What twelve year-olds can teach you when you give them a bunch of tests
Quite a lot, is the short answer. It was on my mind so much by the end of this year’s “testing season” that I scribbled it down on the corner of some notebook paper, and then took a picture when it was time to clean up my classroom on the last day of school. And here I am, neurotic enough to write about it three weeks into summer, just to put a punctuation mark on the end of the school year.
And I should clarify: twelve is an average age. The students at my middle school range from 11-14 years old, none of them too old or too young to dodge testing call slips. The tests, too, warrant a quick definition. They were both the standardized tests- one for English language proficiency, and the other for Common Core- that millions of kids in California take each year. (Shout out to my teaching homies: ELPAC and CAASPP!) In my role of “testing coordination and support”, I brought hundreds of students into my classroom to show what they know, over and over. And over. And over again.
When you go through the same routine with a few hundred students, either one-on-one or in small groups, certain patterns start to emerge. I was a teacher proctoring a test, but I felt like a student of the adolescent condition. Our students had a lot to teach me. Here is what I learned:
1.We do weird things when we’re nervous.
My favorite, of all the tests I gave, was the Arm Fart test. There I was, all alone in my classroom with a tubby little sixth grader, who blew fart sounds into the crook of his elbow after every question I asked him. Loud, juicy arm farts. My first instinct was to quiet the gigglers in the class, but there was no one else in the room. He wasn’t showing off to anybody; my friend was legitimately making arm farts for himself, because sitting tete-a-tete with a teacher was excruciating. Most middle school teachers I work with have about 150 students on their rosters. Spending time one-on-one with any student is incredibly humanizing for both parties. Logistically, it is also nearly impossible. My quirky little arm-farter was a sound reminder of how uncommon it is for students to sit alone with a teacher. We need a crowd to hide ourselves into.
Given similar stakes, a self-respecting adult might have excused himself for some fresh air or a drag on a cigarette. Most of us have enough coping skills to act nervous in ways that follow social norms. An eleven year-old’s options are more limited, so what do you do? Apparently, you bury your face into the soft side of your arm and blow as hard as you can. Then you pick your head up as if it never happened at all, and answer the next question.
2. Behavior follows a playbook.
I’m talking about boys. Those boys. It goes like this:
Kick open the classroom door, arms high and wide- like your rock concert fans are awaiting, or maybe you’re trying to scare off a bear.
Sweep the room with your eyes. Notice there is no audience for your rock concert, just a teacher sitting in a chair, waiting for you to join her. Maybe the bear instinct was right.
Saunter. Let the teacher know that, like a cat, you will sit down when you are good and ready. Touch some stuff: tinker with the singing bowl, play with whatever is wafting out of the essential oil diffuser.
Go ahead, ask her. “Is anyone else coming in here?” Tick your chin up when you say it, like you’re in the Fast and the Furious and the teacher’s gang of street thugs will start their ambush any second.
The teacher’s still not mad. It could be a trick. Take your seat. Proceed with caution.
Do the test. Answer the weird questions about pictures, charts, and state your claims about imaginary scenarios.
It’s over. She was nice to you, and you were nice to her, but nobody needs to know that. “Is that all?” you ask.
When she signs your pass to send you back to class, make sure you go out on top. Exit the room with swagger. Stop by the water fountain and the restroom on the farthest side of campus before you go back to third period. And when you get there, kick that door open like you just fought off a gang of street thugs. Throw your hands in the air; your audience awaits.
3. Language support classes are not a punishment.
I will always have a bias in favor of the arts. I want more people exposed to more visual and performing arts, in the highest quality and quantity that our tax dollars can buy. However, if a California student speaks a second language and cannot demonstrate that their English proficiency is up to par, schools are required to enroll them in a language support class. Arts, if they are available, are secondary. This path begins when a student enrolls in our schools, and a parent checks a box stating “speaks a language other than English in the home”. From that point on, they are provided support in English Language Development until they can prove proficiency on our state’s standardized language test. By the time they are in middle school, enrollment in such a class often comes at the expense of a more “fun” elective. When I see kids who are enrolled in these support classes year after year, those classes seem like an arbitrary punishment. It wasn’t until I sat one-on-one with over a hundred of our students that I realized they actually do need extra help.
The students I work with have plenty to say to their friends, and have very few qualms with gabbing their way through instructional minutes. They are just as likely to dole out polite “pleases” and “thank yous”, or mouth off to an adult, as their monolingual peers. These are the students whose teachers look up from their rosters and say, “Her? I’ve had her all year; I thought her English was fine.” Until a student is asked to discuss very specific situations in a language test, it can be difficult to see that they don’t have the vocabulary to do so.
Most of the 11-14 year-olds at my school have been navigating the system for years, and in their daily conversations, they rarely miss a beat. It’s “school words”, however, that have them stumped. I recognize their technique because it’s something I do when I don’t know a word in Spanish: say about six basic words to describe the one more precise word I just don’t know yet. And maybe point or act it out. I also recognize the apologetic grin and the way they shake their head after their roundabout way of describing something, because it’s the same move I make when I can only get part of my point across in Spanish, my beloved but obviously-second language.
To paraphrase Sir Ken Robinson, an education that goes beyond teaching young people only from the neck up is more crucial than ever. (And it’s just more fun. More of that, please.) Arts classes are not mutually exclusive of language support, but master schedules will often allow for only one or the other. What I learned from this year’s round of language assessments is that our students really do have gaps- the challenge is that their gaps are incredibly varied in depth and content area. How do we quickly identify where those gaps are and get students to flourish right out of them? While I’m at it, the greater challenge is figuring out how to add to our students’ palate of language and at the same time celebrate the fact that, Hello? They speak (at least) two languages! That’s amazing!
Challenges aside, I did not realize until spending twelve minutes at a time (the task was repetitive- we got really good at our timing) with lots and lots of bilingual middle schoolers that my teacher assumptions were wrong. By casual observation, I couldn’t catch what a standardized test set out to measure- there really were places they were “stuck” with their English. Support classes are not a punishment, they are actually intended to fulfill a need. We need to do right by those students, so they can get out there and write some killer proposals for their next art project.
4. Kids need a climbing rope.
Knowing what to do when you get stuck is just as important as knowing what’s being assessed. There were students this year who spent entire days in my classroom, because the time allocated for them in their usual class just wasn’t enough. Most of us will empathize with a student who needs an extra hour or so to work through an essay question. But by the third hour, and the seventh hour, we start rolling our eyes. Are they trying to get out of class? Sometimes. Do they know there are other butts that should be filling their seats? Nope. Have they memorized every curtain, every poster frame in my classroom while they stare off into space and wonder what to do next? Probably. Are there a few who wreak havoc with their neighbors while they alternate between pencil-tapping and cat naps? Ugh. Totally, yes.
What I noticed about a few dozen of the teenagers who made their home in my classroom during testing makeups was that, contrary to the far-away look in their eyes, they really were trying hard. (Coincidentally, on our school’s California Healthy Kids Survey, most of them report that they try to always to their best in school. In turn, most of us teachers reel in our seats and ask, Are you kidding me? You guys spent the whole class period trying to unblock video games!) They just happened to come to a question they couldn’t answer, and felt paralyzed.
Education researcher James Nottingham has built a tome of resources explaining how to prepare students for what he calls “The Learning Pit”. They need to know what it feels like to not know the answer. But more importantly, they need to know what to do to get themselves out. Similarly, in John Hattie’s Visible Learning Protocol, teachers ask students, “What do you do when you get stuck?” (Handy video example here.) As adults, I’d like to think we grow more comfortable with not knowing everything, and the most well-adjusted of us grow equally comfortable with knowing how to move forward from those “pits”. Teaching kids how to get un-stuck is like throwing them a rope they can use for the rest of their life. And it might make test-taking a little less brutal, too.
Standardized tests are like the know-it-all, longwinded aunt who married into the family, who you only see at Thanksgiving: she, too, is a part of your family. Everyone has to hunker down over the mashed potatoes and bear her because this is just something we’ve all committed to, once a year. Part of my job is to escort dear old auntie to the table and then make sure everyone does their time until they’ve eaten every last bite of potatoes. Most of the testing is completed in classrooms under the skillful administration of my talented teaching colleagues. But kids who are absent, or need more time, or are downright distracted come to me.
If you find standardized tests a bore, don’t worry- we all do. But if you look closely, there’s a lot to learn from the humans who muscle through them every year.
