As I was in the shower this evening, I was contemplating my upcoming PRAXIS test and I began thinking about standardized tests. Now, I realize the usefulness of knowing where I stand in comparison to other teacher candidates in Louisiana and elsewhere, but it is ridiculous to expect that I know all the things supposedly on this test.
For me to be able to get an "A+ 100" on this test I need to have amazing test taking skills (I do not), and I also have to have had the same standard education as thousands of other people taking this test. Except I didn't have the same education as everyone else.
- I've never read Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, or The Scarlet Letter, but I have read “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Madame Bovary twice along with some very interesting stories about women in third-world countries.
- Twice professors have told me that we're going to read different stories than Beowulf because they hate it so I've never read that, but I’ve read Grendel (does that count?).
- My knowledge of Shakespeare includes some tragedies and some histories and about two to twenty sonnets but nothing else.
- My grammar class was basically useless, and I passed linguistics by the skin of my teeth, so I feel like I missed the middle step where I understood language and usage as a thing.
- I took history, health and sociology for electives.
- I've taken sequential courses out of order,
- I had teachers whose idea of a curriculum was grading students based on participation and surprise readings assigned by email two days before the discussion
- I took two different courses twice and could have counted them as four separate courses because the content was so different.
Because of this, I am beginning to understand the goal of common core, but I am also beginning to understand how impossible it is. How am I supposed to take a standardized test about standard content when my education has been anything but standard? Am I a bad student because I had no interest in reading the novels I supposedly missed out on?
This has me wondering how much weight these scores should actually have on my quality as a student, teacher, and English buff. How can students who are cut from completely different cloths as their peers be graded on a scale that is uniform? What right do the makers of this test have to say that if I fail, I don’t know as much as the student who took Native American Lit instead of African American like me? How am I somehow a worse teacher than the person across the room who might be better at taking tests than me? Why is this the only way to be a certified, bonafide instructor of smaller humans? In the education department, they tell us all the time to differentiate based on learning style, type of intelligence and so on so that each student has the opportunity to succeed. Why are we not given the same courtesy?
This has me wondering how much weight these scores should actually have on my quality as a student, teacher, and English buff. How can students who are cut from completely different cloths as their peers be graded on a scale that is uniform? What right do the makers of this test have to say that if I fail, I don’t know as much as the student who took Native American Lit instead of African American like me? How am I somehow a worse teacher than the person across the room who might be better at taking tests than me? Why is this the only way to be a certified, bonafide instructor of smaller humans? In the education department, they tell us all the time to differentiate based on learning style, type of intelligence and so on so that each student has the opportunity to succeed. Why are we not given the same courtesy?
