A Day In The Journey

I really would like to write something informative and thoughtful and to the point, but lately I'm finding that my reactions to things are just snarky and aggravated. Maybe it's the cold. Maybe it's the feeling that I've come to a place where I can voice some opinions with some and other opinions with others, but never al of my opinions to anyone without causing anger of aggravation or disappointment. And then I go to war with myself: the rebellious part of me really wants to post inflammatory things just to get a reaction that I can them mock with "See? I told you" sarcasm. The other part of me more realistically eschews beginning a debate that I will tire of and wish to just quit prematurely. And none of me really wants to deal with anyone else's preconceived notions at this moment. Don't get me wrong, I have preconceived notions, too. It's just that some days I don't mind taking them into account, and other days I just want to punch the wall. Ok. Maybe not punch the wall, but you do get the point. I'm fighting a certain level of misanthropy at the moment for completely unknown reasons. Although I suppose it all comes back to the fact that I feel as though I must divide myself in order to retain approval. Or at least, equilibrium, as I've already mentioned that I wouldn't mind really aggravating some people at the moment. I've never exactly understood my penchant for rebelling when considered in light of my nigh desperate desire for approval. Sigh. At any rate, I'll probably go on to include at least a minor rant in order to justify this wanton revelation of personal emotional status. I'm not sure which one I should include, though. I'll probably avoid it, though, since all the things I can manage to find words about are political. And I tend to try to avoid that particular teapot tempest around here.

Instead, I'll say this: I hate giving tests.

Seriously.

I haven't figured out, yet how to teach Language without them, but I hate them. I'm working on how to either get rid of them entirely or change the format of the ones I'm using to be more advantageous to my goals for my students. Perhaps I should specify more particularly the context in which I hate tests. I hate the Language tests that accompany this curriculum. I also don't like giving Language tests to elementary level students. At the high school level, I gave numerous tests to my Literature students, don't get me wrong; but I feel that tests, especially unit tests are of little use in an elementary Language classroom. And here's why, parts I and II.

I: Why I don't like the tests in this curriculum.
I dislike the tests in this curriculum for three reasons:
A) They are too spaced out, which means they end up weighing too heavily in the grading structure even with the weigh modifications I make. This also means that they cover a great deal of material. More on that in my third reason.
B) Many sections have multi-step instructions. While this may seem like a minor problem, for 5th grade students it isn't so minor. Especially when said students are tremendously concerned with making a good grade/not forgetting the information they need. So what happens it this: They read the first instruction, and eager to insure they manage it right, they move directly through the exercise completing step one. At this point, many of them might remember that there are more instructions. These students go back and read instruction 2. Again they immediately go through and just complete step two. The ones who felt a sense of completion after finishing step one have already gone on to the next section without realizing they missed an instruction. The students who did remember will usually complete step two, but rarely remember that there was a step three. To make it worse, these instructions are not divided up, they are in a single paragraph with numbers like this 1) placed before each step. I rarely used multistep instructions with high school students. Doing so with elementary students, who are just beginning to grasp critical thinking and application of processes, is really making things unnecessarily difficult.
C) While the units in the book are generally confined to small groups of skills (modifiers or punctuation use or prepositional phrases), the tests tend to be vaguely cumulative. If every lesson contained review skills, this would not be a problem. Instead, review skills are relegated to a couple of review pages at the end of the unit. During the unit they've been almost exclusively focused on a single skill or closely related group of skills. Now, I do review in class, but the written work does not typically contain review. 5th grade students are barely at a level where they are able to easily recall past information and apply it to a new set of circumstances (different sets of exercises). This is compounded by the relatively long length of time between the tests.

II: Why I hate tests in elementary curriculum in general:
Frankly, as noted above, elementary students aren't at a cognitive level to perform well on tests. They are also starting to develop a certain level of test stress that can impede strong performance. Like I've mentioned previously, I have tested and would test (were I still teaching at that level) high school students. The reason for the difference has much to do with the developmental difference between elementary and high school students. High school students have a deeper ability in test-taking situations to take acquired knowledge and apply it. Elementary school is where they need to develop this knowledge, and in my experience, this is better done through written work and quizzing rather than outright tests. I also find that parents tend to place far more weight than necessary on test grades, leading to teachers' tendency to review/put on the study guide problems that are identical to the test problems. I would far rather offer them multiple ways to learn/express the skill and give small, focused quizzes on that material. This would alleviate the stress of tests from students and parents while still allowing me to evaluate knowledge/skill acquisition. Tests just seem to create an atmosphere of higher stress and unreasonable expectations with little more benefit than other evaluative approaches at the elementary level. At any rate, that's where I've come to stand on the issue of tests in elementary curriculum. I think there are just better ways on a regular basis to achieve student evaluation.

Conclusion?
Having used several 5th grade grammar curricula, I feel this one's method of using tests is deeply flawed. A curriculum that I have used before and truly enjoyed pedagogically, reviewed all necessary skills almost every day and tested weekly or bi-weekly. Further, the tests were, in essence, just another worksheet page that happened to count as a test. This, in my experience, rendered a much better result: tests were less stressful and were a better representation of what the students actually grasped on a day-to-day basis. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending some time reconfiguring these tests and how they work in the curriculum. Right now, I feel like I'm handing a lot of my students a huge mountain to overcome two or three times a quarter. That's not really advantageous for them in showing what they know or for me in evaluating it. Tests have a place, but maybe not in the form with which we are familiar. The way they currently exist, I hate them. Time to re-evaluate, I suppose.