Engagement Over

Or not...

Last week was Dr. Seuss' birthday. What an imaginative dude he was! But WHY did he make his books so long?!  Gee--you have a group of little ones and you are trying desperately to keep hold of their attention and you are doing it with a novel of complete wackiness! So my strategy going into my read alouds using Dr. Seuss' books was to read them with as much drama and enthusiasm as I could muster. And let me tell you it was quite a show. I had to start taking my hernia medication again just to get through the week. Seriously. Well one day I was kicked out of my own media center because testing was going on, so I took a group of first graders upstairs to a classroom to do a lesson centered around Seuss. Since we had our own room with the doors shut, I put on my best performance to date. I got to the part where this kid was singing in the shower with a Ying and I belted out the words like it was a song.. a crazy, nails-on-the-chalkboard type song. Suddenly, an AP opened the door and asked if I could be a quieter since mid-term testing was going on in another hall (I had to laugh because it was a funny moment to be caught singing like a Ying...perhaps I should call it Yinging). So I obliged and I finished with a much quieter performance.

Later, I began to ponder the situation and I started thinking about it in a more symbolic way. Education has turned into TESTING, TESTING, TESTING. The act of learning has strangely taken a backseat to testing. In my situation, I had a group of kids who were totally engaged in the read aloud. And all week the students have been checking out Dr. Seuss books after my read alouds, hoping to experience again all of that silliness that I had brought to the books. So we have an engaging lesson with students eager to learn more and it had to be squelched because it was interrupting the test taking. So many times I have seen meaningful learning opportunities be nixed because students have to be prepared for some upcoming test. As a media specialist I have been turned down time and time again when I have offered project based lessons, that fully support the curriculum, because there simply isn't time to do lessons such as these when tests are looming. It seems we must make our students be the best test takers possible so they will be prepared for the future...a future filled with test taking, I assume?

So I sing with my Ying
not over-thinking this education thing
Why stop to learn?
just test non-stop
Don't understand? Go ask your pop!