Name one common practice in schools that you would like to change, and describe how you would change it.
Journal Reflection #2
Standardized tests are a disservice to our students today. This is the major practice I would change. They do not let teachers teach freely and teach material that is relevant to everyday life. They are expected to teach to the test. This narrows down the curriculum to only material that is being covered on those tests. This does not let the students expand their creativity and learn by doing fun activities and projects because there is no time left for that. Teachers have to stick to mostly worksheets to get the students prepared for those exams. My wife is a Science teacher and she comes home and tells me about how stressful it is to teach when you have the pressure of producing great tests scores from the standardized test, TAKS. Teachers have lost their jobs over their scores being low, but I don’t think this is at all fair for them. They have a whole year to teach a very long list of objectives of which only certain ones would be chosen for the exam. Another thing to take into consideration is that those exams do not accurately measure someone’s capacity to teach. Some students are extremely bright but are horrible test takers; making them not do as well as they might be expected to do. Others are great test takers and they score very high. This doesn’t really measure how much a student has learned. Overall, I believe that they should do away with the standardized tests and let teachers and students enjoy school again.
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