Tuesday’s Child has some interesting commentary on tests.
Which leads me in to touching on a post Paula made about not understanding why people object to teaching to the test. (I can’t find the original entry) It’s not so much that I object to testing, or even teaching to the test, if it’s a test that actually provides a benefit in the learning process overall. After all, we must be able to demonstrate our knowledge in some way. But why standardized, written tests? Why not active, thought-provoking tests? I’ll get to that later, maybe, or in another post. The idea is still germinating.
Too often, tests are tools to measure how much information we took in and have absolutely nothing at all to do with what we’ve truly learned. My gripe isn’t the tests, though. My gripe is the stilted, limited way of thinking about education that undergirds the whole testing mindset. I have a different vision for what our schools should be. I am angry that it took me until my third, almost fourth, decade of life to even understand how shallow my thinking was. I was made to feel intelligent because I was a mostly straight A student, but I was *rarely* encouraged to think for myself. I was seldom guided into discovering how the subjects I took related to each other.
