Natalie Whatley

What a relief to see this past week in the rear-view mirror! For those of you removed from school-aged children, the last few days were filled with Texas’ brand of standardized testing — TAKS — Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, which is the current form designed to assess students’ attainment of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies skills required under Texas education standards.

As a mom who has spent the better part of a decade entrenched in the testing cycle, I’m not a fan. For the record, I fully understand the genesis of the whole mess and that it comes down from places far removed from our local educators.

There’s an extensive list of what gets me riled over it, but what had my pollen-dusted nose out of joint enough to cause me to write about it is this: The timing of the late spring tests couldn’t be worse. 

I get that the bulk of the school year is needed to teach the concepts students need in order to be successful, but geez . . . I can’t focus this time of year, and I (supposedly) have maturity on my side.

The sun is shining until very close to bedtime, birds are singing, the sweet fragrance of spring fills the air and it seems most folks just want to be outside doing something, anything, other than what falls under the scope of formal education.

Shoot, I’m writing this surrounded by the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle while sitting on the bank of Cedar Bayou (there are more beautiful bodies of water, but it’s a short walk from where I hang my hat) listening to the buzz of bees, watching the soft ripple of the water and the slight sway of the trees with a light breeze ruffling loose strands of my hair. Near perfection for a mind that needs to wander.

Memories of household chores try their best to interrupt these serene moments. I’m giving serious consideration to dragging the clothes down here and getting the laundry done the old-timey way. That’s as good an excuse as any I can think of to spend the day outdoors. I wonder if the family would mind their clothes smelling of eau de swampe instead of April fresh.

But getting back to testing, of course I put all the important dates on my calendar and made sure the youths in my charge were at least in their beds a little earlier than usual (making them fall asleep before they’re ready is a another issue entirely) and honed my skills as a short-order cook during the breakfast hour. 

These have become the only days I insist on breakfast consisting of something a few notches up from Pop-tarts on the nutritional scale. (I succumbed to the breakfast war a couple of years ago. Call it bad parenting if you’d like. For all intents and purposes, I have three teenagers – trust me when I say I have far bigger eggs to fry.)

Hats off to all the students, teachers, and parents who made it through! Let’s all wave goodbye to that rear-view image and set our sights back through the windshield.

© 2010 Natalie Whatley

Since I went on such a rant last week about what I perceive as the unfair TAKSation of students, teachers and parents, it’s only fair that I come back and spell out the parental shortcomings that caused my children to show up at school unprepared for educational enrichment. Their educations are extremely important to me. I could get all mushy about how I want them to reach their full potential and . . . blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I just want them to reach adulthood and be able to support themselves in full, happy lives – outside of my home.

First, as I’ve now heard from countless experts, I allowed too much technology into their young lives. Scientists say that I negatively and permanently changed the way the synapses fire in their brains by allowing television, computers, and gaming systems to be a part of our days. The moments of sanity I enjoyed while I had two in diapers came at a heavy price. The guilt is incredible!

Next, I don’t check all their schoolwork all the time. Horrible, I know.  When the oldest started school, I was on top of everything. With my youngest, I’m on top of nothing. Call it lazy, but I tell you I’m just wore out.

Sometimes my kids go to school without eating breakfast. I realize this one is particularly disturbing, but school starts at a certain time every day. What’s a mom to do when she’s bouncing between three bedrooms . . . one gets up, but sneaks back in bed the moment she’s gone, and the cycle repeats itself until there are just enough minutes to dress and catch the bus. (Hi, Mom! I know you’re reading; don’t laugh at me. It’s not funny!) On top of that, I’ve got one who swears she’ll be sick if a morsel of sustenance touches her lips before ten a.m., Monday through Friday. Because she made a believer out of me, I stopped forcing the issue.

School projects: I helped way too much and mostly because it pains me a great deal to have an entire weekend ruined over something that could be done in a couple of hours. Enough said.

Then there’s the availability of my children’s grades online. It’s a wonderful service, but I found myself with a bad habit and came close to entering a 12-step program to break the addiction. “Hi, my name is Natalie, and I checked my children’s grades daily, OK, several times daily, until I drove them and myself nearly crazy.”  In a very liberating move, I taught them how to login and check their grades themselves. They know what needs to be done and what the consequences will be when report cards come out. LOAD off my shoulders.

Homework: My children are well-versed in “don’t ask Mom to help with math homework.”  I can look at the textbook and figure it out, sometimes before midnight, but Jeff handles it all with the greatest of ease. Math is his department, and I have no interest in being cross-trained.  Just this week Jeff explained to me how to find the area of a circle. “Area equals Pi times the radius squared. A = Pi   r  squared.” Because I don’t even want to know, I replied, “Pies are round”.

There. I owned up to doing some things I knew were not producing the desired results. I’m anxiously awaiting Texas’ legislators doing the same in regards to standardized testing.  

© 2009 Natalie Whatley  

If there’s a school-aged child in your life, you’re no doubt aware it’s TAKS season. (TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills – Texas’ brand of school standardized testing.) I’ll drag out the biggest soapbox I can find. Feel free to join me. And know my rant is directed beyond the local level; those toiling in our communities are hamstrung while a select out-of-touch few sit from on high and tax the minds of our greatest commodity.

There are stirrings of new educational developments here in Texas.  A group of school superintendents and administrators interested in education reform comprise what is now called the Public Education Visioning Institute. They’ve been meeting for a few years and last summer released a 48-page work-in-progress report entitled “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas”. It’s an interesting read, and the ideas and concepts explored are quietly making their way to people willing, able, and ready to start a revolution.

Sociologists, psychologists, and educators are converging on a theory that the way the human brain processes information is changing due to young children’s exposure to technology in their everyday lives – long before they sit behind a desk in a classroom. Instead of working to change the way education is delivered, much time and money has been spent making sure each individual is accountable for one-size-must-fit-all standards. There’s a disconnect, and it’s easily apparent to any layperson who visits a classroom.  Creative teachers do what they can, but they’re fighting a losing battle against a massive push to sameness.

Keith Sockwell, CEO of the education consulting firm Cambridge Strategic Services says, “When we look at our public schools today, I’d say they’re doing a dadgum good job of preparing our kids for the twentieth and nineteenth century.” How unfair is that to a person charged with getting us through the twenty-first century?

Educators at local levels and school boards alike blame the loss of local control and autonomy in their respective schools, while state and federal agencies want accountability in exchange for tax dollars sent. Our children and our future hang in the middle. The new vision report by Texas educators states that the current accountability system has indeed narrowed curriculum. It was refreshing to read such an admission. I think we’ve all heard it categorically denied.

I’ve sat through many parent nights where standardized testing was an instructed-from-above talking point. There’s always at least one renegade parent making his displeasure over “teaching to the test” known. The rote response is always the same. “We can’t really teach to the test because we don’t know exactly what the state will include each year.”

While it may be true that the content of the new test each year is somewhat of a surprise, those of us with school-aged children know all too well that fact doesn’t stop the how-to-TAKE-the-test instruction.  The code word for that: strategies.  And “strategies” leave no room for any thought process other than the one the child is told to have.

Forget having strength in a particular subject area and being able to reason your way through to the correct answer. Not allowed.  And weakness?  That child will need extra practice circling, underlining, bracketing, “erasing” irrelevant information and finally solving the problem. On the test, all that matters is getting the correct answer . . . not good if you’re a nine-year old who gets too bogged down in the “process” of test taking to ever reach that answer.

With educators who know the system leading the charge, maybe the time is right for a revolution of sorts. Parents, teachers, and administrators whose lives are intertwined with children daily know this isn’t working. The world’s problems won’t be solved with homogenous thinkers armed with little more than No. 2 pencils and scan tron answer forms. Communities need to get behind this group and with one loud voice state, “No more TAKSation without representation!” 

© 2009 Natalie Whatley