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cover up
January 14, 2009
To prevent cheating, teachers use paper towels as wallpaper
This week, kids in grades 3, 4, and 5 are taking state English language arts exams. On Monday, Ruben, a teacher in the Bronx, said the preparations were getting him down. He wrote:
I spent the afternoon readying my classroom for tomorrow’s ELA exam. That meant covering or taking down a dozen or so charts for strategies like making predictions, using non-fiction text features and understanding cause and effect. I couldn’t stop there however. I needed to eliminate any thing that could be used for help on the ELA exam. So, next came down the class rules, the writing process, my science, social studies and math word walls, directions for early finishers, and how to make an “I statement”.
The paper I was supplied to cover up my classroom had run out, and I still had to cover my alphabet. I found a roll of paper towels and began rolling it across the letters, pinning as I went. It was at this point that the absurdity of the whole exercise - more or less deconstructing four months evidence of learning - sunk in, and revealed itself as a ridiculous metaphor for the next three days of testing my students will undergo. All of my class’s learning across all content areas has been slowly subsumed by these standardized exams. Now even the physical representation of that learning has been overtaken by the tests as well.
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January 14th, 2009 2:01 pm
Why do we still believe that we are cheating if we don’t cut students off from access to the supports they have available to them every day in the real world? Students are taught to use various supports when thinking, learning, and creating yet when we are testing them on their ability to do so we do not allow them access to the very supports we taught them to use. When we will stop assessing 21st century students on their grasp of pre-19th century skill sets?
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January 14th, 2009 4:10 pm
We use black garbage bags which makes to rooms feel so depressing for the week.
@InnovativeEdu The most ridiculous thing is when we cover up the clocks for the math test. When in real life would students not have access to a clock? It is absurd that we must cover them!
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January 14th, 2009 10:44 pm
Of course we joined everyone else in covering our classroom… An insane task that I’d never even HEARD of before coming to NYC. I took joy in ripping all the paper down in uncovering my class this afternoon.
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