Thursday, April 8, 2010

Child Abuse and TAKS

First of all, I went to the Domain here in Austin and played with the new Ipad. Sexy and, if you already have an Iphone, useless. Everything the Iphone does, and some things less, the Ipad does in spades. Jan wants one bad, and I was sorely temped.

Taks is coming and I want everyone to know that it's abuse of children and teachers, plain and simple. Let me explain, for those of you who have never had the pleasure of administering TAKS to every student in the 6th grade in Texas.

The morning starts with students all moving to the room they will be sitting in for the next 2 days. Some of the kids will have other tests after the TAKS. Woe be to anyone wanting data from those benchmarks. The kids will be totally fried by then. At the door, students will be asked to leave their cell phones and to dump their back packs and/or purses in a tub or back in their locker. They will be seated next to someone they don't want to talk to, because you don't want the kids to be talking to each other during the test. They will get handed their sheets and the "speech" will be given about how to take the test. They will start, and then the poor teacher will be forced to stare at the students all day. No reading, no doing a crossword, no anything. You can't really talk to the students, you can only (loudly, so that noone thinks that you are helping someone) tell students that they should work to the best of their ability, and that you can't tell them anything else. When students finish, they can only read or sleep. No talking, no note writing, even the bathroom is monitored for talking. At lunch, we all eat together in the room. As long as any students haven't finished, the entire school is on lockdown, or rather, test schedule. By the end of the day, the students hate you, because you've been such a grump and have kept them from talking, relaxing or having any kind of fun at all. Then you do it all the next day, again. By the end of two days, the students all wonder if you've lost your mind (which you have) and they can barely keep contained because they've been trapped on their butts for two days with little or no break. It's child abuse. And after the two days, I feel beaten down. And it's all happening at the end of April at a school near you. Feel for the kids. Give a teacher a beer.