Life and Music

In this educational environment of test hysteria, schools look at the end – a passing test score, an acceptable, recognized, or exemplary rating, and they forget the journey. Time is taken away from quality literature and writing to prepare students for tests. Real student growth and progress is forsaken for test scores. Last year, I taught a class where most of the students were taking TAKS. They were ill-prepared for my curriculum because of some unfortunate situations the year before. I had to start at the very beginning with writing. They had to struggle through the literature, but because the writing and the literature were quality and something they could respond and relate to, they grew and learned. We wasted six weeks reading stupid TAKS literature and responding to TAKS questions and writing TAKS essays on topics that were not interesting and that no one cared about. Other than that the year was great. Unfortunately,
The TAKS scores were not good. Few passed. On the positive side, most were within one
hundred points of passing, and I think that they will pass next year. I looked like a failure and my students looked like failures. The destination was not reached. But the journey was fantastic. At the beginning of the year, they tried to refuse to do the assigned writing.
At the end of the year, they were telling me the kind of writing and projects that they wanted to do on the literature that we read. We became a family. We all changed each other.