Strategy 4: Read Something

Although the state of Texas has equivocated on this point, our district has been perfectly clear and consistent: there will be no reading of non-test materials during test time, even by students who have finished their tests.  All must remain seated and book-free until every student has finished the serious business of testing.  (Some will take all day.  That is inevitable.)  Then, and only then, may students resume the frivolous game they call “reading my book.”

Some naive teachers see reading as an appropriate, or at least harmless, use of time for students who have finished their tests.  Such teachers have failed to notice or to predict the effect of this post-test reading on the other students in the room: those who have not finished testing.

I once was so naive, and I kept old National Geographic magazines in my room for students to read after testing.  (I must admit that, in addition to my naivete, I had what one friend has described as “an antinomian streak.”  To heck with the rules, I thought.  The kids should be allowed to readd.  Was I ever wrong.)

There was one girl that year who showed a total lack of understanding of the test process, and a total lack of planning or of sensitivity to her surroundings.  Unlike her peers, she arrived on time, finished her test in the first hour, and simply would not sleep.  She also seemed averse (or perhaps unable) to entertain herself by means of knuckle-popping, cheek-thumping, arm-frogging, or any other form of self-pugilism.

Sure enough, though, she found interest in a National Geographic article about the ancient cave paintings in France.  She was an artist, I think, but she probably couldn’t bear to spend her time creating something that would just be filed or trashed; her interest in the article was probably a way around the no-scratch-paper rule.  I imagine she was thinking to herself, “If I can’t make paintings on the walls of my cave, I’ll just have to read about someone who could.”

There she was, enjoying her article, when suddenly I noticed that the boy beside her looked dissatisfied.  He kept sneaking peaks at her magazine–not because it could have helpd him on his test (I checked to make sure there were no Lascaux questions) but because he was jealous.  Here he was filling in bubbles, choosing one out of several hypothetical answers to a not-very-believable situation (you know the kind: if Sally buys five cookies for $10, and Rick buys three gumdrops for $1…); while SHE, on the other hand, was actually LEARNING: investigating and finding information about a real human event in the real world.

The boy got a look in his eyes–one that said, “I’m not spending any more time than I have to on this test.  I’m getting one of those magazine things.”  He rushed through the test, turned it in, and picked up a National Geographic about the jewelry making practices of an African tribe.

I was a little embarrassed when an administrator came by and showed her displeasure.  Two students were so engrossed in their reading and even more were getting jealous; she could see TAKS evasion coming, and she wasn’t having any of it.  “What’s that?” she asked.  “Geography and painting?  They aren’t supposed to have turned in their tests yet, and they’re not permitted to read until everyone is finished.”

She was right.  I hope it could never be said of our school that culture and creativity trumped TAKS or polluted our data.  Students are, after all, just units; they are measurable entities whose progress it is our duty to measure and record.  We are accountable for their (i.e. our) productivity.  A school is a factory, not a hippie commune. 

Now students who test in my room do not read.  They sit.  I have learned my lesson.  Reading distracts from the business at hand.  It substitutes “learning”–a vague, shifty concept at best–for the hard, concrete facts of assessment statistics.  We cannot have students distracted from academic success by books.

Even here, though, students show some ingenuity.   On the English test, for example, we are required to give students dictionaries.  They can only use the dictionaries on the first half of the test, though; once they start the second half, they must relinquish this one and only connection with the outside world.  Students who work quickly will often look around before opening the second section; they notice slobbering sleepers and lethargic TAKS evaders who will be working well into the afternoon, and they choose to keep the dictionary and read it for a few hours before starting Part Two.  One student in my class read the whole “J” section of the dictionary before I asked her what she was reading. 

I was being clever; if she had admitted to “reading,” she would have been in violation of our policies.  She would have been stalling rather than working on her test.  A well-laid trap, I thought.

“Nothing,” she said.  “Just looking for a word.”  Of course I couldn’t ask what word, because then I would have been offering help (or, at the very least, suggesting to other students in earshot that that word–whatever it was–was one that should be looked up). 

She had me.  “Okay,” I said, and walked away, and she spent the rest of the day on “K” before opening the second section and finishing it in ten minutes, just in time to miss being put in an overflow room.