You know, Rose hit the nail on the head with a lot of his points. Let me give you a few examples from the last week of my life:
- We had standardized testing. The questions basically boiled down to exact definitions of words, spelling, identify the correct sentence, identify the incorrect sentence, and find the author's meaning. Our school has chosen not to complete the written portion because modern students actually do better on the objective. (And I'm in a generally high performing school.)
- On the other hand, I had my tech crew (composed of 5th through 7th graders) run full lighting for the middle school production of You're a Good Man Charlie Brown. We had 67 light cues, roughly 50 follow spot cues, and about 13 sound effects. But, all these nice objective numbers aside, the concern of the crew is on the artistic presentation of the show.
The standardized testing took my entire class about eight hours, spread over three days. Policy during these three days was to not have much homework or many strenuous classroom activities. We generated answer sheets that will be computer graded and returned as scores.
The play took my crew of eight a total of twenty eight hours of setup, rehearsal, performance and strike. We generated three enjoyable performances, one tray of cupcakes, a large scrape on the ceiling, and very little sleep.
An objective evaluation of my last week would likely look to the standardized testing as more educationally worthwhile. Personally, I feel my crew had the more worthwhile experience.
But to prove this I would have to quantify what they produced in a world that wants numbers and proof to justify the loss of sleep and lack of preparation for the next day.
So, Rose has it right. I just think he's aiming at too narrow a mark. If we need change, it must be cultural. We can't just change education.
