In August, the nightmares start. It's not that I don't love my job. I do. But still, like every teacher I know, I experience excitement, worry and even a little dread as the first day of school approaches.
It's a combination of Christmas Eve and April 14.
I spent this past summer carefully crafting lessons. I spent weeks reading young adult novels and putting together a series of team-building activities to start the year.
Then, on the second day of professional development — just before the students arrived — I was handed the eight-page district assessment calendar.
I learned I was expected to administer three mandated tests in first 13 days of school. That took up virtually all the class time allotted to me for those crucially important first two weeks.
There went the classroom contract for behavior, the applications for class jobs, the classroom scavenger hunt.
Instead of spending that time getting to know my students, them getting to know me and each other — all essential components in creating a successful school year — right from the start, it was all about testing.
This year, I have to subject my eighth-grade students to 6,600 minutes of district- and state-mandated testing. That’s 110 hours.
I recognize the importance of testing. But it can't be at the expense of actual teaching.
It means making my kids wait an agonizing two weeks to learn the end of the suspenseful novel we've been reading together as we stop to test. It means discouraging extra questions from curious students in order to “cover the material." It means we've had to give up visits from a guest poet. Because all that good stuff won’t be on the test.
With mandated assessments taking place nearly every three weeks, my students are on constant high alert. I’ve seen more sleeping in class, pacing, crying, and panic attacks.
Astonishingly, we teachers have been given little say in this. I, for one, feel disempowered.
I'm quite sure I'm not alone. I can't imagine how disempowering it must feel for my students — victims of a system that commits this much time to testing over learning.
Tiffany Moyer-Washington teaches eighth grade English at Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy. A version of this commentary first ran in The Hartford Courant.
