Agreed. If the kids are being taught the wrong things, you don't get pissed at the teachers- you change the standards/tests. Same as with any good software!
I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests.
I was taught to think, not so much by school but by a select few teachers and especially my father. I learnt metric growing up. When I started construction everything was done in millimetres and meters. I moved from the UK to Canada, where the construction trade is solely imperial (it's not like the UK where you can get legacy tape measures that have inces and meters, I have inches and feet) and I didn't struggle. It was about a month before my boss said "Doesn't the UK only use meters, are you coping with the change?"
Of course I coped, I learnt to think. A foot is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. A meter is a generalised measurement so that multiple people can work to the same measurements. If someone calls out to me "cut at 1321mm" I cut at "1321" the same as if they'd just called "cut at 52 inch".
I've seen guys, high school graduates (in the UK I only did high school until I was 16, and the newbies I get given did it until they were 18) and they're confused by the mere notion that an inch is divisible up to a 16th on a tape measure.
I personally cannot comprehend how they don't understand. How lacking is your education that you can't find 9/16ths on a tape measure? How lacking is your education when you can't cut a 22.5 degree angle from a 16x16 square (measure up to the half way point and trace a line to the 0 point giving you the desired pattern)?
My work doesn't even require a high school education to get hired and we've had some phenomenal employees who failed high school. The irony is we get bucket loads of retards who graduated high school.
There's a big difference between learning and merely storing data. The problem is that we're creating a generation of databases. I'm sorry, but I have computers, and phones, and fuck a pocket book that can retain data for me. I don't need a million kids to do that. I need a kid that can read a tape and cut an angle so that I can train them.
I don't know how I'm supposed to train someone who's passed high school that should so obviously have failed.
The angle from the origin to the point (2, 1) isn't 22.5 degrees – it's arctan(1/2) = 26.6 deg. In fact, the slope of the point you want should be sqrt(2) – 1 = 0.414, not 0.5.
> I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests.
No one disagrees.
However, saying "students should be thought to think" is useless. We need to know to if they're being taught to think.
And no, "trust teachers" doesn't work. The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think".
Are there bad tests? Yes. Are there perfect tests? No.
But that doesn't imply that testing is unnecessary. It just says that testing is hard.
"The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think"."
Funny, I thought it was driven by too many politicians who'd taken management 101 and learned to "measure everything". Do you have a cite? (Honestly wondering).
The only way to administer tests at scale is with multiple choice and number 2 pencils. The easiest way to pass a multiple choice test is to memorize a bunch of crap and not bother thinking.
I'm not saying that all testing should be abolished, but it's pretty clear that testing is insufficient -- any real learning-to-think that goes on with a testing-dominated system is going to be the product of teachers going above and beyond, and totally unmeasurable so those teachers will never be rewarded (and probably punished).
"The only way to administer tests at scale is with multiple choice and number 2 pencils"
I think that there's an alternate way, but it comes at a cost: we have to de-standardize the tests. Here's how I see it playing out.
Jill is an eighth grade match teacher with thirty students in her class. When testing time comes around, she writes an exam for the state which she feels represents what an eighth grade math student should know. She sends a copy of the exam to the state. In return, she receives thirty different exams from the state, each written by a different teacher and assigned to exactly one of her students. She distributes the tests assigned to each student. At the end of testing, she sends back the completed exams. In return, the state sends her thirty answers to her exams, which she grades as she sees fit. Finally, she sends her grades in to the state.
The state then looks at how Jill's student performed on the assorted exams that they were given. The raw score isn't at issue, but rather how they performed compared to the other students who took that specific exam (e.g. how many standard deviations that they were above or below the mean). If most of her students scored above average, we're happy. If most of her students were below average, we question why.
Since the teachers don't know what will be on the test, they can't coach the students to memorize answers. Thus, the teachers who teach the students to think and handle unfamiliar situations will be rated higher by the test than students who simply regurgitate what their teacher taught them.
> I think that there's an alternate way, but it comes at a cost: we have to de-standardize the tests.
Why do you think that "standardized test" means "same questions for everyone"?
Also, we're actually not that interested in the score at the end of the year but in the difference between what the kids could do at the beginning and end of the year.
That's kind of brilliant, although I could see it being a clusterfuck in actual implementation, 30 isn't enough per-test to get meaningful statistics for one thing.
It also involves a total lack of control from the top-down, so it'd probably be resisted pretty strongly. I really like the basic idea, though.
>> "The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think"."
> Funny, I thought it was driven by too many politicians who'd taken management 101 and learned to "measure everything". Do you have a cite? (Honestly wondering).
You haven't seen the "Asian kids are doing better" and "schools are failing" stuff? Really?
> The easiest way to pass a multiple choice test is to memorize a bunch of crap and not bother thinking.
How would "memorize a bunch of crap" work for an algebra test? Unless "crap" means "rules of algebra and how to apply them"....
How about three examples of this "learning to think" that can't be measured with a test? (Skill in playing a musical instrument is arguably one, but mostly at the extremes. However, ranking Carlos Santana vs Jeff Beck isn't the problem.)
I suspect that your definition of "test" is too limited, which says more about you than it does about testing.
"I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests."
OK. How do you propose to determine whether a student has been taught to think? Whatever your answer is, that's your test. Maybe it's questions like "build me a catapult with these materials and tell me how efficient it is" or "explain how so many Latin words came to be part of the English language and give examples". Answering those would demonstrate thinking ability. But that would still be a test.
Tests are important. If they are made well, teaching with the test in mind is fine.
Whether we're testing and teaching the right things is another question. But "students shouldn't be taught to pass tests" sounds to me like "buildings shouldn't be built using blueprints." How can you know whether you've succeeded if you have no stated goal or way to measure results?
Arguments for, or against, a topic chosen at random. Submitted as an essay, and graded by at least two independent readers. It may not scale, but it's a better metric.
So you learn how to game essay-writing competitions. Big whoop. The most brainwashed people I know are arts graduates, who think they know "how to think".
In reality, they know how to use hollow rhetoric to make a convincing case for their own prejudices, and present straw-man arguments to pretend you've covered both sides of an issue. They also find some way to "twist" the question, if it's easy.
The most important part of essay writing is not to be a perfectionist, and try to think too much. You come up with a few points (supported by examples, augments, or references - depending on the requirements), throw in some formulatic meta-discussion (i.e. '... though it may be more important to ask "why", not "if" ...') and get the fucker done. Don't worry to much if you're right or not, just make the bloody sausage. Oh, and try to predict what the markers (generally soft-left yuppies, who went from school to college back to school) will want to hear, or will get their attention - they have dozens (or hundreds) of similar papers to read and do not want to think.
My point isn't that essay writing is necessarily harmful. It's just another mostly useless technique to learn, and probably adds up to something if you can mix it with other techniques, and a little knowledge.
