The Testing Blitz

Famous words in the public school system these days is,"class, make sure you bubble in the right answer." Today I spent two hours of instructional time making sure my students knew how to bubble in the right bubble on their answer sheet. I couldn't help but thinking as I am doing a demonstration on the accurate way to bubble, that I could be starting my unit on the Native American Indian, but not today. We will bubble in. The test took almost an hour and a half. Then we had to transfer the answers to a bubble sheet. Waste, waste, waste. I looked in my student's faces as they seriously considered their task at hand. They worked so hard to get the right answer. They worked so hard to find the right bubble. It touched my heart to see how much they wanted to please. Tomorrow we will spend another two hours taking another test and bubbling another answer sheet. I will not have time to start my Native American unit again. We test. We theme test. We district test. We computer test. We state test. My students ask the question each time I pass out the test, "which one is this again?" Don't get me wrong, teachers need to know what their student's know. But, a good already teacher knows. They know each time they ask a question that probes their student's minds and the light goes on and the wheels start to turn, and the excitement shines on their faces as they raise their hand to answer. They know each time a student gets a math problem right on their daily work and they raise their fist and whisper "yes" silently to themselves. They know when they hear their student's talking in a group project and discussing whether the girl on the "Island of the Blue Dolphin" did the right thing going back to help her brother, which meant she was left on the island all by herself." A good teacher does not need a test written by someone else to tell them what they already have figured out. But, the system is in motion and our public school children are learning to bubble in. So, we administer, and we set aside those exciting lessons for another day. The sad thing is, in two more months we will start all over with the bubbling in, and watching our students labor to find the right answer on the answer sheet. Thank goodness our students can move on and past all the test blitz to find the real education in between. Thank goodness a good teacher can too.