This Article is Too Long

This article is too long. Don’t read it:

I think we must learn how to reach and support kids in spite of the data addiction currently gripping and choking American education, an addiction that has led many of us to put the grade before the kid.

What is the mythical point of contact between the idea of fully supporting a kid and the idea of honestly assessing them? Assessment is so arbitrary.

In the work of some teachers, assessment may actually overtake the classroom, and no real teaching can then occur. That is a dark thing. It is why so many like Tolstoy and Steinbeck and others couldn’t deal with the experience of school, seeing it as endless drudgery filled with mindless boring tasks, to paraphrase the great Russian master.

I succeed or fail in teaching my students the language to the degree that I am able to open up my heart, not my head, to the kids, and to support them as people first and students second, as the precious jewels that they are and not data bots.

I can only keep loving and supporting each and every last pierced goth freak and superstar football player and computer nerd no matter what “grades” they have earned in my classes. We are so full of ourselves sometimes…

Any discussion about assessment brings up a great opportunity to remind ourselves about what Blaine Ray often says about weighing pigs – you can’t make them grow any faster by weighing them more often. They all grow at their own rates, provided we don’t destroy their confidence first in year one.

We need to remember in this discussion that if a kid is doing their best imitation of a potted plant in our classes, that there are reasons for that: stuff going on at home, being only fifteen years old in present day America, not connecting with the drudgery of school, etc.

If you failed even one kid last year, it means that you failed that kid. Language doesn’t lie. American kids don’t need another reason to not want to get out of bed in the morning. They don’t need another adult to mistrust. They don’t need another room to become a plant in.

When we fail them, we become sheep, eating flowers arbitrarily. But sheep do such things out of ignorance and we have no such excuse. We should strive to keep the plant alive as long as possible, by never taking their lack of interest personally. They are doing the best they can, and it is our job to help their natural, research-proven abilities in languages manifest.

It’s time now to place our focus more and more and still yet more on loving and supporting our kids even if they have gnarly snarkification zits in class. We love and support kids, and we don’t judge them. We have been taught not to judge. He wasn’t joking. He doesn’t joke about things like that. We must learn to assess in real human ways, and not in ways that serve only us as controlling devices to keep them in line.

With CI, we are WAY AHEAD of the game. We are in a ball park that many teachers don’t even know exists, bless their blocked hearts. Bring love to our profession this year. It’s not about them learning things - it’s about them believing in themselves.

So let’s not waste our time getting into arguments about defining assessment in our own selfish terms and passing some and failing others when He has taught us to just love them. How dare we focus on anything else in our teaching but the student’s mental and emotional well-being? How dare we forget our real callings as teachers, to help kids become (not necessarily fluent in the language) but happier and more confident human beings?

I will not apologize for the self esteem movement, nor on the other hand will I lie to kids about grades. But I sure will make my tests easy during the year so that they can experience some success and want to pay attention in my classroom and shed the potted plant thing, which is too prevalent in too many WL classes these days and has always been and now that we understand the research is something that we can finally change.

This year, let’s bring them more loving kindness in the way we assess them. Let’s be more gentle. Of course there is a place for tests, but let’s learn to make them easy little things. And let’s filter out the stink of memorization from our testing. We all know that no amount of memorization can lead to a person acquiring a language; it has become a method of control only. Stop doing it in your assessment this year. American language education has traded true comprehension for a cheap parlor trick of short-term recall.

Teachers who have already written kids off by October deserve the loud snoring and springtime desk drooling of the kids they have written off when they refuse to support those kids throughout the entire year all the way to June.