today is the day. --- it's funny, when I write that, I hear two things in my head:

if you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise... today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

and georgia hubley crooning, today is the day. today is the day I think of you.

-- anyway, today is the day my students take their earth science regents exam, the state-mandated standardized test that determines whether they learned enough with me. in some cases it determines, albeit only partly, whether they will ultimately be allowed to graduate from high school. the kids already took the performance component of the exam, a perfunctory lab exercise in which they identify some earthen objects and draw ellipsoids representing a variety of things (earthquakes, orbits, what have you). they tore it up on the rocks & minerals, and if nothing else we can walk away from this year confident that my little group of concrete jungle kids know the difference between something igneous and something sedimentary. but the rest is all still up in the air.

for weeks I've been waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about this test. (I'm not the only one. the history teacher was apparently lecturing his girlfriend in his sleep about what she needed to study.) do birds know that there is a day when they'll have to shove their babies out of the nest, to fly or flail? or do they just do it when the time feels right? do they look at their broken fledglings, the splay-leg babies with crooked feathers, and dread the day their inadequacies must be put to the ultimate test? or are their tiny brains too stunted and conditioned by the cruelties of nature to care?

(it's six am and I've already been up for a while)

it kills me not to be able to sit next to the kids during the exam. not the kids who cut class or defiantly told me that I could bleed review materials and they wouldn't read them, necessarily (although I want them to succeed anyway). but the kids who know all the answers, but are so insecure that they need verbal confirmation before they'll commit anything to paper. the kids who know all the science, but get tripped up because they don't know the meaning of abundant or range or variation or vertical or apparent or features or... words, standardized tests are such a minefield of words, and I can hardly blame the kids for wanting to tiptoe away in the other direction. but to me the answers left blank are like the places where the most destruction is already done. I'm mixing metaphors here and I think they're verging on the inappropriate.

to keep myself from violating the laws of standardized testing conditions, I will sit down at the start of the exam for my ritual taking of the regents. first I zip through it by myself to test my own expertise -- my second year teaching I got a 99, which was upsetting, but taught me a lesson about the nitpickyness of the scoring procedure -- and then I go over each question to obsess about the degree to which I adequately covered its content. there's always one or two things on the regents that are worth a seemingly huge amount of points relative to the size of their share of the curriculum. like the infamous sand dune question of 2005 that has resulted in thousands of hapless high school students learning about wind erosion for no real reason in the four subsequent years.

and then finally I take the test as if I were my students, collectively, with all their odd conceptions and vocabulary quirks and tendencies to skip reading the important parts of the questions. that way I won't cry as much later, when I'm grading their answer booklets.

when I run I go through a sluggish phase towards the end, after three or four miles, and I have to force my feet to keep moving, dragging myself along in a slodgy jog so I won't lose my momentum. that's how it felt in the classroom for these weeks in june, just forcing ourselves towards the finish line, one labored step after another. but once I'm within a half mile of home, I lean forward, headfirst until I'm almost falling over, and my stride gets faster faster to keep up. that's today. today is the day we lean into the wind, jump out of the nest, and do our best not to fall.

it's weird how much I can hate these standardized tests and still find them so thrilling. all it really comes down to is this: I love my students. I want them to come out of this feeling good about science. I want them to win this stupid game, even if it is stupid.
[ 17 June 2009]  ·  [ ]