Jan 9 Observations
Greetings,
As I returned from my Winter Break, it was time to begin my observations of Miss Silverleaf in Peacebloom High School, a suburban/rural school. I found Miss Silverleaf in an interesting position. She had been notified that she was to give a standardized test and a take-home essay test for her final exam. There are two things that I thought was interesting regarding this situation, the surprise and the format of the exam.
Although the former was not a surprise to her, the latter was. Until this point, she had not been notified or forewarned of this part of the exam. This, in conjunction with the discovery that she needed to be three chapters further than what she thought she needed to be, put her in a bind. To help alleviate this problem of time constraints (as she has three weeks to do this and review for the exam), she planned library time for the take-home portion. She then asked the class if they wanted the extra class time, and offered ten extra credit points if they didn’t, since this would help her, but make it more difficult for the students.
I am not sure that I am completely comfortable with this. Perhaps because I have never experienced this sort of offer, I have never though about offering extra credit to alleviate a problem of the teacher. Is this ethical or professional? I would suppose that this is more professional and ethical than just giving the students the assignment and not giving them time in class. Indeed, this also allows students to have control of what the classroom does and forces them to make a rational choice between two considerable options.
The other issue was with the structure of the final exam. The exam is seemingly a copy of any of the recent MEAP Social Studies tests. Although this idea may not seem to unappealing, the teachers were given no additional resources that help teach the students the skills required to work through the questions posed, let alone understand how to read and come to terms with the test. Since this is Miss Silverleaf’s first year teaching a general education history class, she has not the experience with this specific system, nor the resource base to accommodate the test and the training. Although I know little as to what is out there for material to help teach the skills needed, I did suggest that there had to be some sort of guide in the internet that would help, or old MEAP tests that she could work through together with the students.
Overall, I think this experience with a standardized test for the whole history department has been unpleasant. The amount of effort Miss Silverleaf will have to go through in order to prepare her students adequately for this test is, in my opinion, atrociously high. The amount of time that the students will have to spend (probably 3-5 days, in my estimation) in order to get the skills and have a familiarity with the test format could be much better spent either reviewing old material, or examining other topics in history. Although some blame must fall on Miss Silverleaf, I would also tend to cast some blame on the administration for not adequately supporting her and giving her the materials needed to help her students gain the skill set needed to perform well on the test.
