EDLD 5364 Week 4 Reflection

I’m not sure I have ever been as depressed about what I do for a living as I am right now. After watching the videos this week that focus on project based learning I feel like we are stuck on a sinking ship here in Texas. We are so test focused that I feel like we will never be able to give to our students what I hear the educators on the videos talking about. That frustrates and frightens me. I would love to be able to assign my eighth graders the task of going onto the internet and researching Thomas Jefferson but I know that isn’t a realistic possibility. Half of my students wouldn’t even try. Another fourth would just copy someone else’s research and stick their name on it. Seriously, perhaps 25% of my students would get anything at all out of project based instruction. They have been so forcefully crammed into the multiple choice standardized test box that they can’t or won’t think for themselves.

This week I had nine students out of twenty in one class who turned in the exact same assignment. I was absent the day it was due and they convinced the substitute to let them work on the assignment in class. Nine of them ended up with the exact same wording on the project. Unfortunately for them, the girl they copies had tried to spice up her assignment by using out of the ordinary words. (I’m not as stupid as they think I am!) Now I have nine students who will fail this grading period because a zero on a major grade assignment is pretty hard to recover from.

That wasn’t even the saddest part of the story. When I confronted them one boy said, “I didn’t cheat!” and I said, “Then you let someone cheat off you.” His reply, “Oh, ok then.” Another one, rather than being embarrassed or concerned, asked if I could “prove” they cheated. I wish I had stuck to a regular online test. At least that way I can lock it down, turn on the “randomize the questions” option and have some comfort level that they might actually do their own work.

And although I work at a school with a 1:1 program, it was actually suggested a couple of months ago that we should start giving paper tests so that our students would be familiar with a hard copy social studies test when they have to take the STAAR test at the end of April. I feel like I have gone back in time while the rest of the world moves forward. I have never seen the kind of enthusiasm the children on the videos all had for learning in any class in any school I have taught at and it breaks my heart that, with all the possibilities available to our kids, we are still breaking their spirit with standardized testing.