Wk2 Response 1: Tricia’s Tech & Art

POST 2

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 POST 2

“In our society, so many things are also taken out of context. They get so far gone that the construct becomes the assumed reality. I feel that has happened with the process of standardized testing (which we are in the midst of right now), and how learning, and in turn funding for the school, is catered to performance on this test. Isn’t the convention of taking a final assessment being a good measure of learning completely blown out of proportion here? Do we really have the best intentions for our children in mind? And it is being transferred because now, with a month of school left, kids think they are “done” and can totally slack (and let go with their manners) because testing is over. How much better would it be if we were teaching them that learning has no culminating end, that there are profound concepts to be learned that can’t be answered in multiple choice format, and that everything in life cannot be re-done and re-done until you pass?

“As stressed in the reading, the important thing is to reflect on HOW thoughts and actions ARE a reflection off the conventions of a measurement world. If I could somehow transfer just that simple concept to my students, I think they would grow a lot in all facets of their life.”

Tricia,

Could you do it?  Could you get away, in an art class, with giving them a guaranteed A?   Do you have “standards” in art that need to be “assessed” to measure your effectiveness?  Aha—measurement thinking at its most literal.

Seniors don’t test, so my whole year is steeped in the “done” attitude, and I love how you’ve identified the subsumed message that testing is implanting in the kids about the infinite re-do of life.   I get lots of wrinkles this time of year with my face squinching in deep sympathy for the kids who have had much better things to do with their time than participate in the growth activities I’ve made available to them, and suddenly, less than two weeks before graduation, they want to rush out and do them now so they can get “the points.”  But some decisions in life can’t be re-done.  Not to mention the time-wasting futility of just racking up points.

There's the quintessence of measurement thinking:  translating a possibility-oriented concept like learning into point accumulation. 

The most common reaction to offering my students new possibilities is confusion.  Confusion is a survival-thinking mode.  Students’ thinking paths shut down in the face of “pressure from invented realities or fear of what could happen,” as you said; they fear the scarcity of points—or perhaps the embarrassment, or feelings of inadequacy—they perceive to be inevitable if they don’t write down the Correct Answer. They don’t see themselves as learners gifted with a new opportunity to grow, so they can welcome the possibility of overcoming, of contributing meaning into their lives or someone else’s.  And why should they?  Their “system” tells them they’re already “done.”

I think it’s important to live where we live:  measurement thinking is not going away any time soon from teachers’ lives.  Indeed, our culture has been steeped in it since the Puritans got off the Mayflower and began their mission of dividing the sheep from the goats, and teaching students how to be successful in a measurement-oriented world, whatever that means to them, is, I think, an important part of our job.  But possibility doesn’t live out there, in our houses and cars and bank accounts.  Possibility lives in here, in our hearts and souls and minds.  So while we teach our students the strategies for functioning in the measurement-oriented world, perhaps we can facilitate that by showing them how to adjust the focus on their self-perceptions so they see themselves as learners in a universe of possibility.

So maybe there’s a way to give them A’s in their minds and hearts even if they don’t get A’s on their report cards?  I’m afraid that’s going to be a function of personal interaction (piece of cake—if it didn’t take so long to grade all those required essays).  Or maybe just showing the way, as you put it, “to reflect on HOW thoughts and actions ARE a reflection off the conventions of a measurement world.”