It was a bright cold day in April, and the students were inside testing. Last Tuesday kicked off STAAR Season 2018 with the administration of the English 1 and 2 exams. In a month or so, we will test in Biology, Algebra, and U. S. History. Students are required to pass all of these to receive their high school diplomas.
While my students were literally thinking inside the box (“the box” being the 7- by 10-inch rectangle that must contain their essay), I was in the library. I am on the Testing Team, which is like the Avengers, but instead of saving the world, we are complicit in its destruction.
My specialty is seating charts. When teachers return from their five-hour sentence lugging a big box of forms and manuals and sundry other paper artifacts of the bureaucracy, they must give me their seating chart to scrutinize before they can pass onto the next stage of testing check-in. We have a form that we must use, with 30 neat little boxes, all in rows. What happens if the configuration of the room does not allow for a 5×6 grid-style layout? Well, you still have to put the students in the boxes, regardless of whether or not it bears any resemblance to the reality of the classroom.
“You have to write out the ENTIRE nine-digit booklet number on each of the 30 boxes,” I told the German teacher. “I know that it’s the SAME for the first seven digits, but you still have to do it.”
“I need the time that each of these students individually turned in their testing materials labelled on their boxes,” I said to a math teacher. “I KNOW that there’s not a spot for it, and I agree that there should be, but I don’t make the form. I don’t know WHY we have to do it, but we’ll get in trouble if we don’t. Just guess if you can’t remember.”
I tracked down a teacher who submitted a seating chart with a missing form number to ask her to account for the irregularity. She said that that student was the last to finish, and she was just so happy to be done with the test that she forgot to write it down. “Well, now I’M going to have to search through HUNDREDS of test books to find it,” I sniped.
This is not who I am – at least not on the 175-non-testing days in the instructional calendar. I swoon over novels. When I was in first grade, I got in trouble for not coloring inside the lines (literally). I have a bumper sticker that says “Teach Peace.”
But I am guilty of having been obedient. If I were a better, braver person, I would refuse to be a part of a system that I know is not only broken but bankrupt. I would set those boxes of tests on fire.
…
“How did the test go?” I asked my students the day after the exam.
“It went well,” said Ben. “Except I couldn’t think of any concrete examples for my essay.”
“What?!”
“Haha, just kidding.”
“Thank goodness.”
“I wrote a poem in German. And I composed it entirely in the margins, outside of the box.”
“…Okay,” I said, and I meant it.
Using My Teacher Voice 