What a dispiriting sight it was to see my little students in the language lab taking their unit pre-test: little automatons sitting in glassed cubicles looking daunted and confused. I was genuinely shocked. Even my language labs before the dawn of time were more humane.
So first the teacher flicks switches on a control board that looks like a 1960s sci-fi movie. She puts on headphones and instructs the kids to do so. One gets them caught in her long, black hair.
Strutting about the room, a tiny, birdlike Napoleon, she barks Spanglish orders, and very quickly.
Maybe the kids are used to it because it’s their culture. Or maybe they hate it as much as it appeared. At any rate, my heart was breaking for them. I’d fire off smiles whenever I could, from where I sat next to the Directrix at the controls.
I’ll describe the process. In harsh tones, La Maestra walked around the room and gave orders, so quickly that most of the children kept looking around, confused. “They know what to do,” she told me. But they didn’t. Even before the test officially began, kids fell behind. “Get your headphones on, Luz!” “You didn’t write your name, Sharon.” She spoke very quickly, mostly in Spanish but with some English.
She sat behind the console, pushing buttons and flicking switches as she played a tape and auditioned the kids’ speech. As she listened she’d put a tick or an X by someone’s name, based on some mysterious, subjective criterion. What was really strange was how random her listening was. She’d listen to some kids more than others — from 7 to 9 times — yet each was graded as though they’d had ten answers. That is, if she’d listened to someone only seven times, and even if they got everything right, they’d still get seven out of ten. I don’t know how she chose who to listen to, when, or what they were ranked on, so the system was inherently arbitrary and unfair, and way too fast.
Then came the written part. For the first one or two questions she modeled examples. Very quickly. A steady gallop through the material, without a pause for thought.
The kids stepped through a variety of written exercises reviewing what we’d covered in the unit. But her directions were so fast and sketchy that the slower kids were clueless and the others were barely able to figure out from context what to do. Poor little Luz had no clue what was happening. When Magda was on section three, for example, Luz was still trying to fill in section one. Magda overlooked her during her rounds, and when she did happen to notice (which was rare) she chided her to catch up.
Magda commented on how badly the children were doing and how unusual that was. I took it as a criticism of my teaching. But I can’t accept that, though I won’t argue with her, because to do so challenges the foundation of her philosophy: you race the kids through a unit they don’t have time to understand, and then you give them a test that’s got the pace of a firing range, and they do badly. That’s the teacher’s fault? I’m sure there are ways a good and experienced teacher could maximize learning under the circumstances. Yet the children arrived to me allegedly at Level VI, and still they don’t know fundamental material. This is an exercise in futility and I wonder why these kids even come to this school.
Anyway, there were between 6 and 8 distinct sections of the test, each with its own set of instructions. Not only was there overload in content, but the number of tasks, each with its own discrete directions, was daunting. *I* didn’t understand the instructions or what was happening, so I didn’t see how the kids could.
Though M commented on how badly the kids were doing in this unit, when I graded the papers (a mess) I noticed that in one particular secction, every child — even the more advanced — had gotten every answer wrong. It wasn’t because they didn’t know the material. It was because they didn’t understand what was being asked of them.
Other kids got wrong answers on things they know. I don’t know if it was the time pressure, the lack of clarity of directions, or brain-fart that caused that. It’s certainly possible that they didn’t comprehend, but how do we know?
I also noticed an artifact of the approach of this book. They don’t have kids talk in complete sentences, but rather give one-word cloze exercises and the like. They don’t focus on holistic language, but bits. And strange bits they are, too. Do they really need to know about gauze bandages when they can’t form a simple present sentence, and know almost no verbs?
I will emphasize complete sentences from now on. But it was interesting to see that not one of them had the slightest concept of English syntax — and they’re on their sixth workbook!
Another observation is that Magdalena favors certain kids over others. When she walked around the room she’d monitor the two or three who do better, and almost overlook the others. The first day of class she told me that Luz was clueless. Not a good introduction. Of course, I immediately bonded with Luz.
The only thing this test showed is what I already knew from working with the kids: their relative abilities, with Ricardo and Raquel being strongest, Lupita in the middle, and Sharon and Luz struggling the most.
It’s interesting to see the assumptions about the kids’ abilities reinforced by the teacher. It’s like when I was always in the C section in school. Low expectations breed low outcomes, not to mention low self-esteem. Really, my heart was breaking to watch this. And when M was listening to the kids — cursorily, to boot; not with any real attention — it seemed to me that she checked in on Ricardo and Raquel the most. Her markings don’t show that: some kids like Lupita got nine “listens” and others seven. But what the marks can’t reveal is her subjective determination of what she was heeding when she was listening. Sharon and Lupita got more things marked wrong than the other three. What was she evaluating?
If your teacher doesn’t believe you can learn, how can you learn? If she judges you strictly according to some canned measurement instrument, how can she know what the potential is of each individual student? From my time in the classroom, it seems that Sharon and Luz have given up on even trying to learn, and they try to talk through class. Yet they light up when given an activity that interests them and that they can comprehend.
It was a really sad thing for me to watch, and I don’t want to be part of it. I have to, to finish my internship. But I don’t believe in this kind of test in the first place because it measures only certain things and doesn’t honor different learning styles, and I don’t believe in the strict time limit since some people are faster than others, and I don’t believe in the harsh approach that reinforces the negative assumptions that the “slower” kids are making about themselves. I’m very upset by this.
Tonight I have to administer the real test, which will be based on similar material. Not only do I object to taking part in something like this, but I don’t know if I can do it. I simply don’t know if I’m capable of racing ahead, fully aware that some kids don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know if I can do it fast enough — both in principle and in practice.
There is exactly an hour to administer a test before the next group comes in. Why doesn’t she make the tests shorter or otherwise adjust the schedule? There must be better ways to test these poor kids.
And after the test, which took 1.25 hours, I had to go teach them for the rest of the 45 minutes of class time. They were wired and ungrounded. I guess I could’ve done a grounding exercise first. And even though we returned to begin a cool unit on dinosaurs, the kids — particularly those who’d given up — were like fleas.
Heartbreaking, all of it. And I’m powerless to do anything about it, save for giving attention to each kid and trying to let them know that I see them. But I’m leaving in three weeks, so it hardly matters.