DISHEARTENED DURING STATE MANDATED TESTING (in Colorado, this test is called TCAP): Im continually baffled by the huge number of students (an overwhelming majority!) who lack persistence and ignore instruction, and at no time are these two problems more visible than during the TCAP writing session. The writing prompt brings out the best and worst in students approaches to a difficult task. Its during this prompt that I find out whether they are serious about demonstrating their excellence, or if they are just interested in finishing. As I tell my kids, if they finish in ½ the time, their essay will always be weaker than students who have the same skills but wrote more. Writing longer leads to more connections, deeper insight and stronger essays. I give the kids strategies to help them write stronger, deeper essays, including using two easy phrases that produce better work: for example and in other words. The thrust of everything I tell them about writing for TCAP is to go long and write for the entire time. Still, today, during the TCAP session I was proctoring, four sophomores who are in my classes finished their one-hour essay in 45 minutes or less. Three of the four were in my honors class. No one in the room wrote for more than 45 minutes. Several finished in under 15 minutes! Sigh. For my students, its as if they didnt hear a word I said all year, and Im pretty sure there isnt an English teacher in the building who tells kids that its a good idea to rush through essays. The teacher I proctored with complained about the same problem. He collected research papers from his A.P. Language class last week. Many of them bore no resemblance to the sample essays he went over with them, nor did the students follow instructions. He said that he wanted to ask them, Did you all write these essays last night even though you were supposed to be working on them for the last three weeks? Surely this is a rhetorical question, or a rhetorical accusation. He strongly suspected the truth of the matter. Many of the students did write at the last minute, and many of them didnt look at the instructions or examples. They tried to wing it. Double sigh. Both problems, a lack of persistence and a failure to follow instructions, seem to me to be less a problem in the education system or schools, and more a problem of individual character. The top one percent of students work persistently on their projects. They read and write more. They spend more time. They dont quit. The top one percent read the instructions, they look at the examples, and they dont wing it. They have the qualities that make them successful, but I doubt they learned them in school. They just have them. They have character. Theres a funny and interesting book about baseball by retired pitcher and manager, Jim Bouton, entitled, I Managed Good, but Boy Did They Play Bad. While I watched my students take TCAP today, I thought that with very little change in wording, that title would describe how Im feeling about them now.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 01:26:54 +0000
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