A few weeks back, I took my daughter to one of the clinics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for extensive testing to build a picture of her learning abilities and disabilities. Yesterday, her mother met with a psychologist to go over the test results, and last night we sat at the kitchen table, Karen and I, and talked about them. It was a disorienting experience, grappling with those test results. Because the child described by the tests has both less ability than our child and more ability. Her weaknesses didn’t look as weak and her strengths didn’t appear at all. In some areas she scored better than the way we ever see her work; but also, the things in which she most excels are not measured by the tests.
For example:
A couple nights ago, Karen and Grace got into an eating contest. Karen timed Grace eating a cup of applesauce in 53 seconds. Then Grace timed Karen eating a cup of applesauce in 42 seconds. And Grace got all excited. “I won!” she said, “I won!” She was baffled that Karen’s 42 seconds was faster than her 53 seconds.
On another night, I told her that I could no longer trade her one square of a Mr. Goodbar candy bar for three correct spelling words because she was getting good at spelling and she’d wind up with too much candy bar before bedtime. I told her that I would give her one square of Mr. Goodbar for every four correct words. But Grace didn’t like that bargain. She wanted more of the candy bar. So she bargained with me. “No,“ she said, “what if you give me one square for every ten words I get right?”
I said I would, and she was delighted at the bargain she had made. The math scores she got on the standardized tests show that she has some ability to add and subtract, but they don’t show you how she still cannot understand the way in which numbers represent quantities.
At the same time, she is one of the three most acute observers I’ve ever known. She notices extremely small details; she notices changes in a room when she goes away and comes back. She notices the way people interact with one another, and she understands what those things mean–a touch on the arm here, a raised eyebrow there, an angry word or a tender one–she notices and understands these things far more attentively than I did when I was her age. But there is no test for powers of observation, and there is no test for how well you can put observation into context.
The long and the short of it is that the child Karen and I spoke about last night as we read the test results was not really our child. What she did on the test was not what she does every day after school. Some large part of her wasn’t described at all. And there isn’t even any way to measure by testing the things about Grace that are most Grace-like: no way to describe the Grace who responded—when asked how she might change an experiment about the rate at which a sugar cube dissolves in various solutions—that she would like to try the experiment again, but this time, she and her classmates get to eat the sugar cubes. There’s no test that quantifies the Grace who wears her red felt hat with the bow over her jacket hood. There’s no test to understand why Grace is so crazy about anything and everything that glows in the dark.
I have not yet met a teacher who believes that the standardized testing imposed by No Child Left Behind Continue Reading »
