Testing

Sunny has the CRCT this week. That's the big important statewide test for Georgia.

I think there's a general overemphasis on testing in public education, especially in the context of the horribly failed policy of No Child Left Behind. However, I'm really pushing for Sunny to do well on these tests. We're promising him some major swag if he gets good scores. I told him that he usually only gets toys on his birthday and Christmas, but he has an opportunity to earn one with the CRCT.

If he had a different personality, I wouldn't be pushing him as much, or at all. But he's got a lot of self-confidence and competitive spirit. He loves competing. He will do almost anything (eat vegetables, put away clothes) if we can frame it as a race.

Right now, his competitiveness is harming him at school as much as it's helping him. He always wants to be the first to finish so he can yell "DONE!" I'm trying to get him to shift his focus and asking him to compete against the test and compete against himself. I've explained that the best achievement is beating yourself... establishing your own goal and then surpassing it, like the "personal best" of a marathon runner. It's a fairly subtle point so I doubt he understands it yet, but if I keep repeating it, it should eventually sink in.

Since he gets so easily frustrated with us over homework, we're not personally doing any test prep. That would be a recipe for blow-ups. Instead, we've increased his tutoring sessions to three times a week.

I know he can do really well if he just slows down and focuses. His tutor is reinforcing that point as well. According to his 504 plan, he'll have special accommodations at testing time, away from the other kids, and I think that's going to help him focus.

I had an interesting talk with my other cousin last week -- the one who used to have severe ADHD. He was in town visiting my older cousin. He got very emotional when he talked about his own education and gave me some warnings based on his own experience. He felt his mother simply gave up on him when it came to school. My aunt is loving, but disgustingly passive, and I could see her accepting without a complaint anything that any authority figure told her needed to be done. He was put into a self-contained classroom. "They just warehoused me with the retards for six years." I would never use that word myself, but that's how he phrased it. He was finally mainstreamed in junior high, but by that point he'd barely learned to read. He's obviously very bitter about it. He wanted me to make sure that I wouldn't do that to Sunny, and I reassured him I wouldn't.

Although I think our schools overemphasize testing, and that approach only serves a minority (as in cognitive skills minority)... I have to admit, I've benefited from it. I'm a great test-taker. There's something about the application of brute intellectual force, problem by problem, that fits well with my psychology. On the other hand, my mother is brilliant with puzzles, as was my grandfather, and I never inherited that. I have no patience for them.

My mother once bought me a Rubik's cube, but she was the one that learned to solve it, not me. For one birthday, she got me a $20-dollar bill embedded in a clear plastic sliding puzzle, and I spent about half a minute trying to solve it before I got so mad I took a hammer and went to the garage and smashed it to bits so I could get the money. And I was great at math up to the algebra level, and then I became hopeless at it, probably because the nature of the problems began to resemble puzzles. I also failed to inherit my father's genius for languages. But I always did great at any kind of standardized test.

Test-taking is a skill you can learn. It doesn't really reflect what you know, although a good base of general knowledge does help. It's a fairly arbitrary skill, but it's an incredibly important one in today's society.

I always approached tests in a hostile manner. I'd glare at the test a while, psyche myself up, silently threaten it, then take out my pencil and begin beating it into submission.

I don't know if Sunny is going to develop good test-taking skills or not. Still, I'm going to keep my expectations high. If he doesn't succeed in this area, I'm sure he will succeed in other areas.

Anyway, according to this article, what I do as a parent doesn't matter anyway. Ha! Seriously, I do agree with the article's premise that parents drastically underestimate the importance of the peer group. I've complained about this tendency innumerable times when it comes to transracial adoption, but it's worth noting again... it's a general parenting issue too.