Literacy Speaks Volumes

I will be back to school in a month, and whether I like it or not, we will still be assessing our students on a regular basis. Our system has recently adopted a system-wide pre-assessment to determine which students will need intervention. Those students who do poorly on the initial screening will go on to take another battery of tests. I've always done some sort of pre-assessment: grammar pre-assessment, writing pre-assessment, skills pre-assessment. I also look at standardized test scores from previous years. This past year, I kept a copious data notebook (5 and a half inch binder that was full by the end of the year!) and tested before every unit. The question for me is: Are we pre-assessing so much that we're putting the cart before the horse? When do you have enough information. Anecdotally, I can tell you which students just don't get it. I know by looking at handwriting, attitude, behaviors. Veteran teachers are like moms: we know when something is wrong. Do ...

When we return from the holidays, I'll be teaching "A Day's Wait"--a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The story is not particularly one of my favorites, and I'm skipping one of my favorites, "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" by Ray Bradbury. Unfortunately, the story by Bradbury doesn't focus on the tested skills that the story by Hemingway   does. I know I could make it work with the Bradbury story, but I'd have to create my own resources, and I'm busy enough like it is. So, like many things in education, I'm going to settle. I'm going to skip the story that would be more interesting and go on to the one that I can justify on my lesson plan. This is not going to be a post about lamenting the fact that our education system has become all about the test scores and less about good teaching. If you're reading this post, then you know the predicament that education is in~I don't need to beat that horse. This post is abo...