How to Cope With the Soul-Killing Effects of TAKS

This is the first in a series of posts about TAKS–the state assessment that, for the past week, I have been proctoring at the high school where I teach.

These posts will NOT discuss the test itself: its narrow focus, its cultural bias, its stultifying effects on curriculum.  This is not a “standardized-testing-is-ruining-our-schools” post.

I will, instead, discuss the soul-killing effects of the test administration.  The part that I, the proctor, am responsible for.  I am writing this post because I am personally, individually, directly responsible for killing several souls this week.

Killing.  Souls.

There are three important rules you need to know to understand why I am using this language.  First, the state requires that we proctors read a five-page set of instructions to the students each of four mornings before the test.  These instructions are, verbatim, the same each day.

Second, every student must take four tests: English, Math, Science, and Social Studies–each on a different day.  It does not matter how quickly they finish each test; they must wait until the next day to do the next one.  (Our campus also mandates “benchmark” tests in February–practice TAKS to diagnose student strengths and weaknesses–so students must actually do this entire process twice.)

Third, and this is a “non-negotiable” (to appropriate an administration buzzword), students who finish the test early are not allowed to do anything–ANYTHING–until everyone in their testing room is finished.  In fact, to prevent students from rushing through the test, our campus mandates that no one turn in their answer documents until noon each day.  Students are thus required to spend at least four hours on each exam.  (Each exam has about sixty multiple-choice questions.  Only the English requires any writing.  None of the math questions require more than three steps to complete.)

So, by nine o’clock on the first day of testing, at least three students have finished their tests and begun looking at me, their proctor, with an “Are you kidding me?” expression.  I have denied them access to books, sketch paper, games or activities of any kind, for at least the next three hours; and, looking around at their peers, they begin to realize that some will take even longer than that to finish.

The resultant three, four, or five hours of absolute silence and inactivity KILL OUR SOULS.  As proctor, I enforce the rules: no talking, no reading, no playing, no music, no notewriting, nothing.  When a student looks at another and raises his eyebrows–clearly a look of exhasperation and nothing else–I say in my perfect, monotone proctor voice, “You are not permitted to send or receive messages with other students during the test.  If you send or receive messages during the test, your test may be invalidated.  This means that it will not be scored.”

I walk the room watching students test, watching them finish, watching them DO NOTHING–until the end of the school day.

Of course when everyone DOES finally finish, an hour or so before the school day would normally end, we cannot release them; instead, we must hold them in their testing rooms until the bell rings.  Finally, we allow them to read or draw or play cards, but by now, their souls are already dead.  It is too late.

Yet the souls of some are resilient and industrious.  As I proctor, I notice countless ingenuous coping strategies: improvised circumventions of our road stops, tunnels out of our rigid jail-cell policies that, for four whole days, try to squelch all that is human in them.  I offer the following report as a tribute to those few students’ indomitable spirits.

Today I post the top five strategies.  Tomorrow, who knows?  Perhaps I will tell how we, the proctors, manage to stay physically, if not spiritually, sentient.

The students are more creative than we are, though.  My hat is off first of all to them.