Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Good God. I sure hope you are not actually an educator, because [b]you certainly can't seem to see the forest for the trees.[/b] Whether it's specifically identifying an unknown word in a sentence that they read themselves, or one that the teacher speaks to them is not relevant, specifically pointing at a word is not the relevant thing here, and is not the outcome that CC is striving for. The point is to get kids thinking about sentence structure and context as a building block toward understanding language, giving them the toolset to be able to deconstruct language and understand its nuances, and any thinking person would know that the "unknown word" objective can be met in a number of ways without getting hung up on idiocies like "well do they have to point at the word 'shafloozle', should they underline it, or is it OK to say 'I don't know what 'shnafloozle' means.'" This is a PERFECT example of the kind of pedantic myopia and utter and complete lack of understanding of the big picture of educational objectives and how they all fit together as building blocks that the anti-CC folks seem to be suffering from.[/quote]

But, this is the way we are forced to think in order to get the kids to "pass" the tests.  There are standardized tests in which the teacher has to talk to the student and mark responses on a sheet of paper that has very specific assessment guidelines.  The prompts and responses have to be exactly done a certain way (many times word for word) or they don't "count".  I wish I were making this up, but I'm not.  This is what standardization is.  The tests cannot be deemed reliable unless they are delivered in exactly the same way to every student.  And, because of this, the teachers want to make sure they deliver the standards in the way that the test will (so that the student has had directed practice). You and I agree that common sense should reign, but you would be surprised at how teachers are trained in ultra specific details regarding testing.  One false move and the teacher is toast (or so they tell us).  It has led to this super cautionary approach.  Thus, the standards need to be specifically stated if they are to be tested (which we assume these will be since we have NCLB).

On a test, it would have to be clear to the student whether pointing would be allowed and whether the teacher could "transcribe" the student's answer.  This may be an accommodation that would only be allowed for a student with an IEP.  There are many accommodations that teachers have to keep track of as well.

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