The Family Business: Like
Father, Like Daughter
In case you missed our last
article, I am a fairly new teacher at Bais Yaakov, and my father has been
teaching in yeshivos for more than 20 years. It’s nice to be able to come home
at the end of my day and talk shop with my father, and as it turns out, many of
the questions and issues he has dealt with (and continues to deal with) are the
very same ones I come home with. Take a moment and eavesdrop on another of our
recent dinner conversations.
Meira: I smile, ready
to start a fantastic lesson. I’m not even five minutes into it, and a girl
raises her hand. “Is this on the test?”
Tatte: I can’t tell
you how many times I get that question in yeshiva – sometimes multiple times in
a single class.
Meira: It’s a
lose-lose situation. If I tell her it’s on the test, I get a collective groan
from the class. If I tell her it’s not on the test, all of a sudden, she
becomes very interested in what is going on outside the window.
Tatte: A few years
ago, I was sharing teaching stories with a friend of mine who grew up in
Russia. He also had become a teacher in our schools and was very bothered by
this question that seemed to plague him endlessly. He explained that, growing
up in Russia, there was a culture that valued education, valued learning new
things. If the teacher had more to teach, the students were eager for the extra
information. In our schools, however, there is this concept of the information
you need to know for the test and the information that is extra. Where
he grew up, this idea just did not exist. The emphasis was on learning, not
merely doing well on the test.
Meira: At the end of
the day, though, our students are only asking because we seem to place an
inordinate amount of importance on testing. Tests make up the bulk of their
grades, and test scores become the focus of parent-teacher conferences. We
prepare review sheets for tests, send home notices, mark test dates in our
calendars, and ask our students to have their parents sign their graded test
papers.
Tatte: It is hard to
fault our students for asking what seems to be a very logical question. We do
seem to put tremendous emphasis on testing.
Meira: There are so
many problems with tests: They create an unnecessarily competitive environment,
punish students who may struggle academically, unfairly reward students who
excel at test taking, cause unhelpful stress, and wrongly place the emphasis on
the end result, not on the process of learning,
Tatte: There are,
though, some very basic reasons to test. Recently, in the news, there has been
some controversy around the teaching (or lack thereof) of general studies in
the chasidic schools of New York. In 2019, one particular school administered
a standardized test in reading and math to over 1,000 of its students. Every
one of the students failed. While I don’t think that result necessarily means
that the state should be put in charge of the curriculum of the school, those
test scores are quite revealing.
Meira: At the end of
the day, we are both teachers, and we both give tests. The most basic reason is
to hold students accountable. Students often breeze through material, listen
with half an ear, doodle in their notebooks, and claim to do homework, when we
all know they barely give it five minutes of their attention. A test forces
them to confront the material head on. It forces them to commit information to
memory, to finally understand how to solve math problems, and to actually learn
the material.
Tatte: Testing has
also been used widely across the educational system in the U.S. as a means of
holding teachers accountable. The task of finding and removing ineffective
teachers and replacing them with new ones, especially in the face of very
powerful teacher’s unions, is substantial. So, for decades, test scores have
been used as an objective measure of a teacher’s effectiveness, giving
principals the needed justification to fire and replace them.
Meira: It not only
gives administrations and students feedback but also teachers. When I give a
test, I know that there are a mix of questions, from easy to hard, and I have a
sense of what I expect the average score to be. If the students score
significantly lower, I take that seriously. I want to know where I went wrong,
why I was not connecting with my students, what happened that whatever I was
trying to teach was not being grasped.
Tatte: Over the years,
I have met many a student who has told me that he is not a “math person.” I
have a theory about that: Math is cumulative; what one learns in one class
carries over into the next. So, if a person has a bad year in math, a difficult
teacher, or an extended absence, it creates a gap in their knowledge that will
follow them in successive units and successive courses in their math career.
Inevitably, as the math gets harder, those gaps become more significant and
impede a student’s progress, resulting in the mistaken conclusion that one
might be lacking the “math gene.” Interestingly, that gap in knowledge is often
detected by a test. A student will score poorly on a particular test, revealing
a gap in knowledge.
Meira: Yes! A student who
receives a 70% on a test is clearly missing 30% of the material. But as
teachers, we are pressured to push ahead and cover the curriculum so that we
never have time to go back and re-teach that missing information. We can’t take
the time to try to discover what went wrong that a student missed nearly a
third of what was being taught. There is an expectation that the student should
merely try harder next time, that, somehow, those gaps in knowledge will take
care of themselves.
Tatte: Our current
academic model is absurd. Testing becomes a means to categorize students into
neat packages. These are the A students, these the B, and over
there are the C and D students. We inexplicably expect students
missing a sizable chunk of the material to magically improve their grades. Sal
Khan, the founder and creator of Khan Academy, talked about our broken system
in a TED Talk, Let’s Teach for Mastery, Not Test Scores. “We were
artificially constraining how long we [had] to [learn] something, pretty much
ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and
identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it.” We never stop to
address the educational gaps, we simply keep teaching.
Meira: We must keep
teaching, or we will never cover all the material. Additionally, we can’t stop
the class for a few students at the expense of the rest. School is, by its nature,
an imperfect educational system.
Tatte: Sal Khan’s
point is that we can bring technology into the mix to change that, to start a
shift in our thinking. Instead of merely plowing ahead without taking the
feedback of the tests seriously, we should and can teach for mastery, moving on
at individualized paces once a student has achieved mastery. In fact, many
medical schools have changed their testing to a pass-fail system. As we train
young men and women to become doctors, medical schools learned that it is most
important to discern whether they have achieved a sufficient mastery of the
material or not, and less important to grade students.
Meira: I saw that out
of approximately 150 medical programs in the U.S., about 100 of them, including
schools like Harvard, have moved away from letter grading to pass/fail for the
well-being of their students. Another issue with tests that often directly
impacts our students’ sense of confidence and well-being is that they
completely ignore effort. We preach that a person gains great schar (reward) for mere effort, even if
she eventually fails. Certainly, effort should be rewarded. While many teachers
include a participation or behavior grade in their final calculations, it tends
to be overshadowed by test scores. I have seen many girls in my classroom
feeling dejected and hopeless after receiving a test grade that does not
reflect their efforts.
Tatte: Angela
Duckworth, in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,
shows how what she calls grit is possibly a more important determinant of
success than doing well on tests. Grit is the ability to stick with something
even though it is hard, to continue to work at it, to continually put forth
effort regardless of achievement. After studying grit in the Chicago Public
School system, she writes, “[It] turns out that grittier kids were
significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every
characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized
achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school.”
Meira: On the flip
side, though, tests can help create the very grit that Duckworth has found to
be so essential. Every last one of us has strived at one point in our lives
against our innate laziness. We struggle against our yetzer hara to give up, take the shortcut, or rush through things.
A test can be a goal to strive toward, a high water mark that helps us hit the
books one more time. Look at the success of programs like Dirshu, which boasts
150,000 participants in its programs worldwide. Its rigorous testing has
propelled learning to heights that without the tests would never have been
achieved.
Tatte: It seems that
we are back where we started – tests create accountability.
Meira: I think that,
as teachers, we need to bring more awareness to our testing practices. Are we
testing to create accountability, to motivate our students to achieve loftier
goals, or to generate feedback for students, teachers, or administrators? And
we need to be more deliberate about how we use the results of the tests. Are we
using them to merely categorize and rank students, or are we using the results
to find gaps, locate deficiencies, and refine our educational approaches?
Tatte and Meira:
There
is still much more to say on this topic, but for now, we will leave it there. If
you have any questions that have bothered you about general studies in our
schools, please send them to the editor (adswww@aol.com) along with any
suggestions, topics, or comments.
