On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:53:55 GMT, "Doug Kanter"
wrote:

"PocoLoco" wrote in message
.. .


The test, rather than being an assessment are the goal. The teachers are
teaching to pass the test instead of teaching to children to learn.


If that's what your school is doing, complain, or help your kids at home,
which is where most real learning begins anyway.


In Virginia, the state has published Standards of Learning for each
subject by
grade level. The SOLs are pretty comprehensive.

Here is the 8th Grade Math SOL. Note that this is *not* the Algebra SOL.

http://www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/Superi...Sols/math8.pdf

The teachers are given the SOLs, and are told to teach them all. They do
not see
the SOL Test until it is administered in late Spring. To say they teach
the test
is simply an untrue put down.

When talking face to face with people about this, I mostly find that the
ones who complain about "teaching to the test" are the parents who are
minimally involved with their kids' education to begin with. And that's the
reason for this whole uproar in the first place. Kids are turning out stupid
and the parents can't figure out why. How are teachers supposed to figure
out who knows what, unless there are tests? Granted, they have to do observe
how each kid is learning, via class participation, but still, there have to
be some standards.

I spend lots of time with my son and his friends, all around 192 months old,
and I don't know how high school teachers deal with their testosterone-fried
brains. My son's taking AP physics. Last night, his homework involved a long
list of conversions between feet, meters, blah blah blah, how many trains
get from the moon to Chicago at the speed of light on a Tuesday, using
mostly exponents. He was bitching loudly that this was not physics, this was
math, and even though he got a 99 in AP math this past spring, he was
finding this a bit challenging. I calmed him down with a strawberry
smoothie, and suggested that his physics teacher assigned this stuff to blow
the summer cobwebs out of their brains, and evaluate who was going to be
challenged when the real physics began, like..next week. His response: "Nice
slam, dad. You think we don't use our brains all summer?"

I just said "No comment", left the room. :-)


We agree. I've found also that parents who do not support education (esp.
homework completion) tend to blame the failure to perform on tests as a problem
with the teacher. There is a very strong relationship between a failure to do
math homework and a failure to pass math tests. I graded my students homework
every day. Using Excel, it was easy to graph the relationships. Most of the
'grade report' software the teachers use don't allow that.

Sounds like your son was reviewing the laws of exponents, perhaps as a prelude
to the use of logarithms.
--
John H

"All decisions are the result of binary thinking."