Assessments have become the newest buzz word for educators. Do you know your summative assessments from your formative assessment? How are you tracking assessment data? What kinds of student data are you collecting? What trends do you see in the data? The list goes on.
I can't assess the things that matter in my English classses. Did the boy who plans to enlist in the Marines after graduation realize that "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" could easily be a conversation he has with a loved one some day? Did the girl who read "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" figure out that real love isn't always a "bed of roses/and a thousand fragrant posies." There is not test that measures how poetry stirs the soul, especially if the soul doesn't recognize it is being stirred.
Reading comphrension seems to be at an all time low for many of my students. When I ask them what they think about what they have read, many stare blankly back at me. I can't teach high school students to be readers. If they hate reading at seventeen years old, there's little I can do to win them back. And there's even less a standardized test is going to do to make them want to read.
I can help them find something, anything in reading that resonates with them. It might not be an essay by Sir Francis Bacon or a sonnet by Shakespeare, but I want them to be affected by what they read. I want to force them to slow down and pay attention to the words, as difficult as those words might be. I want them to figure out what they agree with and disagree with - and more importantly why they feel the way they do. I can't test my students on their self-reliance and their independent thought, but to me, it's the area that needs more attention than writing conventions.
No test is going to show me how much my students grow. A lot of the time I'm not even going to see the growth. Yet, in some small way I'll know it's there.
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