I love how the Writing Project encourages such a socially gratuitous attitude of written feedback. It really is a large part of why we write: to get feedback (the other major portion being to figure out what it is we actually think!).

First, I was very happy to see your piece on “teaching to the test” in Education Week. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s mindless repetition of buzz words in any field. This one about testing has been a fly in my ear for years now. Your article has helped me to swat it down.

Thank you again, I’ll look for future articles of yours!

I prefer e-mailing each person who responds to my posts. I think they appreciate this policy. I’m doing precisely that right now to you.

First, I want to thank you for your intelligent comments. I think we agree on the harmful practice that too often prevails in today’s classrooms.

Teaching to the actual items on a test is the predictable – but always indefensible – manifestation of Campbell’s Law: the more any quantitative indicator is used for decisonmaking, the more it will be subject to corruption, and the more it will corrupt the very process it is intended to monitor.

On the other hand, teaching to the broad body of skills and knowledge that a test’s items represent is sound pedagogy. I don’t know of any effective teacher who doesn’t do it. They may not openly admit it because of the negative connotation. But I submit that if you analyze their instruction, you’ll know what I mean.

Walt

I’m a big fan of metaphors and I think you’ve come up with an interesting way to describe the notion of balance. I’ve always been fascinated with functions like sine because it seemed magical to me that an equation could be plotted into something visual, and something so iconically appealing as a sine wave no less. I bring all this up because I think it illustrates what I see as the shortcoming of standards from my own school experience. When I learned about sine in high school, I was given the equation, told to plot it, told that was a sine curve. No one asked me what I thought of a sine curve. And if they had, and I had said, “That seems magical,” I probably would have been deemed a math failure. Yet given the opportunity, asked a simple question that I’m sure is not part of most math standards, who knows what I might have been inspired to create because of the magic of algebraic functions? Recently, I heard two interesting comments about standards. My colleague, Shirley Brown, said she thought the standards movement was simply a means to continue the schooling practices of the industrial revolution whose goal was to create docile, cookie-cutter, worker bees. My friend Andrea Zellner said despite all the best intentions, standards can’t help but become prescriptive rules for teaching practices. I’m afraid I think they’re right. However, I like the idea that you have a blog “thesis” in which you’re trying to understand the relationship between creativity and standards in your teaching. I’m looking forward to reading what you discover.