…or, “same shit, different day” for short. Anyway. We just finished a week-long standardized test. And I hereby confess that I am now the parent I used to make fun of. I MADE MY KIDS STUDY FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STANDARDIZED TESTS. Yeah, I know. I fully appreciate how fucked up that is. Here’s my take on it, though: Don’t hate the player; hate the game. I hate the game, but I’m damned sure going to do what I can to help my kids win the game. This No Child Left Behind bullshit is supposed to measure how well the school is doing. However, it’s used to measure my individual children against all the other kids in the country who have to take this test. It shapes how teachers view them. It decides whether or not they get into the gifted program. It dictates what math track they’re put on. IT GOES ON THEIR PERMANENT RECORD. Eek!
The biggest problem i have with this is that the test is a piece of shit. It doesn’t measure their aptitude for learning. It doesn’t measure what they have and have not learned. All it measures is how good they are at choosing the least-stupid answers to poorly-worded questions. Seriously. I could go on for pages about all the stupid fucking questions and answers, but will spare you the diatribe, and myself the cortisol surge, and limit myself to a single (paraphrased) sample “science” question.
Yahaira is doing science. She puts two bean plants in pots. She puts one pot in a window in the attic where it’s quiet, and the other in her bedroom window where she plays music for it. The one in her bedroom grew taller. What was she probably testing?
a) if plants grow in the dark
b) if onions make her poop stink
c) if plants grow better with or without music
d) if plants grow better in the attic or bedroom
Apparently, the “correct” answer was c. This question was in the 6th grade practice test book I bought. And both my third-graders also realized that there were two variables in this experiment, and that putting each of the variables in a separate answer choice and pretending that one is right and one is wrong is FUCKING BULLSHIT.
Ham-fisted. This is the term i used over and over again while teaching them how to choose the “correct” answers. These questions were written by ham-fisted motherfuckers incapable of nuance. All of the details that spring into your mind do not exist for the knuckle-dragging asshole who crayoned this artificially-science-flavored bullshit. If you attack this test armed with all the scientific knowledge you have acquired from reading thousands of pages worth of high school and college-level books, you will fucking fail.
The first round of practice tests were frustrating as hell for them, but after going over the answers and explaining the Hamfist Principle, they developed the Hamfist Corollary, a sort of ITBS WWJD: “What answer does the idiot want me to choose?” Going into the second practice test, they improved their scores fromaround 80% correct to over 90% correct.
The Council of Barely-Sentient Hamfisted Assholes who get paid by taxpayers to write this bullshit have a handful of obvious favorite topics. We spent a couple of days making study sheets. “Characteristics of Important Taxonomic Phyla, Classes and Orders” (Birds have feathers. Snakes have spines. Penguins are birds. Whales are mammals. Spiders are not insects.) “Differences between Animal and Plant Cells” (Cell walls.) “Orders of Magnitude and Spatial Relationships in the Solar System.” (Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth. Mars is farther. Jupiter is a lot bigger than Earth and a lot smaller than the Sun. Comets and asteroids are not planets. The Sun is a star.) “The Carbon Cycle.” “Characteristics of Ecosystems.”
The third round of practice questions had all three of them at 100%, which was pretty goddamned gratifying. Not as gratifying, however, as what we did with the scribbled-up practice test books when ITBS week was finished: made smores over their flaming corpses!
