Carie Juettner

Brain on Lockdown: Why Standardized Testing Is As Hard On Teachers As It Is On Students

A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream that I was monitoring a standardized test in my old classroom. The test was TAKS (because my subconscious had forgotten that we’ve moved on to STAAR) and I was being chastised for doing something wrong (I don’t remember what, probably opening a book or staring out the window for eight seconds rather than “actively monitoring” the students). Whatever it was, it was a big problem, and dealing with the person who was berating me was starting to be a giant pain in the butt.

That’s when I remembered that I quit teaching a couple of years ago. I wondered why I was back in my classroom. Did I decide to go back to my old job? Was I just subbing? I racked my brain, trying to find a loophole that would get me out of this situation, but so far nothing was working. Then it came to me.

“I can’t administer this test,” I said to the woman who was still badgering me about the mysterious crime I had committed. “I didn’t go through the training!” That did it. She stopped talking, my heart swelled with victory, and I woke up from my nightmare.

Cartoon Crazy — Image of crazy person tearing her hair out found here.

Because, as anybody who’s anybody knows, you can’t be trusted to administer a standardized test (no matter how many times over how many years you’ve done it) without going through at least one, usually two, sometimes (if you’re lucky and get chosen for a field test) THREE trainings a year on how to do it. The training consists of a power point presentation that tells you not do things such as give a student an answer, hint at an answer, or “act out” an answer. Yes, really.

(Note: If I had a blood pressure machine in my house right now, I could prove to you that, even twenty months after quitting teaching, the very thought of standardized testing still has a profound physical effect on me.)

zebrastress — I found this cartoon here.

There’s a lot of truth to that nightmare I had. Testing is a stressful experience, and not just for the students. Teachers are under a lot of scrutiny during standardized tests, and we’re being scrutinized for really ridiculous things. One year an auditor from either the state or the district (I’m not sure which) came into my room during the test with her official clipboard. She looked around to make sure all educational materials and posters had been taken down or covered up, wiggled the mouse on my computer to make sure it was off, and perused the testing documents on the table at the front of the room. She peered at the state-mandated seating chart and then crooked her finger for me to come over there. I did. She then indicated, with gestures and whispers, that I had neglected to mark where the door to the classroom was on the seating chart. I picked up my pencil and wrote the word “door” in the proper location. She nodded and left.

(Note: The year of the first TAKS Writing test, I actually broke out in the only case of hives I’ve ever had in my life.)

Then there was the time, during my second-to-last year of teaching, when I was unlocking the cabinet after the lunch break to retrieve the tests to hand them back to the students (because they must be under lock and key during breaks), and I managed to break my key off in the lock. I stood there with my back to the students contemplating the paths my life had taken to lead me to this point when I heard a girl’s voice say, “Ms. Juettner, did you just break your key?” Um… And then a boy’s voice say, louder, “Oh my god, are our tests stuck in there?!” UM… Thankfully, a counselor was sent to the rescue (because he had a screwdriver, not because I needed to be counseled, though some therapy later probably would have been a good idea) and soon we were back to our silent and serious testing atmosphere. But it was touch and go for a few minutes there.

(Note: Our school’s system for teacher restroom breaks during testing involved clipping a little red sign to the outside of your door when you needed to be relieved (in order to relieve yourself) and then waiting for a relief person to show up. Sometimes the relief person was already relieving someone else. Sometimes they didn’t see the sign. Sometimes they were reading the newspaper and forgot that teachers’ bladders were about to explode. There is an art to determining when it is exactly fifteen minutes until you are going to have to pee, and I never mastered it.)

Beyond the monotony of the trainings, beyond the stress of following all the rules, beyond the various physical ailments that it causes in otherwise healthy individuals, the absolute WORST thing about standardized testing is the mind-numbing boredom of “actively monitoring” students for five hours a day, up to four days in a row. No grading. No computing. No reading. No writing. No talking. No napping. No making any noise. No telling how long until your next bathroom break. MIND. NUMBING.

One year, a few minutes before testing began, we were all standing in the hallway outside our classrooms, soaking up our last precious moments of freedom, when my friend Julie walked up and said, “Anybody got any problems you need worked out? Any relationship issues? Financial woes? Decisions about what to do with your life?” We all stared at her. She said, “I need something for my brain to work on while I’m in there. Come on, give me a problem to solve!”

I couldn’t supply Julie with a good life problem that day because the biggest thing on my mind at the moment was the same thing. What the heck am I going to do with my brain for the next five hours?

A few days after my recent nightmare, I came across the Love, Teach blog, which I’m now following (and you should too). The first post I saw was “16 Things You Can Do While Actively Monitoring Standardized Testing (Or The Next Time You’re Crazy Bored)” and, let me tell you, she has some GREAT suggestions. You should check them out. Then I’ll round out the list with my four favorite things, making it an even twenty.

human brain don't shake — I found this cool image here.

17. Gamble

Place bets with yourself about which row of students will finish the test first or turn the seating chart into a big bingo board and see how long it takes to get BINGO.

18. Play Matching Games

Since students aren’t allowed to keep anything at their desks during testing, they have to place all of their lunches and silent reading books at the front of the room. My favorite game was trying to match the students to their books and lunches. Since some of them brought multiple books, it was a real challenge.

19. Practice Your Math

If there are twenty-six students in the room, and nine of the students are wearing blue, what percentage of students is wearing blue? (Yes, monitoring standardized testing is so mind-numbing that my brain sometimes CHOSE to do math!)

20. Write Poetry

Technically speaking, you are not allowed to write while monitoring. But the rules do not specifically state that you are not allowed to carry a piece of paper and a pen in your pocket with which to scribble lines of poetry during restroom breaks. I wrote a few poems during my TAAS and TAKS and STAAR monitoring days. Unfortunately, most of them were about monitoring standardized tests. (The whole experience really saps your creativity.) See exhibit A below:

As we head into yet another testing season, my heart goes out to all of my friends still in the classroom. I wish you interesting internal imaginings, great epiphanies, and absolutely NO highlighter marks on the answer documents. Good luck to you.

[To read more stories from my teaching career, check out my Teaching Stories page.]

Goodreads Before Goodreads

I don’t mean to make a stink here, but Goodreads really owes me quite a bit of money. You see, I had the prototype for their entire platform back in 1999, long before Otis and Elizabeth Chandler launched their website. Yep. It was called My Book Journal.

My Book Journal is an offline system for tracking reading progress and maintaining literary lists. It comes in hardback (can you say the same, Goodreads? I don’t think so) and fits neatly on a shelf or in a medium-sized purse. It’s been in operation for fifteen years now and has never once crashed.

My Book Journal’s features include:

Organized lists of the books I read each year
Titles marked as “to read” in the future
A page for collecting favorite quotes
Convenient bookmarks
“Links” to lists and articles about authors
Very personalized privacy settings
Easily portable
Classy cover

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’m not going to make a big deal over this dispute. I’ve decided to be the bigger person and take the high road, because I do admire that little Goodreads website and I have to admit that their rating system is easier to use than mine and, what’s more, they have pictures (which is cool and also kind of cheating). But I just wanted it to be known: Goodreads started here.

Here are some of the quotes that I’ve “favorited” over the years, i.e. written into My Book Journal with my own hand, rather than clicking a simple button. Yes, this system takes more time, requires a little elbow grease, but it’s that very dedication to record-keeping which makes My Book Journal so special. If you’re not willing painfully print a passage on the page with your tendonitis-afflicted fingers (while walking uphill in the snow, etc) then perhaps you don’t really “like” that quotation so much after all, now do you? Kids today have it so easy…

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” – Douglas Adams, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. Why and how? Because I say it is so.” – Ray Bradbury, from “Just This Side of Byzantium”, the introduction to Dandelion Wine

“The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: ‘Don’t ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can’t stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.’” – Amy Tan, from “The Cliffsnotes Version of My Life” in The Opposite of Fate

“The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me. I suddenly stood upon a hill in the center of an unknown country, hearing the sky fill with a new spelling of my name.” – Audre Lorde, from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Mr. Weasley was looking around. He loved everything to do with Muggles. Harry could see him itching to go and examine the television and the video recorder. ‘They run off eckeltricity, do they?’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Ah yes, I can see the plugs. I collect plugs,’ he added to Uncle Vernon. ‘And batteries. Got a very large collection of batteries. My wife thinks I’m mad, but there you are.’” -J.K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“If you take a book with you on a journey… an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open the book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it.” – Cornelia Funke, from Inkheart

“Although a Centaur Liaison Office exists in the Beast Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, no centaur has ever used it. Indeed, ‘being sent to the Centaur Office’ has become an in-joke at the Department and means that the person in question is shortly to be fired.” – Newt Scamander (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling), from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term ‘Future Perfect’ has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.” – Douglas Adams, from Life, the Universe, and Everything (I opted for a very condensed version of Adams’ phenomenal passage on the problem with time travel. To read the whole wonderful thing on the “real” Goodreads, click here.)

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine guns, hand grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.” – Erich Maria Remarque, from All Quiet on the Western Front

“He made three separate formations that led to the same tower of dominoes in the middle. Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would all smile at the beauty of destruction.” – Markus Zusak, from The Book Thief

“‘I do not want it to rain.’ ‘Then you should not have washed the turtle.’” -Joan Abelove, from Go and Come Back

“Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive plains. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations ‘nonsensical’ in front of fifteen other teenagers. Eventually a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box: MRS. ROSS HAS DIED OF DYSENTERY. This filled me with glee.” – Sloan Crosley, from “Bring-Your-Machete-to-Work Day” in I Was Told There’d Be Cake

“As long as he and I were together I had in some ways never really left where I started because we carried that place between us like a familiar blanket.” – Michael Dorris, from Sees Behind Trees

“The gong was long gone, but the legend lingered.” – Lemony Snicket, from “Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.” – William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, from The Elements of Style

“‘There is no story that is not true,’ said Uchendu. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.’” – Chinua Achebe, from Things Fall Apart

(If you want to see my profile on the “real” Goodreads, click here. If you want to see what’s happening in My Book Journal, email me your request, including a specific page number and/or year, and I will get back to you within 48 hours.)

Things Fall Apart… Again

Today I finished Things Fall Apart for the second time. I first studied Chinua Achebe’s book my sophomore year in high school, and while I liked it then, I did not fully appreciate it until now. In this powerful African novel, the author perfectly balances the complexity of his tale with the simplicity of his storytelling, and the result is a chilling tragedy in which nothing is black and white, and no man can be clearly hailed as hero or villain. The end of the book, which disappointed me when I was a teenager, both satisfied and haunted me my second time through.

Literally. (Halfway through the book, my old paperback copy required a little mending.)

In lieu of a longer analysis from me, I instead would like to share with you Skylar Hamilton Burris’s thoughts on Things Fall Apart from Goodreads. Her review is insightful well-written, and I agree with it.

From Skylar B:

I read this many years ago as a teenager, before it was as well known as it is today, and then I read it again in college. Readers often expect imperialism to be dealt with in black and white. Either the author desires to see native ways preserved and consequently views any imperial attempts as immoral and threatening, or he’s a Kipling-style “white man’s burden” devotee who believes non-European cultures ought to be improved by supervision from their European “superiors.” Yet Things Fall Apart is a novel that complicates both of those simplistic views. In it, a desire to preserve the native way of life coexists with an urge to admit improvements to it. A tension inevitably arises from the juxtaposition of these two goals. In Things Fall Apart, this tension courses through every page, and it is part of what makes the book so fascinating.

Achebe seems to despise the tendency to simplify complex human life. The events that occur in Things Fall Apart signify the destruction of an entire way of life, an obliteration of the ties that bind a people together. Yet it is not that Achebe unconditionally embraces the culture of the Ibo people. He makes the reader feel for Okonkwo’s father, whose failure by Ibo standards is the source of Okonkwo’s severity, and for his son, Nwoye, who does not fit into the strictly ordered masculine warrior society.

I appreciated, especially, Achebe’s nuanced portrayl of both the positive and negative aspects of missionary activity. When the missionaries come to Nigeria, the church provides a haven for the discontent: for the woman who can not bear to leave her twins to die, for the outcasts who are shunned by the community, and for Nwoye, who can only fit into Ibo society by denying himself. I was moved by Achebe’s depiction of how Christianity provides a place for the outcast: the hymn they sing about brothers “who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted [Nwoye’s] young soul–the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.”

Yet by providing an outlet for the discontent, the church begins to unravel the ties that bind the Ibo people together. Although the church gives dignity to the outcast and the misunderstood, the second missionary who comes fails to restrain his converts from injuring the dignity of other Ibos. Achebe makes us sympathize with Nwoye’s dissatisfaction and acknowledges that Ibo culture was imperfect, but through Okonkwo he also shows us what was lost when the Ibos failed to preserve their culture from the onslaught of the Europeans. What was lost, Achebe has said elsewhere, was DIGNITY, “and it is this that they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing in human terms what happened to them.” Achebe succeeds brilliantly. He painfully and tragically depicts the tragedy that can result when the only way of life a man has ever known begins to crumble.

To see Skylar’s review on Goodreads, click here.