Chris Cotton teaches high school English in Ohio. He posted it on the Facebook page of NE Ohio Educators and given permission to post it here.

He writes:


Harnessing Student Anger on Ohio’s EOC Tests

I’ve been working on my preparations for next year. I teach English to a class of remedial-level sophomores who are several years behind in reading level. I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall trying to figure out how to prepare them for Ohio’s EOC (End-Of-Course) tests. My first feeling is that I can’t prepare them. It’s simply not possible.

I also teach AP seniors, and parts of these tests (ELA I for freshmen and ELA II for sophomores) would be very difficult for those students. In fact, most educated adults would struggle. I struggled with them myself.

I’ll give a little sample from the one (and there’s only one) released ELA I test on the Ohio Dept. of Ed. website. This test for freshmen asks the students to compare two passages: one from King Lear, and one from Shakespeare’s source material, written 40-50 years earlier.

In freshman English it’s traditional to teach one Shakespeare play (usually Romeo and Juliet). But that comes, even in honors classes, with a great deal of teacher support and scaffolding.

I read King Lear in a college literature class, and it was a challenge then, even with a textbook that had at least five times as many explanatory notes as the ELA test. Here is an example of lines that have no explanatory notes on the test:

“Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,
With shadowy forests and with champains rich’d,
With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,
We make thee lady. To thine and Albany’s issue
Be this perpetual.”

Imagine seeing this on a high-stakes test if you’re a student reading at fourth grade level. There isn’t even a note saying that Lear is pointing at a map (“this line to this”). How many adults could tell you what “champains” are, or “wide-skirted meads”? There’s inverted sentence order, archaic pronouns, apostrophes that look like typos. “Albany” is a person, not a city, with an “issue” of some sort.

We are deliberately inflicting pain on young people. I know my kids, and I know they will feel humiliation when they begin this test. Many of my kids believe that the world and school especially are out to get them. A test like this is confirmation. Most of them will simply give up after reading the first line of the passage. It’s too painful.

So, I’m trying to figure out a way to prepare my students to not give up at the outset. They need to do as well as they can, due to the “point system” we have in Ohio for graduation. In one course, I can’t teach them all the material covered by this “end-of-course” test (because that’s impossible). I don’t even think I can “teach to the test.” No, what I have to do is teach against the test.

A lot of my students have a great deal of anger, much of it directed at school (sometimes for fair reasons). How can I work with that anger, so it doesn’t lead to self-destructive capitulation, but instead to energy for getting as many points as possible.

So I’m pulling together a unit of some sort predicated on the fact that these tests are a scam. If I can validate their anger, could I then redirect it in a direction that helps them?

I have a few questions for the other teachers on this site:

What do you think of this basic idea? Is it crazy?

Is there any text or materials you would suggest for reading?

I’d like to show a movie as part of the unit. I know there are many on the topic, is there one you’d recommend?

Thank you very much,

Chris Cotton