It is always risky to imagine what some long-dead figure might have thought about current events. But David Perrin, an experienced high school English teacher in Illinois, makes a good case for Mark Twain’s likely reaction to Common Core testing.
He cites Twain’s writings to show his disdain for test-centered teaching. Perrin gives example after example of Twain’s low regard for the teaching of facts without meaning, taught solely to be parroted back to the teacher.
Perrin writes:
Twain compared the instructional methods in American asylums for the “deaf and dumb and blind children” to those used routinely in Indian universities and American public schools. As a friend of Helen Keller and a champion of her education, Twain was familiar with the methods of asylums; he’d convinced his friend H.H. Rogers to finance her schooling at Radcliffe in 1896. In Following the Equator, he chastises public schools for emphasizing rote learning and teaching “things, not the meaning of them.” He applauds the “rational” and student-centered methods of the asylums, where the teacher “exactly measures the child’s capacity” and “tasks keep pace with the child’s progress, they don’t jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational caprice and land in vacancy—according to the average public-school plan.” In contrast, Twain quips, “In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he doesn’t know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly display the assification of the whole system.”
The Common Core standards and their assessment tools would have given Twain plenty of fodder for his sardonic wit. The first “anchor standard” for writing at the grade 11–12 level declares that students will “write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.” This goal will be assessed by Pearson, one of America’s three largest textbook publishers and test-assessment companies. Pearson will, at least in part, be using the automated scoring systems of Educational Testing Services (ETS), proprietor of the e-Rater, which can “grade” 16,000 essays in a mere 20 minutes.
Robo-grading! How absurd is that? Perrin cites Les Perelman, who is a retired professor of writing at MIT and a leading critic of robo-grading. Perelman “claimed that ETS privileges “length and the presence of pretentious language” at the expense of truth, stating, “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945.” He watched the e-Rater return high scores after he submitted nonsensical passages—for instance, the claim that “the average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents … In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.” These sentences hardly adhere to the stated goal of “valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence” of claims.
Twain would also have been critical of the profit motive involved in Common Core testing. It never ceases to amaze how willing Americans are to sell out principles and values when the next fast-talking salesman comes along.
Perrin concludes:
In Twain’s writings, he returned again and again to a simple theme: Education should be practical and meaningful. When high marks on exams are the goal, students end up focusing on isolated facts and writing in what Twain described in Tom Sawyer as a “wasteful and opulent gush.” He would have almost certainly had something to say about essay-grading software and corporations that refuse to reveal their testing methods.
TV news often supports rote learning when a crew is sent out to ask random people on the street to name. for instance, all of the U.S. Presidents, the names of the U.S. Founding Fathers, the names of the 50 states, the Preamble to the Deceleration of Independence, to quote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and be accurate, and then use the fact that most people can’t answer such questions as evidence that the public schools aren’t doing a good job teaching kids to learn.
I have seen this on the news almost annually—as if it is a seasonal thing to go out and judge education based on the memories of randomly selected people on the street—and if you visit YouTube and use the right search terms, I’m sure you will discover this for yourself.
And of course we have no idea what happens in the editing room back at the TV news station when an hour of film is cut down to 20 seconds.
That’s why I (and probably Twain would have as well) endorse the Father Guido Sarducci 5 minute University:
Geometry
A squared + B squared = C squared
Algebra
X is the unknown
Calculus
???????
Physics
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
Chemistry
Never trust an atom – they make up everything
Biology
All living things are made of cells
Geology
If id happened before, it’ll happen again
Meteorology
Evaporation + Condensation = Precipitation
Astronomy
Earth orbits the Sun
Muy bien, NY Teacher.
Gracias.
Five years of HS Spanish and this is what I’m lest with.
It has been 41 years.
20 minutes to earn a BA and 1 minute to become a lawyer. That seems right.
Thank you so much for my today’s laugh-out-loud!
As a recovering Spanish teacher, the “¿Cómo está Ud.? Muy bien.” was a home run. Et tu, Krazy, Señor Swacker and Spanish Freelancer?
So many great writers (and scientists, and artists, and so on) would have been mediocre (or horrible) on standardized tests. And the same argument can be made for tests and grades in most schools, which still emphasize factual recall over brilliant ideas.
16,000 essays in 20 minutes. So now the human touch in teaching is also under attack. I think Twain might have uttered a few other phrases not fit to print.
I wonder how the program would grade this?
YOU don’t know about me without you have read a
book by the name of The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was
made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,
mainly. There was things which he stretched, but
mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never
seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it
was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt
Polly — Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is — and Mary, and
the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book,
which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as
I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom
and me found the money that the robbers hid in the
cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars
apiece — all gold. It was an awful sight of money
when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took
it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar
a day apiece all the year round — more than a body
could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she
took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize
me; but it was rough living in the house all the time,
considering how dismal regular and decent the widow
was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it
no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my
sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But
Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going
to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would
go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went
Incorrect! Do not pass go. Do not collect diploma.
Twain would’ve been a solid “2”
“A Whale of a Tale”
The Coleman tells a tale
Both fanciful and grim
The Common Core’s a whale
That swallows Huck and Jim
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Mark Twain
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.