Nuts

It’s nuts when a teacher depends on the scores of a kid on a standardized test for their sense of professional self worth. Many kids are not motivated because they are simply too young to appreciate what is being offered to them. Tests should not be looked at as accurate barometers of progress in language for that simple reason (and many others). Tests taken by unmotivated kids cannot possibly be accurate. Yet teachers go about worrying how their students perform on those tests. That really is crazy! Better to evaluate our performance on the amount of light coming out of our kids’ eyes during class. Somebody should invent some kind of Eye-Ometer or something. Or a Smile-Ometer. Sounds crazy, but it’s not. It sounds crazy because the people in charge of testing and teaching of foreign languages don’t understand how happiness affects learning.