Spirit of learning lost in teaching the test

By DEBRA FERNANDEZ
COMMUNITY VOICES

I have spent the last three months tutoring fourth-graders to ready them for the all-important Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test this week. These students were low scorers last year -- the ones who really need to make a significant jump in their scores this year so our schools can get a nice slice of the financial pie.

A big part of how schools are graded is based on the lowest scoring students making the biggest leaps in learning. And Florida measures learning with the FCAT.

Working with these students, I was really able to see how our educational system has failed them. Their reading skills were low but there was something that bugged me more than that. They just weren't able to think about what they had read. Because so much emphasis is spent on teaching the test, students have lost the spirit of learning and the ability to think on their own.

Learning is a discovery process, for as we all know, the lessons we remember are not what our parents told us nor what happened to our friends, but rather what we ourselves have experienced. If this is true for life lessons, shouldn't it hold true for academics also?

My tutoring sessions were a lesson in no frills teaching. There were no books or activity sheets for students to fill in the blanks. I wrote reading passages and questions on the chalkboard and students would have to read my writing, then write their answers on a piece of paper. There were no multiple-choice answers for them to ponder over. They actually had to read and digest the information in order to write their responses.

At first the students were upset with me. Where are the answers they can pick from they would ask? When they told me they couldn't spell what they wanted to say, I told them to do their best and keep writing.

Practice makes perfect. One student told me her grandmother always said that, but she never knew what it meant until that day. Some students just sat there and told me that they could not do the work because they did not know what to write. I really think that these kids had never really been challenged to think. They have been spoon-fed information and been asked to regurgitate it for so long, that some of them don't even read stories or passages, they just blindly answer the test questions that follow....

They were talking and discussing and interested in what they were doing. And they were having a good time. Alas, my time with these great kids was too short and FCAT starts this week. I am not sure if our short tutoring periods were enough to help boost their scores sufficiently but on that last day, when they walked out of my room, I knew that they could be excited about education without even knowing they were learning. Now, isn't that what school is all about?

Fernandez lives in New Smyrna Beach.
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