Stewie Griffin, who declares, after taking over the world:
“Furthermore, anyone who uses the terms ‘irregardless,’ ‘a whole nother,’ or ‘all of the sudden’ will be sent to work camp.”
I love that baby!
Archive for August, 2009
My New Hero
Friday, August 21st, 2009Standardized Tests: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Friday, August 21st, 2009As someone who makes money preparing others for standardized tests, I can say that I think they generally fulfill their purpose. I do think that in recent years, far more attention has been given to them than they deserve, however. In particular, the SAT hype is out of control.
The Stanford Achievement Test was originally developed by the state of California as a way to mass-screen all of the candidates for its university system. Following World War II, there were an unprecedented number of applicants, because of the GI Bill, and the colleges needed a way to filter out the most successful ones quickly. Because the SAT primarily measures one’s ability to take standardized tests, it’s actually a pretty good indicator of how a student will do in college. But if you’re applying to a school like, say, St. John’s College, where your grades depend on your ability to write and perform on oral exams, a high SAT score doesn’t say much of anything. Bottom line: it certainly doesn’t measure intelligence. Not even close.
The ACT, despite what you may have heard, is not much different from the SAT at all. There is a Science section, but it mostly involves data analysis and logic – the same things the SAT tests for in its Math sections. Oh, and there are four possible responses to each question instead of five. But if I had a dollar for every time someone told me they’d heard the ACT was easier than the SAT, I would be the world’s richest teacher. As it is, I’m just very frustrated. Honestly, I want to say, do you think there’s some kind of trick here? If the ACT was easier, why would anyone even take the SAT, when most colleges accept either?
The really unfortunate part of this whole business is that, regardless of your test preference, you really can’t take the test without preparing. If you do, you’ll be at a disadvantage, because this time, everyone else really is doing it. You can check a prep book out of the library and learn most of what a tutor like me would tell you, if you’re smart and a quick learner. Or you can pay someone to explain it to you and drill you on the concepts. Either way, though, you cannot possibly get your highest score by taking the test cold. There’s just too much psychology involved now; the test writers have to keep upping the ante as tutors uncover more of their secrets, and now the experience has so much cross and double-cross that it feels like a spy novel.
More reviews below . . .
Toughing it Out
Thursday, August 20th, 2009Sarah Fine, a fairly new teacher, is so overwhelmed and disheartened that she’s quitting. Statistics are fuzzy, but it’s estimated that half of all new teachers will follow her before the five-year mark. Burnout is the most frequently cited reason:
But there is more to those numbers than “burnout.” That term is shorthand for a suite of factors that contributed to my choice to leave the classroom. When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school’s administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class “seated and silent.” It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration.
The teaching itself was exhilarating but disheartening. There were triumphs: energetic seminar discussions, cross-class projects, a student-led poetry slam. This past year, my 10th-graders even knocked the DC-CAS reading test out of the water. Even so, I felt like a failure. Too many of my students showed only occasional signs of intellectual curiosity, despite my best efforts to engage them. Too many of them still would not or could not read. And far too many of them fell through the cracks.
Bolded sentences are my “Amen!”s. This year, God willing, I plan to be one of the half that stays in teaching, but I can’t tell you how many dozens of times I’ve wanted to quit. I especially sympathize with her comments about administration, who shuts down the majority of good ideas and micromanages the rest into mediocrity. And yes, it is utterly defeating to encounter people who don’t love learning, especially when you love it as much as she and I do.
Fine spends the second half of her article talking about how little respect her profession receives from the outside world. My experience could not be more different. I’ve had total strangers call me a hero upon learning my occupation, and my friends (those who aren’t teachers themselves) are deeply appreciative as well.
In fact, it could be that the only reason I’m still here is my diehard optimism: I love the thought of a class where ideas are shared and intellects are shaped, and no matter how unrealistic that idea may be, I’m seduced by the fleeting glimpses I’ve received over the years. The student who exclaimed in discussion last year, “I love this class! We get to talk about stuff!” Inarticulate, spontaneous and sweet, those comments stay with me. Maybe I’m a sucker, or maybe I just love what I do.
Overheard in the Dining Room
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009Me: Okay, so the way to tackle these Sentence Completion questions is to find a word that fits in the blank, and then look for a similar word in the list of answer choices. Here’s the first one: “To be a writer, one needs a great deal of _______.”
Student: Pencils.
. . . so THAT’S what I’ve been doing wrong!
Twitter Backlash
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009In the immortal words of countless bathroom stall doors, “Those who know me, know me well, and those who don’t, can something something.”
Or, as my techno-savvy cousin recently wrote, “Who needs chat when you have chat status?” (Added bonus: he wrote this in his chat status. Wit runs in my family.)
Look, I just don’t get it. I love my friends and family. I don’t, however, need to know what they’re doing for every hour of every day. In fact, some things I would decidedly rather not know (details of abdominal illnesses come to mind.) I’m a big advocate of quality time, as I have said before. So it’s heartening to find that others in the media are beginning to agree.
First, a welcome diatribe from Melissa Dribben about the evils of a constant stream of self-absorption:
I know. I’m turning my back on an invaluable resource. I’m missing out on the chance to be among the millions who know a celebrity has died 15 minutes before the rest of the world finds out (Michael Jackson, June 25) or years before the death actually occurs (Natalie Portman, Jeff Goldblum, and George Clooney, last week).
To shun Twitter also is to deprive oneself of access to the personal musings of great legislative minds. “I did big wooohoo for Justice Ginsberg,” Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri tweeted in February, when she saw Judge Ruthie enter the halls of Congress.
Call me a fool for failing to take advantage of the greatest social network since Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates.com, the coffee shop up the street, the parents association at my daughter’s school, the alumni groups from college and graduate school, my neighborhood gym, the farmers market, the hardware store, my address book, the Yellow Pages, my dinner table, and the dog park. Agoraphobia’s a bummer, isn’t it?
Second, an interesting article from the New York Times about a biweekly gathering where participants are forbidden to tweet, blog or photograph any of the goings-on. Imagine: the unbroken thread of a conversation untainted by tweaks into bloggable material! The luxury of having one too many without the threat of tagged Facebook photos of the revelry, retrievable by grandmothers and prospective employers everywhere! And this wonderful quotation, which just may be my new mantra:
“We are fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled,” Mr. Malice said. “People think that every thought they have, every experience — if it is not captured it is lost.”
Okay, so at least two people are on my side. Out of several hundred million. It’s a start.
Postscript: in my grad class this evening, we were discussing Blade Runner and the City of the Future. Interconnectedness, alienation, and depersonalization factored into our conversation, so of course Twitter came up. Fully half the class shook their heads in disgust, and there was a general murmur of “Oh, that’s SO stupid.” So, score seven more for Team Emily!