Tomorrow we will begin
yet another round of testing at our school.
As a matter of fact, every school in Jackson Madison County will start
another round of testing. At this point,
I honestly am not sure if this is a real or practice test because they all come
so frequently that it is difficult to keep up.
In the shadows of all these tests, I found myself pondering the end goal
of such a system. Why would you
water-down a child to a point on a graph? Why would you strip away their name,
personality, and everything that makes them amazing and replace it with a data
point?
I have
twenty-two children in my classroom. I
have 10 first-graders, 6 second-graders, and 6 third-graders. I refuse to look at them as points on a graph
or a score on a test. I could tell you
amazing things about each one of them. I
could describe to you how they laugh on the playground and how they focus
during our meditation time. I could tell
you which ones prefer Zumba and which ones prefer Yoga. I could tell you which little ones might cry
if their feelings are hurt and how I would make them smile again. I could tell you which ones show outstanding
leadership skills at recess and which ones dabble in the dramatic arts. There is so much that I could tell you about
each one of them, but I would never describe them as a Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier
3 individual. This is how the state of
Tennessee would have me describe them to you.
I refuse to think of them that way.
I
became a teacher to help cultivate the minds of the little humans of the
world. I did not become a teacher to
assign a label, data point, or line graph to each individual child. In my classroom, I teach them to be good
people. I teach them to love, to learn,
to be peaceful, to create, to solve, to give, and to grow. If this is not what a teacher is supposed to
do, then perhaps I should find another profession. Tomorrow when my little 3rd
graders enter the computer lab to take another standardized test, I will smile
at them and say, “Don’t worry, just do your best!” This will be the only discussion that we have
about the test, because they are more than a test score to me…..to me… they are
amazing little humans.
