Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions.

We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like that.

I got in more trouble than I could have ever imagined. The teacher nearly screamed at me for doing math, and threatened to take me to the principle to have me removed from the exam permanently. She feared I was cheating, and forbade me from doing any more math that day outside the strict testing times.

View on HN

This is pretty much why you have to have standardized tests. Subpar teachers like this one. You couldn't possibly trust someone like that to make any sort of valid evaluation of her students.

I think you actually have a good point there.

I'm not so sure... The standardised tests don't actually weed out crap teachers as they can just teach to the test, and they do a lot to hurt the effectiveness of good teachers.

Also a lot of the motivation of the teacher who was annoyed with my parents was that I was causing problems in tests due to being interested in stuff well outside the domain of what would be taught in class.

Set tests largely test how good you are at those set tests, but most problems you will encounter in the real world are unbounded by a curriculum and the ability to recall stuff you have very recently read, while useful, is not a particularly good measure of wider ability.

"Just teaching to test" isn't always bad. For things like literacy, it's pretty good.

Yes and no. Obviously his teacher was in the wrong for yelling and screaming at him over such a trivial matter. However, in California at least, testing standards (as dictated by the state) are incredibly strict. More than one good teacher has been fired for not following the written procedures EXACTLY. Any reported deviation (state inspectors interview students and staff at random) is grounds for punishment and possible dismissal. It's a complete disaster, but this is what the teachers have to deal with. It can be incredibly stressful.

Reminds me of my primary school's request to my parents that they stop me from having access to books at home as it was making me difficult to teach.

Upvoted a thousand percent. This sums up everything that is wrong with education.

(EDIT: spellchecking my dumb arse)

My dad had to explain to them how this wasn't really achievable, even should they want to, as he worked in libraries.

Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.

We had a book reading contest my fourth grade year, to read as many books as possible during the year.

At one point, after I'd read some multiple of whatever the class average was, my teacher told me to stop reading so many books. Still, all these years later, I have very negative feelings about that.

There's a lot of subpar teachers out there. In every district.

If those teachers had any sense of professional responsibility they'd resign en-masse, or at least drum out whoever's idea this was. Unbeliveable.

Wouldn't normally post a youtube link but the famous Bill Hick's "what are you reading FOR" story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvs2g5Nj0NI

Reminds me of my first grade teacher telling me to stop signing my papers in (neat) cursive as I wasn't supposed to know how to do that until the end of the year.

Were I to receive such a ludicrous document, after I got over the shock my first course of action would be to double time on the number of books I bring home for him/her to read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com