How I Know Education Is Headed Down The Wrong Path

Very simple really

My daughter has transformed our entire basement to a classroom/makerspace(which is AWESOME!!!!!). She always plays school. She grades papers, has seating charts, hallway signs, etc.

The other day we were observing her play and all she did was hand out tests, do test prep, and test again.

If this is how she imagines school where all they do is test, that is a problem.

Why are we over-saturating our kids with tests? I’m sorry, but my second grader should be playing school with activities, hands on learning, excitement, art, building, puppets, play, discussion, etc. Not handing out paper tests, marking the wrong, and giving more tests.

This is a problem around the nation. If we spent half the time used in a regular school that is consumed with taking tests and moved to learning instead, we would not have to worry about data so much because they would actually have time to learn and in the process scores would naturally go up because I realize that testing is not going away anytime soon.

Standardized testing is nothing more than trying to put a linear learning modality in a place where learning is anything but linear. We have ups and downs as we tackle new ideas and grapple with how to bring context to existing ideas.

As much as I love what Addy does with her own imagination, it breaks my heart to see her use it to test “her” students over and over because that is all she knows.