Beating Testers at their Game

This anecdote reveals something interesting about the nature of testing and the way it construes literacy. It comes from the early days of Ontario's Literacy Test, but is perhaps the more astonishing considering that at the time the test (without the current course option) determined graduation. Laugh...and weep?

Elaine and the Literacy Test

A couple of years ago I spent about 20 hours with students at a local school who were most likely to fail the literacy test. Virtually all of them presented both ability and behavior problems, but as we progressed I felt perhaps half of them might succeed. Needless to say I focused on very pragmatic procedures.

Elaine was less cynical than most, but quiet and convinced she couldn't pass. She tried the strategies, and with encouragement seemed ready to give it her best shot. I was most anxious for her to succeed. But she didn't. Her score was 5 points off the pass mark, and the school was convinced it should appeal her result.

The appeal failed. It was my sense of what the whole ordeal had done to Elaine that prompted me to write this piece.

Provincial English Teacher Websites

There are just five provinces with active provincial English teacher associations with websites for networking. Ontario, the four Atlantic provinces, and the two territories do not have associations. Here are the links for the five active provinces.

British Columbia

Alberta

Saskatchewan

Manitoba

Quebec

Ontario Subject Associations

STAO, Science Teachers Association of Ontario

OAGEE, The Ontario Association for Geographic and Environmental Education

OAME, The Ontario Association for Mathematics Education

OHASTA, The Ontario History and Social Science Teachers’ Association

OPHEA, The Ontario Physical and Health Education Association

CODE, Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators

OSEA, The Ontario Society of Education through Art

OMLTA, The Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association

ORMTA, Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association

Why marks drop at university

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was suppose to have amassed during his years of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead.

John Dewey, Experience and Education

This caught my attention as a teacher who has had to wonder why student marks drop in university, and why university professors don’t have an intelligent response beyond saying that high schools don’t do their job. The linked excerpt comes from Lapham’s Quarterly (Vol. I, Number 4, Fall 2008), and addresses schooling as “preparation” To extrapolate and apply, I think Dewey makes the point that when students learn how to write in high school English, they do so in response to particular teacher notions of what writing is for the material they are teaching. When those students go to university, they falter in the same task because they face another teacher with other notions of writing attached to the material they are teaching, which would seem to make it necessary that, in some degree, the teaching of writing needs to begin again as the university’s responsibility to its students.

On Line Teaching

You might be quite surprised to find how easy it is for you to create a plan of work for some of your students using on line tools and applications. A blog, for example, can be the "home page" of a website you create with instructions for work, and links for students to follow to the appropriate research sites, or to sites where they can, themselves, create web pages that will look quite professional.

Here's an example.

Teaching Poetry

Experiencing Poetry describes an approach for secondary students that tries to side-step, for a time, the thorny issue of "meaning" in order to encourage an experience of poetry by close observation, rather as one might look for a time at visual art, giving it the kind of attention that eventually draws from it some significance. I've published in on Scribd (see link in the sidebar) so that you can see how that application works.