His Indolence Speaks

I just wrote a big long rant at a school teacher I thought was going off the deep end over basic skills testing in schools, and standardized testing thereof. I don't know how to do that fancy trackback thing, but you can read her post here. (Be advised that she was writing, to some degree, out of frustration, and so was I. Also, my fellow German speakers should forgive the first word of her blog name. To all my loyal readers, I promise I'll continue to try to keep my active vocabulary smaller than my passive vocabulary, especially when frustrated.)

Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Amy [a previous commenter] quoted Supertramp:

Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal

Mamacita, I'm pretty sure you're an excellent teacher. Certainly this cri de couer shows that you care deeply for your individual students, which, from where I sit outside the educational establishment, seems to put you head and shoulders above perhaps half of our experienced teachers, and it reflects well on you personally. So take this as coming from a naif in need of your expertise.

Educators railing against standardized testing get my hackles up. I see standardized testing as an attempt to see that students meet the MINIMUM requirements to partake of our modern civilization. If it takes all your classroom time to "teach the test", I would submit that you may not be doing it right (or, more likely, your students were not well served in previous grades). If the tests are truly too hard and force too much regimentation on the classroom to meet MINIMUM standards, make that point, please.

I began reading your post thinking (I admit, on extremely limited evidence) that good teachers who care about their students must realize that standardized testing and the skills it entails are meant to be only part of a scholastic experience. When you began denouncing testing, I (good Republican that I am) began thinking, "could she be a moonbat?" All this about feelings and crushing the souls of innocent children and creativity... No, I'm not writing you off. I can still read your post as a complaint against school administrations thinking it is EASIER to teach only to the test, and lacking the imagination to allow extraneous elements into the classroom for fear they will detract from time spent teaching measurable skills.

You say, "I have problems with people who see creativity as a threat to order". Well, I have a problem with people who want to let kids chase butterflies until they're 18. And we're both right, it is WE who have the problem. I'll admit I've set up a straw man with my butterfly-chasing argument; will you admit that at least not ALL of us who want to impose minimum standards are doing so because "creativity is a threat to order"? I hope so. I think your essay would be improved by some understanding for school boards: they have many constituencies to deal with. Yes, it is wicked to stunt a child's creativity, yea, I'll go farther: if all a child has to say about school is that it is a boring chore, that is evidence of a nonoptimal school system. But life imposes many boring chores on humanity, and it will always be so, and school must reflect life to at least some degree.

The only nod I saw to my side of the argument was your paragraph which stated, "The ability to love, to be loved, to express love: can it be that these are more important than grammar, or math, or social studies? I think they are. I also believe that a good teacher can do both at once, if ever he/she is allowed to do so again." That is a lot weaker than I would hope for. Not just good teachers, but ALL teachers HAVE TO be able to do both. Has it gotten to the point where they can't? I need to know this.

"Civilizations are judged by the arts they leave behind, not for statistics and varsity letters." Umm... go tell the Spartans. Ruthless efficiency is a form of creativity, too. Plutarch would still have readers if he'd chosen his subjects like Zola did, no doubt, but there's a case to be made that we learn more of human nature from observing the extremes of human behavior.

As for facts being the enemy of truth, well, Don Quixote had a go at creative lunacy. "Romeo and Juliet" was a comedy, not a tragedy. I doubt that Erasmus intended _In Praise of Folly_ to be the last word on human nature. The truth is not in us, nor will ever be. Non-Euclidean geometry and similar "outside the box" thinking really are folly until they turn up demonstrable results. Facts, or paths toward them. I would maintain that facts and truths are both unattainable, and I'm glad I "learned" that before someone challenged me to calculate the last digit of pi.

All right, I read your post again and ran straight into, "I believe in testing. I'm no tree-huggin' earth mother who thinks children should sing and dig clay out of the ground for art and eat granola all day long. I believe in math and science and grammar and spelling and history." Sorry, I must have completely missed that the first time. I'll try not to blame my public school education ;P Belay most of the above.

I'll keep your opinions in mind as I debate my county's Republican Party education platform. I'm sure you're right that we have to demand more than just the basics. But... Umm, I don't know, really, how quickly children learn. Where can I put my foot down? I want to be able to mount my high horse and declaim, "If you are sending a child into the ninth grade who cannot read _Don Quixote_, nay, more, if the child is not confident that he can read _Don Quixote_ and learn something from it on his own (and one thing he should be able to learn from it is that Don Quixote was generally considered insane), your school system has failed that child. Someone has put their opinion of what a child ought to know above that of not only Miguel de Cervantes, but of every literate man since the invention of the clay tablet." I'd like to say, "seventh grade", but I dunno... Help me out, here, I'm not asking for them to read Hegel in German, but am I so wrong to recall that people used to go to UNC-Chapel Hill with only eight years of education behind them, and able to read Latin and Greek?

I know I've gone on too long and too pompously, but this truly is meant as a critique of your post; I think you ought to sprinkle a few more tidbits in to acknowledge the conditio sine qua non: teaching basic skills. If only for us naifs who might otherwise be calling you a radical, a liberal, oooh, fanatical, criminal... BTW, did Socrates die as he did for asking too many questions before ensuring his students could read?

(signed) your loyal opposition