Bud the Teacher

        I added a rough draft of a document that I am building to distribute to students on how to get started blogging to the blogging resources wiki that I have setup.  If you are interested, have a resource to share, or want some feedback on or to workshop something you are creating, come and join the conversation.  I’ve learned a great deal about wikis just through the last couple of days — they’re pretty handy tools.  As always, there’s more to learn, but this work has already been fascinating. 

    This week we’re giving our state test, the CSAP, to the students at my school.  It’s going pretty well — the students, for the most part, are taking the test seriously, as they care about our school and what the test scores can mean for the program.  But something  happened yesterday that really made me frustrated with this sort of assessment. 
    One of my students, a nice young man who has only been with us for a little while, raised his hand during a writing test.  I walked over and he whispered to me, "Can I use a dictionary?"
    The language arts teacher inside of me smiled with glee — here was a student seeking to use a tool to improve his writing.  Hooray!  Questions like his are the ones that start conversations that lead to increased knowledge.  Teachable moments, some call them. 
    Except yesterday wasn’t about teaching.  Yesterday was about taking a test.  Teaching and learning and standardized tests don’t often sit down together at the dinner table of the real world. 
     The CSAP, as standardized tests go, is not a bad test.  But it is a test where you’re not allowed to use resources like the dictionary or a thesaurus.  Or ask the teacher to spell a word for you.  Or read something you wrote out loud to see if it makes sense to a colleague or a classmate.  Or any of a number of tools and strategies that I teach my students and that real people actually use in the standardized testing-free world that exists outside the realm of the public schools. 
    Standardizing a testing experience, like standardizing an educational one, takes away many of the dynamic and social elements of schooling and learning and being in a community of learners.  These tests are artificial assessments — and that’s frustrating. 
    I understand the value of a test score (which isn’t near as valuable as many legislators seem to believe that it is).  Testing can and does provide us with some information about our students that is handy to have.  But I also understand that yesterday, a student who is growing as a writer and a thinker asked to use a dictionary, something that I had never heard him ask to do before.  It was a simple request that should have been immediately granted.  Shouldn’t we be encouraging dictionaries and other tools for learning?  Where on the test is asking for help or reaching out to a new tool honored? 

"I’m sorry, but dictionaries are not allowed.
"Oh."

    I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but what kind of language arts teacher denies a kid a dictionary?