What a bad Joke

Standardized testing is the most ridiculous form of testing ever created. It was obviously put in place by the laziest person ever because it is the easiest way to grade a very large number of people without really testing how smart they are. It does test how good someones memory is and how well they can parrot what has been drilled into them without allowing them to analyze anything. It does not allow kids who learn differently show that they are just as smart as kids who have been taught how to take a test. There are kids whose needs are not met by these "standard" tests because they are bad test takers, don't understand questions, learn different. If we want to really find out what kids know and test them, which is what we want to do, we should do it at lower levels with people who know the kids and know how they learn and where they are in life. The higher these tests go the less people care about the kids and the more they care about results, and that is not the way people should be treated, much less the future of this country.

Who is the standard anyway? There is no Standard.

Teaching Made Easy

Instead of making kids think deeply about questions about why teachers have been made to teach what. The reason the what is being taught is because the why is the most difficult thing for kids to comprehend. The what is also on standardized tests and that is the current policy dictating how schools get money. So teachers tell students what they want parroted back to them because that way no one has to think and students can answer the questions on the exam they have to take at the end of their time in high school. We are killing critical thinking in the middle school and high school with this kind of teaching. We need to stop teaching to an exam and teach kids how to think for themselves, how to gather information without giving them long research papers. But to teach them how to discern information themselves from the text books we make them read. We can do it by giving them more outside literature so that by the end of their time spent in our classrooms they are not "parrot smart" but can actually think for themselves. It is our job to give these kids the tools that they need in the real world, and having kids repeat what the teacher just said is not the way to prepare anyone for anything.