Assessment gives me nightmares

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Well, I read both chapters of Best Practices and the Nancy Rankie Shelton and Danling Fu article on Creating Space for Teaching Writing and for Test Preparation and all I can say is, assessment gives me nightmares. Since I started this reading I have dreamt every night that I’m taking a horrifying writing test of some kind or another. The two more vivid were one where I was just starting the test when the lights went out and no one seemed to notice but me. I couldn’t read the test, and I couldn’t see how anyone else could, but no one else was complaining. They just kept going. I rose my hand and tried to get the proctor to listen to what I was saying about the light situation, but he refused to see me. The next night I dreamt I was a prisoner in a school building and wouldn’t be released until I could pass this particular writing test. I kept taking it and failing even though I was positive that I had produced good writing. I couldn’t figure out what it was they wanted from me and I kept being forced into a new classroom every time I failed. Finally, I felt like I had it down, I was on a role and only had one more section of the prompt to cover before completing a perfect essay that covered every single thing they (whoever they were) could possibly want, when the test was over. I was freaking out. I was so close to finishing but they ripped the paper out of my hand and I failed again.

I don’t know exactly what this means, but I know I am feeling stressed by the fact that I seemed to retain nothing from the Best Practices chapters. I read portions of them three and four times and still it was like I was reading Greek. It just didn’t gel for me at all, which is scary because I know this is going to be a big part of my job, but I just had a complete mental block about it.

The article left me conflicted. I was glad to see that Nancy made writing workshop work for her. She seemed ready to experiment with other ways to incorporate test prep, and even seemed likely to abandon it all together if she felt confident that her writing workshop alone could prepare students for tests. It was nice to see that there is some hope for breaking out of teaching to the test. Still, my experience with field work this year showed me that students in struggling schools have been completely brainwashed into believing that tests are all that matter. In one class I observed this semester, a teacher asked her class why it’s important to learn grammar. A student answered, “So we can do better on tests.” The teacher said, “Right.” There is something so fundamentally wrong with that. In other classes, I noticed all the students care about is finding out what their grades are. One teacher purposely puts no preliminary grades into the school’s system because the students obsessively check it. There is a total disconnect between grades and the purpose of education.

In looking over Chapter 7 again, I find I do get a lot out of the strategies on revision. Certainly, I see how reading and writing work together, because without the ability to read critically, you can’t critique anyone’s writing, including your own. As a former editor, I know that revision is essential to good writing. Very few people (maybe none at all) can produce high quality writing without revision. That’s why I find it so insane that we make kids take these writing tests where time is so short that they have all of five minutes to plan and maybe five minutes to proofread, but no time at all to revise. That’s not really writing. That’s the Jeopardy of writing. Just because you can’t hit the buzzer as fast as the guy next to you doesn’t mean you don’t know the answer. Some people need more time to write and more revising time than others. That might actually mean you’re a better writer overall. But we don’t seem to care about that. Certainly, if all you’re doing is teaching to the test, there is little place for revision. Yet it is maybe the most important part of the whole process.

I’ll have to give Chapter 13 another try at another time. I just don’t know what happened there.

But there is one other thing that has been confounding me. All of the examples of actual classroom experiences in Best Practices are K-8. I’m feeling unsure about what this means for high school teachers. How is high school different from what we are learning about here? What are kids supposed to be doing in high school? In my field work, it seems they are reading short stories and catching up on what they should have already learned, but none of it is being done in a coordinated way. I’m feeling very nervous about the prospect of teaching in high school because I feel so unclear about what I would be teaching or what I could or should expect my students to know.

424 thoughts on “Assessment gives me nightmares”

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