I was beginning to think that the last three columns I’d written hadn’t had much in the way of readership, until a casual friend asked me straight out, “What is the big deal about the government dropping provincial exams? Don’t you realize that virtually every teacher, at least at the high school level thinks you’ve gone off the deep end on this one.”
The answer is simple: I like the exams because to fear them is to ignore the fact that their arms-length presence and material presentation in my classroom provides me with a certain insight: a sense as to whether or not I’ve given them sufficient knowledge in preparing for their life’s journey in learning, while now telling me how to improve so as to make that journey easier for the next group of students I’ll teach.
Many of my colleagues describe the process of constructing such exams as being nothing more than “picking and choosing” specific topics that might not have been covered during class time but were more than adequately dealt with in other segments of curriculum coverage. I can understand that concern, but having majored in both Mathematics and English, I’d love to meet a Grade 12 English teacher doing the “30B” program whose way of “evaluating” student progress is to assign a 6 to 10 page essay on the emergence of this dystopian train wreck threatening today’s society over the Christmas holidays, have it count for a sizeable percentage when calculating a final mark, and include references to current factors and conditions suffering from the process, such as environmental violence caused by climate change, warring religion undermining their own belief systems, racial strife, and our increasing inability to properly socialize due to our now worshipping technological advancement as opposed to personal growth.
I’d even kick in a hundred or so just to be able to read something that a student has written that demonstrates he/she “gets it”. What learning objective have I missed in describing this “test”? None – and yet what makes it most important to me as a father and grandfather, we have to adjust our learning expectations to a level where instead of being “replaced” by such technology (e.g.: Artificial Intelligence) we continue to control the direction technological advances must take.
When they talk about just “how well our students are learning,” teachers fail to realize that their students are treating course materials much like a disposable diaper– the moment the course is done, student notes end up in the recycle bin. However, many of our STEM-related programs, including math, build their structures based upon previously well-proven theorems or stand-alone axioms that must be continuously reinforced in the “essentials” allowing the next phase of lesson planning to properly develop.
What makes things worse from a time constraint is that the Department of Education expects the curriculum to be covered in 100 classroom hours, yet administrators are reluctant to encourage teachers to provide homework assignments on a daily basis for fear of parental backlash. This inability of our educational elite to confront the reality of a need for continuous remediation is therefore lost, and students suffering learning setbacks as a result. For instance, in the mid-1990’s the U of S Department of Mathematics issued a Calculus 100 final examination to over 1,100 students. More than 90 per cent of those writing it miserably failed, begging the question as to how could that happen when my own Grade 11 wrote that same exam, took only about 45 minutes of the 3 hours allocated for its writing and everyone passed?
Perhaps the fact that the “test” was just a recycled provincial examination from around 1936 for Grade 10’s might have had something to do with my students faring better in its writing…
Unfortunately, analyzing what mathematics teachers have to go through highlights where many of our educational intentions end up mired on sandy beaches. For instance, we STILL have administrators who believe that someone with a PhysEd degree can teach mathematics class by staying one day ahead of the students. Trustees don’t believe in mentorship, or we’d have not lost the services of so many who’ve retired rather than watch as something else gets “cut” from its availability as a classroom resource. Add to this the ”politically correct” administrators who skeptically stare at your resume and wonder how any student could ever get a university scholarship when you describe your teaching approach as by allowing students to first get to know me before trying to “evaluate” that individual’s interaction in school affairs.
Nothing, however, puts a strain on a teacher’s desires to impose a standard of learning on their courses than watching Mr. and Mrs. Helicopter, the bane of educators everywhere and destroyers of society as we have known it from its past, entering the school on Parent – Teacher nights. I’ve gotten to the point where instead of listening to their complaints as to how Junior or Princess never had “problems” in mathematics before I came to town, I merely remind them that what they’re really doing is enabling their children to do worse, but if they want to be part of a “solution”, perhaps they might choose to come to school with the child and help in the areas in which they appear to be struggling.
I’ve actually had parents take me up on this offer, and the speed with which their children improved was stunning, to say the least. However, considering the fact that in high school one’s friends are not supposed to know one’s parents, much less watch them embarrassingly helicopter over them eventually resulted in a curative vaccine being concocted.
In creating measuring standards, though, we also must try to evaluate how our minds develop and how to push the boundaries of that process. For us to have such understanding, though, we first must acquire some sense of the psychological process in how we test for true learning, the topic for next week’s column.
