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February 20, 2008
Testing One, Two
I took a test last night. It was a grammar test. I don’t believe I’ve had a grammar test since high school. Did you know modifiers can dangle and commas can have splices? I’m sure I learned this all when I was 12, but it’s been a while since I was 12.
Last night, though, I had all the feelings of a 12-year-old facing the “big test.” It was crunch time. Did I study enough? Do I know all the parts of speech? Will I pass?
I wasn’t the only one who was dealing with these feelings. There are nine of us taking a university class on improving writing. My guess is the average age in the class is 45+. We’re people who are working or retired. We have lives. We aren’t students trying to decide which career to go into. We’re professional folks trying to improve our writing. So why were we so up tight over a grammar test?
One man joked about not passing this test might ruin his chances for graduate school. Another said she knew she hadn’t studied enough. All of us were concerned about how much time he’d give us to complete the questions. None of us needs the units. We’re all taking this for content not grades. So why the anxiety?
Because we’re all 12-years-old again facing the big exam. That last sentence was a fragment, by the way, and it needs revising. I know that because my class taught me to notice sentence fragments and because my computer told me the same thing. I’m going to leave it alone. That’s the nice thing about taking a writing class; you can know when it’s wrong and leave it anyway.
Back to class-we were all feeling those old anxiety feelings about test taking. I couldn’t help but wish I had known different feelings in grade school. What if I’d been able to take a test just to see what I knew? What if the test was diagnostic and would show what the teacher could stop going over because I had it, but it also showed what areas I needed more work on? What if tests hadn’t been competitive and based on a curve? What if it tests were more about what and how to teach than about how much I didn’t know compared to the smart kid in class?
Hm…I’ve been in education for a long time. Where I haven’t been for a long time is on the other end of the test taking. This is going to mean some rethinking for me about all the tests we give and why we give them. I don’t have answers today. I have questions. I was supposed to answer questions last night. It seems I raised more than I answered.
I rarely solicit comments in my blog because I usually end up with ads for Viagra or reducing my mortgage so I send most of them to spam mail, but I’m open for this one. How do you feel about testing? What do you think of the testing we do in school? What would you do to make it better? Any comments?
Posted by Dr Joni at February 20, 2008 08:32 AM