OT: Standardized state exams for high-schoolers

[Tom Zurinskas]

That is an interesting Washington Post article.  A successful adult takes "his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests" for 10th graders and finds the subject matter irrelevant.

 “I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

Moral of the story = academia can go awry.  Witness "new math" and "whole word" instruction.  My take is that phonetics is in that group.  That's why truespel phonetics was created, a notation in English that is infinitely more useful than academic phonetics.


Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now Fl 9.
See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk








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> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 07:35:06 -0600
> From: lethe9 at GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: OT: Standardized state exams for high-schoolers
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Darla Wells <lethe9 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Re: OT: Standardized state exams for high-schoolers
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Great article, Wilson! All too true. I interned in an elementary classroom
> a few years ago and the teacher immediately put me to work teaching
> test-taking techniques. Got in trouble because I couldn't remember if the
> blue pencil was supposed to mark the possible answer or the one that
> couldn't be the answer, along with all the other color codes. If I couldn't
> remember the stuff, why expect a 2nd grader to do all that while the test
> is going on? This testing has nothing to do with learning and much to do
> with enriching testing companies.
> Darla
>
> 2011/12/5 Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject: OT: Standardized state exams for high-schoolers
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > http://goo.gl/ntHFH
> >
> > --
> > -Wilson
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> > to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> > -Mark Twain
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