Swimming Upstream

Well I emerge from the End of Grade testing week mostly unscathed. Of course, we sent home the letters for students that need to re-test on Friday, so perhaps there may yet be some scathing. I find that I wrestle each year with how to interpret my results. Notice that I refer to them as my results.

In my heart of hearts I would like to think that my students EOG scores are just one small component of a year end review. That, while they do generally offer some direction in areas for improvement, they are only a small part of my regular and ongoing reflective practices when it comes to my teaching.

I refer to the scores as my scores because ultimately I am the only one who is truly a benefactor of the outcome of the test. Sure it may be psychologically and subliminally affecting our children, and yes it may even hold some of my students back, but the scores I received on Friday will not, ultimately, be a factor in my students future admission to a four year college. They will not post these scores on their resume. Most of them will not even remember them beyond June 9.

And so I come back to my ongoing inner debate. What do my scores mean to me. Before I go on, let me lay them out, so that you might see where I am coming from. I will start with my writing test scores, a bear for most North Carolina fourth graders. I had twenty three students when the writing test was administered back in March. (Currently I have twenty four.) Of those twenty three, seven did not pass, many barely missing the score of three with eleven points (Twelve points make a three.) Ten students passed with a grade level standard of three, essentially what would be considered by most to be average. Six scored a level four which, not boasting, is generally a pretty difficult bar to clear. Last year my writing scores were essentially the same except I had no students score a level four. I still had seven who didn’t pass.

My EOG test results are for twenty four students. I inherited a new student around the beginning of the last nine weeks. These numbers allow for more rigorous analysis, though they are confined to only the math test scores as our reading test this year was a field test. Four of my students did not pass the math EOG. Two of those students scored twos on the test and two scored a one. Nine students scored a three, and ten of my students scored a four. My average growth for each student which is arrived at by taking their scale score from last year and subtracting it from this year was about five points. I believe that six points is considered to be high growth.

How many of you have I lost?

There are many who would argue that these scores validate what I have done as a teacher for this school year. I think that herein lies my greatest fear. While these scores do validate what I have have done this year as an educator, at the same time offering me some direction with regards to where I can improve, they miss so much more. While numbers are concrete, and many would say indisputable, there are not measures for so many of the powerfully influential lessons that I hope and pray that I have imparted on my students. Here are just a few...
Don’t make excuses, own it. Re-evaluate expectations daily... hourly. You can be a great writer... seriously. Truth can be your strongest commodity when promoting self. Being a good sport can yield greater victories than winning the game... seriously. You can be an actor, an artist, a musician.

I have poured all that I could into fragile nine and ten year old self esteems. (They really are surprisingly fragile.)

You too can have a voice that can be heard by a powerful many. A love of reading can be a great thing... seriously. Don’t sell yourself short with laziness.

We’ve talked politics. We’ve talked about the serious situation that faces our planet. We talked about Tibet. We talked about poverty and thought about solutions. Money is not a solution. Food is not a solution. We have continued to practice the fine art of sharing. Sharing of space, sharing of objects, sharing ourselves. We have learned that when you are on stage that actors never have to be embarrassed. We practiced engineering and architecture. We studied art. We studied poetry. We wrote songs... about multiplication... and actually enjoyed it. We leaned that teachers can be wrong... seriously. We practiced letter writing, knowing that it is a dying art. We learned that cursive handwriting is a personal gesture that means a lot to some people. We learned about the power of the internet, about connectivity, blogging, wikiing. That our world is rapidly shrinking and speeding up, in a dizzying manner. I could go on and on...

Ultimately, it is my hope that my students take from my class one lesson. I myself have borrowed the words from a colleague:

Be bold, not perfect.

Simple, no? How could any standardized assessment ever measure that? I think that what frightens me the most is that so many teachers who impart similar lessons are losing the opportunity to share, and in their stead training our kids meet a narrow set of standards.