Friday Two Degrees of Separation

Doc Shazam's busy in the ER, but here it is again: two degrees!.

I start out with Ms. Frizzle, who lead me on to A Schoolyard Blog. She knows what needs to be done to fix American education, and she's writing about it.

The problem is that when you only put emphasis on the score, neglecting any emphasis or thought about what goes on in the lead up to the score, you can’t ask for a much different outcome. Actually the cheaters are using their problem solving skills to solve the most valued part of the problem. That is not going to change until what is valued changes. There is a massive amount of information out there on how to do that, but people read it and shrug.

Here is her About page:

I was good enough to warrant my own classroom and a more than generous supply of students. I learned that there are lots of young men out there that believe there is a letter LMNO in the alphabet.

By the way, Ms. Frizzle, who teaches in a public middle school. She is not uniformly enthusiastic about the educational validity of standardized testing.

I'm uncertain about tests. I used to be against them in my gut, and I still am, for the most part. I'm definitely against yearly testing, which I think is needless and stressful. But there are things about New York's state exams - given in 4th and 8th grade - that I think are okay. The Intermediate Level Science Exam's performance test, for example, is totally reasonable and motivates schools to make sure their kids learn to use real science equipment. I'm sure there are other ways to motivate schools in this way, but the fact is that many schools cut stuff like hands-on science any time the budget gets tight. I dislike the multiple choice section of the test, though, because I would rather teach several important and complex topics well than every single sub-topic of Science shallowly, and I think the multiple choice section flies in the face of this. There are also many questions in the multiple choice section which I know will trip up my students because of the way they are written, even though my kids know the science behind them. Same thing with some of the diagrams. I know that my kids know a lot of science when they leave my class - I know because this year they make connections to what we learned last year, and because former students have told me that what we learned is helping them in ninth grade. But I am truly afraid that this knowledge will somehow not show up on the test, especially the multiple choice part.