywhere. We are some weird kind of fruit, challenging and prodding kids to achieve while society fakes their support. Then, regardless of success on the child’s part, the teacher is eaten alive.  

Maybe that’s a bit of stretch.  Maybe. 

Here is the scandalous story: http://usny.nysed.gov/docs/the-hare-and-the-pineapple.pdf

This story and accompanying questions were included in the language arts exam given by the state of New York. The pages of the test were made public because the media had a flawed copy and the education officials thought the real story would clear the air.  Yeah, go ahead and publish those top secret test questions!  By doing this, the Commissioner of Education has actually breached testing security (in a big way) because any students who were absent this week will be tested by Tuesday of next week.  Oops!  Now they have time to research possible answers to these questions!  

GOOD LUCK! 

The questions are vague and ridiculous.  

The New York Commissioner of Education made a statement to go along with the publishing of the test passage. Here’s my favorite part:  

“It is important to note that this test section does not incorporate the Common Core and other improvements to test quality currently underway. This year’s tests incorporate a small number of Common Core field test questions. Next year’s test will be fully aligned with the Common Core.”

Raise your hand if you have any idea what Common Core is? 

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Unless you teach, you don’t know and you don’t care.  However, it sure sounds like that section of the test was not important because it doesn’t include this new program that is going to be incorporated next year.  Next year, when we get more of that Common Core, THEN the kids will really be taking a relevant exam!

If those six questions did not cover anything important, why were they on the test?  Why are they assigning a number to a child’s intelligence based on questions that the commissioner of education deems as unimportant?  Furthermore, why are they assigning AND PUBLISHING ratings for teachers based on those numbers?

So, I’m in Tennessee, not New York.  This means that we are behind the times but picking up a great deal of steam thanks to that 500 million grant we received last year.  We have incorporated the evaluation style that New York has been using.  In the past two months a law was passed stating that teacher effect scores are public information and can be published, say, in the newspaper.  Yesterday I received an email from the Tennessee Commission of Education stating that we are now going to pay Pearson to start observing student answer sheets for suspicious erasure marks that might indicate cheating.  Anyone smell Atlanta 2011 on the horizon for Memphis County Schools?  My school is great and will be spared the worst of education reform because we have a talented staff that manages to teach despite the obstacles.  

Every year I sign a testing security agreement stating that I will not look at the exam.  I will readily admit that, if I were the student in testing, it would be uncomfortable to have some English teacher hovering over me to read the test as I go.  However, if I’m not allowed to look, some tax-paying individual ought to be holding that testing company responsible for creating a valid assessment.

In Tennessee there are currently 10 state-required exams at the high school level alone.  Pearson receives millions of tax dollars to create these tests, score them, and search for “suspicious erasure patterns”.

So far, every practice booklet provided by the state (also created by Pearson) has contained flawed questions with incorrect answers, not to mention a great number of ambiguous “best option” questions that are so subjective that many teachers disagree about which answers are best.

My teacher soul keeps asking, “What’s the point?”

Testing is a terminal activity.  It only happens when learning stops.  Even if the test contained relevant questions, students are never given a list of incorrect answers.  They are never told that, because they missed question 32, they need to brush up their understanding of the term “allusion”.

I can’t see the test.  They can’t review the test. Again, what’s the point?

I suspect that it is easier to give several million dollars to a test generating company than it would be to struggle with the essential learning that helps a student mature and create a good life for himself.  That’s much more difficult to measure.  We need data to prove that our millions of dollars accomplished a specific task.  Unfortunately, the task they accomplished was testing, not learning. 

And I just keep thinking about that pineapple.  He has no sleeves.  There are no tricks up those nonexistent sleeves.  He is stuck and distrusted by the crowd on the outside, the crowd that’s waiting to eat him. That sounds about right.

I will not be eaten.  My kids love me.  I am surrounded by talented faculty members.  My community, for the most part, treats the pineapples well.

I can’t fathom what it must feel like to be the lone pineapple with no sleeves and no support system.  This story, and the media coverage, give me hope though.  If they aren’t getting too distracted by the impending revolution of the Common Core, maybe someone in New York is taking note of the current prejudices against pineapples. Hopefully.

nwroth:

Daniel Pinkwater’s done it again

A modern spin on Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Mrs. Noodlekugel is very much Pinkwaterian (an adjective created specifically for this post), but in the same vein as the nice old lady from my childhood who taught good manners and kindness with a little bit of magic. 

nwroth asked: What's all the kerfuffle about the New York standardized test with the Daniel-Pinkwater-story-based question? Something regarding Borgel and ??

it’s the greatest thing! some new york standardized test put a modified version of one of borgel’s stories on the reading comprehension part of the test; all the kids failed that section because they couldn’t answer the questions because the story didn’t make any sense.

some details here