If you ask me, it’s getting way out of hand. I am no stranger to standardized testing. My family moved at the most every two years. It seemed as though I would take the assessment test at my old school, then move to a new state and start a new school just in time to participate in their standardized test. But, like many from my generation, I survived. I don’t know how well I scored on the tests, though I’m sure my mother has the reports around somewhere. We did not dwell on the material in the tests in our classes. I remember getting advice on test taking from my teachers: “get a good night’s sleep” “have a good breakfast” “bring an extra pencil.” That was it.

So when the latest article on standardized testing came out, I found myself behind approximately 98% of the contents. Specifically, this paragraph almost made me cheer:

The obvious cure in Illinois, and in other states, is to carefully limit or dispense with test preparation in class. Teachers should instead be working on the high-level academic skills that students need to perform well, not just on tests, but in college and long afterward.

I think it’s obvious that there is too much time spent on testing preparation. Honestly, I have to admit that when it’s in print in the New York Times, though, I do a little happy dance. Why? It’s getting attention outside the educational sphere. This means that the non-educator citizen is starting to pay attention. So, I say thank you, to the New York Times. I thank all of the parents who have called and complained that their child should not fail a math test for bubbling in the wrong answer when they have the work to show that they got the answer write. I applaud the parent able to de-stress their child by not stressing out over the test at home. I applaud the teachers who do not dwell on the test preparation in their classroom. I applaud Carl Chew for standing up for what was right.

Writing…the Black Sheep of the Curriculum?

I do not, however, applaud the New York Times for the ideas they put forth in the opening paragraph of their essay:

To get the well-educated, highly skilled workers that the country needs, states must strengthen public school curriculums, especially in math and science. States also need to adopt high-quality tests that show how students are performing from year to year.

Unfortunately, the New York Times has jumped on the bandwagon of bettering education without looking at the whole picture. If we are going to strengthen public school currriculums, it needs to be done across the board not “especially in math and science.” I spend a good portion of my summer grading writing placement tests and I have to say that each year, the results seem to get even more dismal. In addition to placing more students into basic writing classes because they cannot write to college standards, I hear more complaints from parents about the placement, get more pressure from administration to not place these students in basic writing and continue to grow more annoyed with the entire system. The problem with placing students in basic writing is two fold. It’s a result of bad PR for basic writing and it’s a result of less writing curriculum in the high schools.

Basic Writing (Read “Remedial Writing” to Parents and Students) is for Dummies

The biggest problem with Basic Writing is the bad PR it has gotten over the past few decades. Few schools offer this class as a credit class, which means the students enrolled in the class are paying for a class that does not in any way count towards the credit hours they need for their degree. Writing instruction in this class often begins with writing paragraphs and graduates to writing a full essay. For this reason, students who are placed in basic writing (and their parents by default) see this class as a course for remedial students or Second Language students. They feel that since they passed all of their English courses in high school and did not fail the Written portion of the Standardized Test, this is not the place for them. Unfortunately, this can create a very hostile learning environment for some students.

AP students are the worst in a Basic Writing class. This is largely because they enter into AP classes in high school with the preconceived notion that passing the AP test clears them from all need to take college writing and that if they don’t pass it, they certainly won’t be placed in Basic Writing.

The High School Writing Curriculum

In many high schools, writing is not actually part of the curriculum. Now, I don’t want to generalize, because I have seen several schools that do a great job of incorporating writing into their English classes. However, for the most part, writing instruction seems to simply involve

“Write an essay discussing the symbolism in [enter novel name here]“

When the student turns in the essay, they receive comments on whether or not they interpreted the symbolism appropriately, used MLA correctly, and used correct grammar. Unfortunately, I have found that too often writing instruction beyond these small areas consists of

• An essay has five paragraphs (introduction, 3 body paragraphs, conclusion)

• A thesis statement goes at the end of the introduction and is constructed as such: “In [the novel's name], [Author's name] uses symbolism to [item one, item two, and item three]

That’s about all it seems that my students know about writing. Even when they place into our traditional Composition I class, they don’t have the information to write a persuasive essay of any form. They can inform until the semester is over, but they can’t persuade an audience. In fact, most of them are never introduced to the ideas of writing to an audience. So it bothers me even more to see writers from the New York Times pushing for improvement in math and science curriculums.

Preconceived Notions of Writing

I think the biggest problem with writing curriculum and students’ disinterest in their writing classes comes from being in a field that they don’t believe will use writing. Over the last few years, I have heard more students say “I don’t need writing in my career, I’m going to be a [insert career here].” I’ve heard this from disciplines across the university, including:

• Business students
  • “My job is about numbers and management, not writing”
• History majors planning to attend law school
  • “I’ll have a clerk who will do my writing for me”
• Nurses
  • “All the writing that we do is notes that appear in charts”
• Chemistry
  • “I’m going to find a cure for cancer, I don’t need to know how to write.”
• Theater
  • “I’m an actor, writing isn’t my job.”
• Art
  • “I say it with paint, not words.”

I could go on and on with the disciplines, but I’ll leave it here. I’m not compiling a laundry list. I don’t know where they get the idea that their specific career is not one that requires writing, but I would love to see more emphasis on this in the curriculum. No matter how much I remind students that they will have to write in their discipline, they seem to brush it off as something their English teacher said. I don’t know anything about their discipline because I’m not part of it.

There’s a problem with the entire system. From not teaching students to write well in high school to the preconceived notions that they don’t need to write. Everything that gets done in this world today is in some way connected to a necessary document. Law students become clerks before they become lawyers. Even as lawyers, they still have to write briefs. Business students have to write proposals. Actors have to apply for jobs and those applications sometimes involve a cover letter.

In short, we need to change writing instruction now. We cannot afford to wait for another generation to slip through the cracks.  Please, teachers, start stressing how important writing is to the subject you teach. Kids need to know. If you teach English, move beyond the five-paragraph essay. If you’re a student, look into your career and see what kind of writing is going to be required; I think you would be surprised. If you or your child gets placed in a Basic Writing class, work with it. There are lots of things that you can learn from this class. I promise, it is not a remedial class. It is designed to aid you in becoming a better writer.

Why We’re Told No.

From my experiences and what I’ve read and gained from talking with other educators, we are generally told we cannot use blogs in the classroom for various reasons.

1. Blogs violate student privacy laws created in FERPA (US only, but I think many countries have similar guidelines).
2. Blogs make students vulnerable to internet predators.
3. Blog posts are disruptive to a student’s education.
4. Students are unaware that what they post online is available to anybody surfing the web.
5. Blogging is not educational.

Now, in the world of academe and politics, the solution to these problems–beyond banning blogs–is to pass rules and legislation that prevents educators from using any form of new technology in the classroom. I think, at least in the realm of academe that these rules are too often passed by administrators who do not fully understand the full capacity of these new technologies. Administrators who blog, from my experiences and the experiences of those that I have spoken to, tend to support teachers in their decision to add this media to their pedagogical practices. This is not to say that all administrators who do not blog are not willing to see how this works, but I believe the majority are too hesitant for the rules listed above. So, I want to take a second and look at each of these objections from a educator’s standpoint.

Blogs violate student privacy laws created in FERPA

(US only, but I think many countries have similar guidelines).

This is a hard one for me to wrap my mind around right now. The reason for this is that I’ve read the FERPA policy many times and I understand that, at it’s core, I cannot give out their personal information. But, I don’t see how this is a violation of FERPA rights. So, I’m working on getting this question answered. This is the reason that I was not allowed to use blogs in my class this semester. It came from one of the deans who is also a former English Professor, so I’m going to see if I cannot have a sit down with her and find out what the scoop is on this one. I’ll post more after I have the chance to chat with her about the reasons behind this.

Blogs make students vulnerable to internet predators.

I can see the motivation behind this argument. When the news headlines are talking about a young girl committing suicide because of a MySpace hoax, I can see the administrators being gun-shy about allowing teachers to require blogs as a course component. However, I still think that this is the wrong way to approach the problem. In my classes, I talk a lot about safety on the Internet. When my students were using Wordpress blogs for their blogs (I’ve now switched to the blog provided through Blackboard due to the rule changes) we talked about the username they chose, the name of their blog and the address they gave to the blog. I made sure that my students were aware of the potential dangers to setting up a “Janedoe.wordpress.com” address. We talked about the information they should and should not put into their About Me pages. But then we took the discussion a step farther.I did not limit the discussion to the class blog. I spent a week’s worth of class talking to my students about the perils of using their real name and information on the Internet. We created a game to play in class focused around who’s MySpace page was the safest.

These are the kind of things that we need to do with our students. If we make them aware of these dangers in real time learning experiences, then we have a chance at teaching them to be careful of the Internet as a whole. Banning blogs from the classroom is not the answer. We have to remember (as former students) the allure to books, movies, and other things that have been banned. But I think that Wes Fryer says it best:

Generally adults help young people learn to drive safely before giving them car keys and turning them loose on the streets of the world. Young people also need guidance and adult assistance to learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. Schools must be proactive, rather than merely defensive, in helping students acquire the skills of digital citizenship needed today and in the future. Simply banning read/write web tools on school networks is an inadequate response: Educators must strive to learn alongside students and parents how these technologies can be safely and powerfully used to communicate and collaborate (SafeDSN)

Seriously, if we expect students to know how to be safe on the Internet, can we expect this knowledge to be ingrained in them before they enter our classrooms? I don’t assume that my students have ever been taught the rules of plagiarism–even if they say they have. So why would I assume that somebody else had told them about Internet safety? Okay, off the soap box and onto the next reason.

Blog are disruptive to a student’s education.

Blogs are not educational.

Alright, I can see these arguments too and I’m going to tackle them together. Blogs can be disruptive to education. If Jane is posting her latest love poem to a crush on their blog instead of working on their Calculus homework. I’m willing to bet, though, that if the blog is for a class, we won’t see the love poem on that blog. So, I contend that we have to look at the difference in personal and educational blogs. I teach in a classroom that doubles as a computer lab during the off-periods. Students can get on these computers during class and surf their MySpace and their Facebook page. They can tweet about how boring my class is that day. Each of these means of communication is disruptive to the student’s education during my class. So, if the concern around blogs is that the tool is disruptive, why do the schools not block these other sites too? These sites are, at least in my class, more disruptive than blogs that I ask students to maintain. Why? Because when students blog on a class related blog, they are not disrupting the educational process, but rather furthering it.

Students are unaware that what they post online is available to anybody surfing the web.

So, while I think Jane’s love poem can be disruptive to her education, I must first ask if the poem Jane is blogging is on a blog for her creative writing class. If so, then the disruption to Calculus is still in the realm of education. If we cannot allow students to further their education through a means that engages them, how can we be educators?

What We Can Do

We cannot combat the problem with all of these issues on our own. But there is one thing that can be done to further facilitate the comprehension of administrators when it comes to blogs and other new medias. We cannot expect administrators to make the right decision if they are not informed on the advantages of these technologies. You know the feeling you get when you realize that your student knows more about the topic you’re teaching than you do? Do you remember how you feel about not knowing the answer to the question? Do you think that administrators may feel the same, especially in a world that automatically assumes that the higher your position of authority, the more you know? We need to sit down and talk to these administrators so that we can ascertain if the problems we’re encountering come from their lack of knowledge with blogs or from their refusal move into the digital age. If the administrator’s problem is lack of knowledge, then we, as teachers, need to take the first step to talk to the administrators about the rewards of blogs (and other medias). If you’re faced with an administrator who refuses to move into the digital age, try talking. If it doesn’t work, be patient, you never know what might happen.

If you haven’t already posted to Al Upton’s blog to support his students, do so. Together, we might change the mind of one administrator. I’m sending an email to my dean. She’s always proven rational in the past.

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This article is also featured on TheApple; join the conversation on privacy and Internet safety with other teachers in TheApple’s article discussion

I’m worried now for multiple reasons. I want to start with the testing itself. A few weeks ago I, along with my FYC colleagues, received an email saying that ACT representatives would be administering the CAAP (Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency) to all of our FYC classes. I paid no notice because, since I teach Basic Writing, my students would not be tested. Now, over the past few weeks I’ve heard the horror stories of teachers waiting for the officials to show up for the class, having to reschedule class plans and just be generally annoyed with the entire process. I said nothing. I’m not an advocate of standardized testing in college (or anywhere else, really), but these were not my issues. Yet today, I got an email that seemed just a little bit ludicrous. Apparently, the tests were not only given to FYC students, but also to our senior class. The senior class, it seems, rebelled. So the school’s response is not to just shrug their shoulders and go on, but to bribe students who did not take the test in their classes. By bribe, I really mean bribe. They are willing to pay these students (via a raffle) to take the test. It seems they promised ACT that a specific number of seniors would take the test and they have to meet that quota. So now the students they are attracting are not necessarily made up of a true sampling of our senior class, but will be made up partially of those who are seeking a “reward” for some kind of participation. It seems to me that this will, ultimately, throw off our sample pool.

The reason this worries me is that since our state is considering mandatory assessment. I have a strange feeling that these “experimental” tests are to help decide if this issue should become a law in the state. This means that instead of seeing what our school is doing, they are seeing how far students who need an extra few dollars in their pocket can be assessed. This sample in no way will reflect the student body graduating this year and, therefore, we run the risk of having to cater to the content of mandatory testing because a few people wanted to earn some extra money.

Still, I have not answered the overlying question of why I am against mandatory testing. Well, that all goes back to my teaching experience. I teach in a college where students not only must have specific SAT scores (1000 on the verbal and math) or a 21 composite ACT score. Truthfully, I would have just squeaked into the school as a Freshman. But that score is only valid if the student has also passed the state exit exam. I took an assessment test at the end of my junior year in high school and I did fine. But it was not a mandatory test at that time. Now, with the mandatory assessment, teachers focus too much energy on preparing students to pass the test and too little on teaching them what they need to know. When I was in high school, the test was poo-pooed as just an “experiment” so our teachers did not focus on the content of the test as the basis for our class syllabus. Now, however I spend the first few weeks of FYC teaching students that the 5-paragraph essay is not a form carved in stone–a concept they generally don’t comprehend until midterms. In addition, I have to teach them that a thesis statement does not have to specifically include the topic statement and the statement of the three topics in their essay. I have students in my class who didn’t score well enough on the state test to be placed into traditional FYC classes, but are brilliant writers. They’re in my class because they can’t write a 5 paragraph essay. Sure, I have students who can’t write a paragraph, but the majority of these students are working with problems traditionally addressed in our regular FYC classes. They feel that they are “bad” writers because they couldn’t write the 5 paragraph essay. What makes them “bad” writers–and this is not just the Basic Writing students, but a majority of our incoming freshmen, is that they don’t know what a topic sentence is and they can’t identify a thesis statement in any form other than the one they were taught to write in high school. They don’t know what plagiarism is and they can’t use any style manual to cite a reference. They don’t know these things because they weren’t emphasized in high school–they weren’t on the state test.

Now I swore that I would not make this post a “back in my day” rant, but I know that my high school English teacher would never have let us out of her class if we didn’t know the basics to writing. The basics, in her mind, included a full understanding of MLA, topic sentences, complex thesis statements, and 7-15 paragraph essays. There are times in class when I’m thinking that I’m teaching things in class that I would expect students to have learned in high school. I can’t be mad at them for not knowing this class, and, to some extent I can’t be mad at the teachers who are doing what they are told to do–prepare the students for the test. But I’m worried. What I’m worried about is that we’re going to be sending students into the real world with too much attention on what needs to be learned to pass an assessment test and not what they need to know in the real world. In other words, I’m worried that some day, somewhere, an accountant will be teaching a new secretary that they do not use the five-paragraph format in the real world.

That is my worry. And if we keep bribing students to take an “experimental test” I fear that is where we will be in the next decade. If that happens, I may hang up my PowerPoints and handouts and run for office. This state could use a former teacher as a governor. Why not me? I will be able to write more than the five paragraph essay.

As I experimented successfully with blogging in the classroom, I began contemplating it as a dissertation topic. When I found out I was teaching developmental writing this fall, I was enthused. I was waiting patiently for a chance to experiment with blogging at such an important level.

But then the other shoe dropped. We’ve been going through some “changes” in our department this semester. We have an enthusiastic and open-minded new director that can infuse some life into our FYC classes. We have a new common syllabus that we’re allowed some flexibility with. We have random new rules. And, apparently, we have security rules too. When all this newness began, I was polite enough to ask about using blogs in the class. Now, I did this because they have gone as far as telling us to refuse to answer emails sent from students using an email address not assigned to them through the school. It had to do with “privacy” and “security.” It doesn’t make sense to me. I usually use my Gmail account because no other server that I am familiar with allows me to 1)be alerted the minute I have email, 2)keep conversations together instead of having to sift through individual emails with the same topic and 3)allowed me to make my life as simple as 54 categories in one mailbox. But, I changed.

And, in addition to changing, I was polite enough to ask if I could use blogs. Yes, I know the saying “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” but I was being nice and trying, in the long run, to save my job.

So, a week later, I get an email back telling me that the word has come down the foodchain that no blogs can be used that are not hosted on the school server. Well, in essence, the school just said that I could not blog. Why? We have one way to access a blog–through Blackboard. Not that this would be a problem, but this aspect of Blackboard is currently only available to distance learning instructors. So, I’m left with no blog.

Okay, I can work with this. I have plans once we get through this semester. But what’s really bugging me–in much the same way that I was bothered with the fact that my students could watch YouTube videos in class but nowhere else on campus–is that the reason I have been forbidden to allow my students to use a blog in the classroom is apparently for their security.

Now, understand that when I emailed about this originally, I was clear to explain the safety to the blogsite I wanted to use–this one. I also explained how blogs could be set as private and all that jazz. But no, this site is not secure enough for the school. Okay, I can see them denying it. But there should be larger concerns if they’re going to play the security card. Facebook and Myspace are still available to students from their dorm rooms, computer labs, library and even from the computers they use in the classroom.

It’s starting to sound, to me, as though this is not a privacy issue, but rather a freedom issue. We were told when they required us to use only our school email (which we can’t even forward to another account that will allow us to answer back using the school email) that this was because they could keep the emails on the main server even if we deleted them. That way, if we needed them later, we could have access to them. I’m assuming that means that they can also read any of them at any time. And, by forcing students to use only school sponsored sites, they have the ability to censor anything we say. (In fact, you should check out the changes to my “About Me” page.)

All in all, it sounds like a nice big panopticon where the administration has the ability to quash our freedom of speech, invade our privacy and censor as they wish. If you will excuse me, there’s a link I need to delete from my page before I call it a night.

I assigned my students 4 videos on same sex marriage and homosexuality to watch on YouTube. They were to have read them and blogged on them by midnight Wednesday. Now, I gave them this assignment for several reasons. First, one of the articles they have the option to write their first essay focuses on YouTube and I wanted them to be more familiar with the site before entering into the essay. Second, It never crossed my mind that YouTube would be unavailable from the dorms, library, and computer labs on campus. The reason it never crossed my mind was becasue I knew YouTube was accessible in the classrooms–I’ve caught several students watching YouTube videos in class during my lecture before and I assumed that if this was accessible in the class then it would certainly be accessible at other locations on campus. I was WRONG!

Around 10am Wednesday morning I began getting emails from students trying to access YouTube on campus. Either YouTube was blocked in their location or the video would simply pretend to load, play two seconds, and skip to the end. After offering all the potential solutions I could come up with, I got on the phone to the helpful guys in Information Technology (or Internet Technology–I’m never really certain what that anagram actually stands for), I discovered that though the videos are accessible during my lectures, they cannot be accessed anywhere else on campus becuase of bandwith problems. Ugh.

So I made a decision to show the videos in class. I felt that this was the best step, since I had been told that as an instructor I could access the videos without a problem. Now, these videos were pivotal to the lecture I was giving on Aristotle’s triangle of rhetoric. I had chosen two videos that focused heavily on ethos and logos with little emphasis on pathos, and I had two videos where there was little logos, no ethos, but a lot of in your face pathos. Everything went well in my 8am class; the videos played and we had a wonderful discussion on them in relation to the triangle of rhetoric. But then came my 9:30 class where I never had the chance to play the two pathos based videos and was left dangling with no strong way to show the students these pivotal pathos appeals.

I was so amazingly frustrated at this point that I let my students leave almost 20 minutes before the end of class. I cannot understand why they could access these videos on their own in class during a lecture, but I don’t have the ability to use these videos during a serious lecture. Certainly I will be the first to admit that the content of the videos is not the most scholarly information in the world, but it fit the discussion of my lecture AND engaged my students. We are supposed to be moving into a world of technology in the classroom, but how can we further this move to a less stressful place? Is there a way to “permit” YouTube access with a phonecall to IT?

Where do we draw the line on what our students have the right to know in order to make their own decisions? Where do we draw the line on what is allowed as a teaching tool in the classroom? I am so ready to move into the next generation of teaching, but I really wish that the people with the ability to make this move run smoother would give us some guidance on how we can actually do this. I know why YouTube has been banned and I can understand this decision. That does not mean that I can fathom why the site has not been banned across campus and why my students can distract themselves in class with this site, but can’t do homework assigned on the site. How do we rectify these problems?