Teaching to Learn, Part 4: The Testing Game

Me in my extremely fashionable floppy
beige safari hat, and children.

Tuesdays are my least favorite mornings of the week.  Most other mornings I arrive at school, drop my things, don my extremely fashionable floppy beige safari hat and head out into the garden for some pest control, watering, or a few moments of calm before the school day begins in earnest.

Not on Tuesdays.  Tuesdays are lesson planning days.  On Tuesdays I arrive at school, drop my things, place my laptop under my arm, and enter the library which, thanks to an HVAC malfunction, currently doubles as a walk-in refrigerator.  Next the garden team checks our unit calendar to see what topic we'll be teaching the following week, then we unfold our laptops and open up our school's lesson planning template.*

In the top right box of that template stand three capitalized letters and a fourth lower-case one in parentheses: GLE(s).  Grade Level Expectation(s).  These are the skills and ideas, broken down by subject area, that the state of Louisiana expects our students to understand by the end of the school year.  Each of our lessons, and by extension each of our classes, involves content drawn from the science GLEs.  2nd grade, my focus area for teaching, has 51 GLEs for science alone.**  Almost every student gets tested according to these criteria, and both teachers and schools are evaluated on how well students meet these expectations year-to-year.

For four mornings in mid-April almost every student in Louisiana undergoes some form of standardized testing.  Fourth and eighth graders have it especially tough - failure to pass the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, or LEAP test, means repeating the grade.  The stress created by the weight of the test is probably enough to cause some students to fail.  3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th graders took the iLEAP, a less high-stakes exam but one that can act as an indicator for students who may need to repeat.

I'm a big believer that kids need to be tested less, or not at all, or at least in a very different way.  Any standardized test I've ever encountered is extremely reductionist; often all they measure is a student's ability to take a test or a teacher's ability to teach to it.  These tests set a very narrow scope of what it means to be a successful student to the detriment of all students, especially those who might be gifted in ways that tests like these will never show.  Like traditional schooling tends to do, standardized tests make the "gifted" students feel good and the challenged students, or the students gifted in other ways, feel less good.

Testing can really limit what teachers and students are able to achieve.  I had a conversation recently with a middle-school English teacher who was reflecting on his last couple years of teaching.  "Last year my kids did great on the tests but my classes were dull and my students weren't that engaged," he shared.  "All I did was drill, drill, drill for the tests."  This year, his classes have been inspiring.  He's seen such growth in his students' ability to express themselves through writing, and he's created a really positive and supportive classroom culture.  "But they're screwed for the tests," he said.  "We haven't been drilling nearly enough."  Perhaps a really skilled teacher can collapse the either/or between an ideal learning experience and an ideal test score, but for most people it's pretty difficult.

Testing also glosses over so much about what happens in a school.  For instance: do educators create an environment where kids can believe in themselves?  Are students happy and supported?  Are they learning to be loving, caring, compassionate, thoughtful, communicative people?  Are they good listeners, good sharers, and good friends?  What are students good at that's not traditionally measured on tests?  How much do students retain of what's on the test after the test itself?


It's a game, in a way.  We all play along, following rules we didn't create and sometimes don't understand or respect.  Those who adhere most strongly to the rules tend to do the best, and are rewarded with accolades and funding.  It's highly competitive and some students, teachers and schools are better at the game than others.  There are winners and losers, only in this game the losers get held back, fired or shut down.  You can choose not to play, but you'll pay for it.  You can also choose to play only by the rules and ignore other aspects of raising young people, but society will pay for it.  I work in a school that plays both the testing game and the raising kids game exceptionally well, but teachers and administrators end up paying for it in the form of extremely long hours and high faculty turnover.

Clearly I'm no fan of the sit-and-regurgitate method of evaluation.  So when I walked into school on Thursday morning for the first round of testing I expected to spend the better part of the next four mornings frustrated and sad.

Instead I found myself smiling, a lot.


As I walked into the cafeteria that morning during breakfast I saw the fourth grade teachers handing out "good luck" cards that their students had written to each other as encouragement.  I'm sure a handful of kids didn't take the assignment too seriously, but reading the cards almost all of them had really touching and thoughtful messages.  The students worked really hard to draw nice pictures, write peoples names in funny or creative lettering, or come up with some really kind things to say to their classmates.  Even the kids who got someone they didn't get along with seemed to step up.

Right after the cards were exchanged one of the teachers led the entire grade in a warm up exercise that involved stretching, words of encouragement, and screaming.  My students never get to scream in the cafeteria.  It was a small victory for exceptions, and I think it made them feel special.  The scene in the cafeteria that morning became this beautiful and rare 9-year-olds' version of solidarity.


When testing began a handful of non-testing middle-school students made their way out to the garden where they got to spend their entire morning.  Some of these students had never set foot in the garden before and probably wouldn't have save for their testing exemptions.  They got to play with and feed the chickens, go hunting for snails and caterpillars, and harvest cabbage leaves.

The younger students finished testing earliest.  As they made their way past the fourth grade rooms toward the cafeteria they walked by in total silence, out of respect for their older peers still testing.  It was the quietest and most focused I had ever seen them in the hallways.

As a hallway monitor one of my responsibilities was to watch over testing groups while the teachers returned their testing materials to the main office.  I was standing in a silent room with a small group of fourth-graders when one boy started making motions with his hand as if pantomiming a ball.  Another boy raised his hands up together as if to say "throw it here!"  Pretty soon the whole room, girls and Mr. Sam included, was involved in a calm, hilarious game of silent catch.

Every day during testing I saw little shining moments of resiliency.  Of positivity.  Of compassion.  Even in this stressful and unfortunate environment, or perhaps because of it, my students and co-workers showed their most vivid human colors.

It's a lesson I've been learning all year at school but have only recently begun to take to heart: even within a troubled system, it's possible to create pockets of real beauty.  It's a lesson that extends beyond schools, and one that offers hope to frustrated and confused hyper-politicized 20-somethings who are looking to carve out small corners of good in an impossibly huge mess of a world.

When it comes down to it, we're never disconnected from things we resent.  Public school educators will inevitably be part of the regime of testing.  Justice-minded entrepreneurs will participate in exploitative economics.  Environmentalists will depend on fossil fuels and Big Ag.  Homesteaders will never be fully off the grid.  There is no off the grid.

If we begin to believe that we've carved out an existence that exempts us from the parts of the world that we find troubling, we're likely kidding ourselves.  It's an illusion, an image, and if you read my last post you might agree that images can have very bad unintended consequences.

Rather than trying to separate ourselves from the evils we see, perhaps it's a better approach to acknowledge that we're in the thick of them, always.  That the best thing we can do is to act despite them - to love, to give, to teach, to create in the face of them.  Here's a self-serving analogy: the narrative is big and it isn't going anywhere, but in small ways we can begin to re-write it.  We can edit a line here or there, add or subtract the occasional paragraph and maybe even alter the punctuation.

More and more I'm convinced that creating a better world is just as much about form as content:  that what you do matters, but whatever you do, how you do it matters too.  We all have to play games, but we also have a choice in how we play them.

If you're an educator, fit your passions into the gaps in the curriculum.  If you're in food service, be the very picture of grace even to the most ungrateful customers.  If you're a software engineer, be the most thorough and passionate software engineer anyone has ever met.  If you're in clerical work, smile at your coworkers more than they thought anyone could.  If you're a financier, be the best damn listener your clients will ever encounter.  If you're an executive at Exxon-Mobil... well... lets draw a line somewhere.***

Maybe I'm clinging to this belief to relieve some latent guilt about working in an extremely problematic school system.  Maybe this is an early stage of rationalizing an eventual full-blown sellout.


I'm hoping that's not the case.  I'm hoping it's nuance.  I'm hoping it's the closest thing to wisdom that I can muster at 22 and still not yet a year out of college, a place where I sometimes believed that the only way to make a dent in the big bad world was to start from scratch, away from it.  Sometimes I still wonder if that could be true, other times I wonder if it's even possible.  I'll never be sure.

I am sure that on the Tuesday morning after spring break I will have a lesson planning meeting at 7:15 AM.  I know that the first thing I will do is fill out the GLEs that I'm required to cover.  I also know, or at least I'm starting to learn, that my lesson plan doesn't have to end there.  I can deliver the testable content and also include garden work, higher-order thinking, communication skills, and even some pure fun.  I can play the testing game without giving up the imagination game, the personal growth game or the building relationships game.


If you've ever spent time around children you know that the ones who have the most fun playing games aren't the ones who always win.  It's the ones who, win or lose, make the choice to have fun.  It's the ones who don't despair when playtime is over, but rejoice in having had it and in knowing that it will come again.  It's the ones who, sitting silently in a room after a three hour test, don't see any balls lying around, so they imagine one into existence instead.

That is how you play a game.

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*We gardeners have it a hundred times easier than most of our colleagues, who spend the better parts of their evenings and weekends lesson planning.


**2nd grade also has about 50 GLEs each for ELA and social studies, and about 30 for math.


***Or perhaps not.  If we're never fully detached from the evils we see, then probably we're never fully embedded in them either.