It seems that all this talk about assessment, testing, (even teaching really!), is to "prepare students for the real world". But, it seems that in English classes particularly, the goal is to produce good writers, good readers, and add a little creativity to all of that, with not much mention for the "real world". If the real world is AFTER college, then we need to expand our territory. We need to incorporate a wide variety of things that familiarize students with many careers. And the after-college-real-world would require students to give presentations, speeches, oral reports, advertisements, etc. However, if the real world IS college, (or if the goal of teaching high school is to prepare students for college), then the assessment and testing would look much different. For the great majority of my college courses, assessment and testing has looked much like what we sort of "shunned" the other day in class. Things like multiple choice tests, long, drawn out papers, 10-questions quizzes to prove if we read a book or not, and true/false where you have a 50% chance of getting the answer right. I guess I'm confused as to what we are supposed to do. Or what "real world" we are supposed to prepare our students for.
If it were up to me, I think a combination of everything would be best. Preparing students for careers, preparing them with college-type work, and helping them produce in themselves the best and most creative readers and writers they can be...
-Lacy
2 comments:
I agree. "The real world" is vague. If we only had to actually prep students for "the real world," i.e. getting a job, they wouldn't need to know much at all. They wouldn't really "need" to read novels or learn complicated math. Students complain about not using what they're learning now in the "real world" all the time. I don't know what the answer is, but it's part of a person's philosophy of education, I guess. To figure out what world we're getting our students ready for, I think we each have to figure out what the purpose of education is, for us as teachers...
To respond to Christine's comment, I wouldn't be in education if I didn't truly believe our job was to improve students' lives and help them prepare for what is ahead of them after school. Will I make a profound impact in all of my sudents' lives? probably not, but I feel like I have to try, and teaching is one way to get to students before they become responsible adults. I believe that by making them good readers and writers we ARE preparing them for the real world, whether they are going to college or not. There are not many jobs for illiterate people, and those jobs are the ones no one else wants to do, so maybe reading and writing is not essential for survival, it is for improving quality of life. Testing is part of life; no matter what field you are in, you are always being assessed, and maybe that's not what should be important to us but that's how our society is.
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