I had an interesting discussion today with my 10th graders. I’m having them take a mock Regents exam in January, to be better prepared for the real one in June (and so I can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses). The school had a passing rate last year of around 14% for this test, so it’s a Big Deal. I emphasize a lot with them that it’s not impossible, and that they just have to try, but they’re understandably nervous. A 65 on this test is the gateway to graduation for many of them, and it’s also a big stretch.
One of my higher-ability students raised her hand and asked “Miss, why do we talk about the Regents being so hard here? At other schools, they act like it’s easy.” It was a good question, and everyone seemed interested, so I took some time out of my lesson plan to talk about cultural literacy, and what it means for these kids.
For example, the phrase “The end justifies the means” shows up on the Regents 9 years out of 10. I know what it means because my parents talked to me about it, and I knew who Machiavelli was, or at least knew that “machiavellian” meant scheming. (And I knew the word ’scheming.’ Yesterday the 9th graders struggled with ‘tremendously.’) My students, whose parents mostly don’t speak English, or didn’t go to college, don’t have that advantage. My students have jobs, or little brothers and sisters to watch after school, and they don’t sit around discussing current events and reading the newspaper with anyone after dinner. My parents had a gigantic dictionary in the living room, and sometimes I’d flip through it and quiz them on long words.
I explained that the starting line is different for them, than it was for me, but it’s not because I’m smarter. And then we talked a little bit about the racist attitudes of what you “should know” inherent in standardized testing.
Depressing? Enlightening? It depends, I suppose, on what they ultimately take away from the discussion.
January 3, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Dude, I think it’s utterly empowering and necessary for the kind of teaching you’re trying to do. How can we expect them to overcome these enormous racial and cultural and economic barriers without ever discovering or acknowledging that they’re there? (If nothing else, your average culturally literate college-bound high-schooler ought to be familiar with the concept of the achievement gap.) It’s patronizing to think that we’ll be able to Rescue them without ever letting them know that that’s what we’re doing. (Not that that’s what you think; I’m just all steamed up now at those people.)
One of the best moves Heartthrob Charter School ever made was teaching those kids terms like “dialect” and “prescriptive standard English” and “code shifting” and “white-dude handshake” — talking openly about the injustices that meant you were about to force them to learn to master all those things. (The alternative is, you end up trying to talk down a room full of extremely angry eighth graders at Crappy Charter School who happened to have glimpsed the annual report: “Who the fuck they calling underprivileged, Miss? They calling me poor?” True story.)
January 3, 2007 at 9:58 pm
It’s sad that kids feel stupid because they can’t master these exams. Luckily I teach math in a pretty good school and I’ve come up with lots of tricks to get them through the regents. The Math A regents has really been dummied down over the years. I think I spend more time coming up with ways to “get over” than I do when I teach–especially when I have low achieving kids.
January 4, 2007 at 7:16 am
Are we talking about the English Regents exam here? I think if you drill them to death (I know, it sucks) you can make them pass. And if it’s a do-or-die thing they might as well get it over with. That’s what I’ve been doing to get ESL kids to pass, and it does seem to work.
January 4, 2007 at 7:34 am
It’s the Global Regents, actually, and I do a fair amount of drill-and-kill with it (“When you see ‘river valley’, you circle ‘fertile soil.’”) Unfortunately, since it covers 4 semesters of history, and it’s heavily weighted toward the 50 multiple choice questions, it’s hard to give them a formula for success.
Mostly I want them to take it because when they sit down and realize they have only 3 hours to do 50 mc, a DBQ, and 2 essays, they tend to freak out and give up. I want them to know what’s coming. I don’t expect them to do super well (ie, pass).
June 16, 2007 at 7:27 pm
[...] literacy II By the way, when I say the test has a bias based on cultural literacy, here’s what I mean: One of the short-reading passages was about feudal rights, and the [...]