Re:'A Test You Need to Fail': A Teacher's Open Letter to Her...
by eropple on Saturday March 24, 2012 @11:16AM
(#3749552)
> Anyone who wants to ace them, can and will
This is an amazingly provincial comment and it does not reflect well upon you.
Rather than assuming malice in your comment, however, I would gently suggest that it would be rather difficult for someone passed from grade to grade without basic functional literacy to ace such a test. Or, for a sneakier, harder to quantify example, there are "standardized" tests in circulation (and I was exposed to some of them in middle and high school) where certain cultural information was implicitly demanded. Probably not a problem for middle-class suburban kids, but unlikely to be appropriate for underprivileged very-rural kids (of which the testing area had many).
A narrow worldview isn't something to be ashamed of, but it is something to recognize and compensate for when making statements like yours.
This is an amazingly provincial comment and it does not reflect well upon you.
Rather than assuming malice in your comment, however, I would gently suggest that it would be rather difficult for someone passed from grade to grade without basic functional literacy to ace such a test. Or, for a sneakier, harder to quantify example, there are "standardized" tests in circulation (and I was exposed to some of them in middle and high school) where certain cultural information was implicitly demanded. Probably not a problem for middle-class suburban kids, but unlikely to be appropriate for underprivileged very-rural kids (of which the testing area had many).
A narrow worldview isn't something to be ashamed of, but it is something to recognize and compensate for when making statements like yours.