Our students, much like those you work with, are preparing for their state graduation test. The tension is building with each day. The teachers are cramming material into each lesson and the students are sponges absorbing as much educational "water" as they can.
Is this where we are as educators? Cramming as much in as possible in the short amount of time we have until T-day--test day. I miss the science classes that have experiments, labs, and dissected worms. The science class that I see has packets of endless pages and word banks of 50+ words. Where did we go wrong?
The inquiry in education has been set aside for the comprehension of vocabulary. How boring! The challenge of the educational leader is this: How can I move the school statistically, as reported in state grade cards for schools AND have classes that stress inquiry, synthesis, and other elements of higher order thinking? Who will be the first to move the class away from the memorization of test questions that may be asked on the annual assessment, and move into the realm of deep and developed thinking? Our country has decided to assess each school by assessing each child, and has done it as cheap as possible. This builds our production of mediocre learners with limited thinking skills. Can we afford to wait for the country and the states to change their testing? I think not. Go out and make a difference today. Don't wait. Challenge the trend of memorization of vocab. and develop the thinking of our teenagers.
-Aric Thomas, Assistant Principal
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