Who has oppressed us, who are asleep at the testing barrier? Oh, nobody in particular, except the textbook companies and a legion of freak memorizers-turned-language-teachers who don’t want us to wake up and who now are about to get the wake up call of a lifetime if only we can wake up at the assessment barrier, hoist our tired feet and legs over it, and do what we are called upon to do right now when we assess our kids, since we teach differently, which is to assess our kids in human way and destroy all vestiges of the old “tell and test” model.
So if you are sitting there and think that you might be one who is asleep at the barrier and you are reading this, then I urge you to take seriously the words here over the past week, the 25 or so articles which have taken over the spotlight here now for three weeks ad counting.
Hmmm. Asleep at the barrier? Might I be asleep? Might I need to set some time aside to read all those articles? Might I really need to change the way I test in my CI classroom before my CI classroom can even work? Maybe I do! I do know that I am not happy with the way I test right now. The classes are so neat, but the testing brings us all down. Because it is bogus.
Hmmm. Could it be true that kids being presented with a new way of teaching but who are being assessed in the old way of assessment might themselves then end up unintentionally sabotaging the new way of teaching? Like, they are so used to being dinged as “not good enough to learn a language” that they never learn that they too can speak a foreign language!
Maybe I need to wake up, look down, see my own sleeping feet, realize I have been sleeping with my head on the assessment barrier, and get on over into some activism on this point. Somebody find me a principal to talk to. Oh I’ve got a meeting with one Thursday. Cool. Time to fire up the engines and re-read some of those articles!