another reason to give teachers their power back

I am learning so much by tutoring this little first grader (we will call her Wendy) through Wyzant, not just about myself and Wendy but also about her parents, Internet instruction, schools, and testing. Yes, testing.

For the first time, Wendy did not have a homework packet from her teacher for the week so we decided to work on her reading. Wendy's mom grabbed some flashcards they had made for sight words and books for Wendy's grade level. Great! I'm up for that.

What I'm describing did not necessarily happen in chronological order; I'm describing my aha! moments. And there were many.

For the last two weeks, I tried to have Wendy work offline first. She works primarily on paper in the classroom, it seems, so I want to make sure we work that way, too, for part of our session. If she got through some of her homework, we spent the end of the session on ABCMouse and did practice activities to earn reward tickets.

It was while we were working offline that I realized Wendy mainly suffers from performance anxiety. I watched her expression simply freeze when I asked her to read a 3-letter sight word on a flashcard. She was afraid! It was then that she showed just how creative and smart she is by asking me if she could just use the number 1 instead on spelling it. Aha!

The next aha! moment came when we finally got online and Wendy started feeding her virtual hamster and fish on ABCMouse. I was about to tell her to click on a button when she went ahead and did it herself. She had to have read the words on that button to know to go there. Another thing I noted was that she understood that sometimes she needed to hit the Back button to redo something. Put a mouse in her hand and she knows what to do. But ask her to read aloud and she freezes up.

So what is my point? I have a few:

• Test anxiety is real and running rampant because of all the emphasis placed on test scores in schools. It is not only making kids anxious but their parents and teachers as well. This might actually be a duh! moment rather than an aha! one.
• Test scores in no way show that our kids are learning. If you have to teach a child test-taking skills then the test must not really measure the child's learning at all but their ability to take the test.
  There is so much test anxiety that there is even an accommodation made for those who suffer with it! I'm not sure if you have to prove that you are anxious and how to do that...I think every student in the NM public school system should request this accommodation, see what happens.
• Only competent educators and caring, observant parents/family members can see the nuances in our kids' learning. If I had not been sitting with Wendy, facilitating her learning, I would not have known that she does know how to read at the level she should read at; she's just afraid to show it because her classroom experience has made learning a competition, or more specifically, a test, and she has test anxiety, something bred of the incredibly stupid educational system we suffer. In short, we still need good teachers who have the power to be the best they can be for the benefit of our kids' learning.