Surviving At Home

Every year since third grade my oldest daughter has taken the state’s standardized test. For these last two years, I never really put much emphasis on these tests because I didn’t want to make her nervous and I had always believed that these tests were more for showing how well a teacher was teaching than how well a student knew the material.

Apparently I was wrong.

For these last five years in elementary school, the classes have always been divided pretty evenly with students of different “levels”. They were not going to be accused of segregation by putting all the top level students in one class and have all the struggling students in a separate class. But apparently the middle school DOES divide the students in this manner so this annual standardized test has acquired all new importance.

I was stunned when the note came home from the school’s reading specialist suggesting that my daughter start working with a Reading Tutor. We were blindsided because this is the kid who was always in the top reading groups and who always received outstanding grades in reading on her report cards. After I gathered all of her past report cards and was ready to wreck havoc on this so-called specialist, I learned that her test score from 4th grade went down, thus prompting this teacher to test her skills and make this recommendation.

Come to find out from another friend, these test scores are looked at VERY closely by the middle school administrators when they meet in the spring to put these new students into “teams”, or different levels. The same thing will happen when my daughter enters high school. And since our district is so big, they won’t have time to analyze each student. They’ll just see on a computerized report what numerical level she achieved on the test and plop her onto a team. It won’t matter to them that if she had scored only two more points on last years test she’d be categorized in a higher level.

Since we want her placed with other driven and ambitious students in middle school, I’m going to search out a SCORE Learning Center for a Reading Tutor just in case our reading help at home doesn’t help her enough.

I hate to place such an emphasis on these tests but it sure seems like these state tests are almost as important as the SATs.

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Just the other day my neighbor was complaining that our daughters’ preschool didn’t focus enough on academics and she didn’t think her daughter was well-prepared for kindergarten. She then went on to state that she wanted more academics because she and her husband just don’t spend the time sitting down with their daughter to go over “the basics”, so she feels like she’s missing out and will be behind the rest of the class.

I don’t think my neighbor noticed my bug-eyed reaction to her comments because she still smiles and speaks to me but I left the school that day sad for her daughter because it seemed like her parents were missing the point of being in preschool. Granted, everybody has a different opinion about how children learn best, but it was made very clear that this particular pre-K purposely focuses on “learning through play” to help improve the children’s social skills as well as gross and fine motor skills. But my daughter is also learning the “academics”…she can spell her first and last names, she can count to 20, and she knows the alphabet. If memory serves, she’s at exactly the same place my older daughter was at 5 years ago when she was about to enter kindergarten.

Children are like sponges and just soak up everything that they hear and it’s sad to think that some parents either don’t have the time or don’t have the desire to just sit and play with their children. The kids will be in school learning academics for a minimum of 13 years so let them play in preschool.