Unfair Testing

I have never been a naye sayer to testing. We all need some sort of assessment and evaluation procedure. I'm not saying that I should be evaluated based on these numbers but testing is just part of the job. Today is day 3 of testing. We made it through the practice test and the first reading test. Of course this includes the "trick" question on the practice test on equivalent fractions AND the fact that there are 14 versions of the test that require different directions. They go something like this: If you have versions 1-8 you will begin on page 12 #29 and work through page 17 and #41. If you have version 9-14 turn to page 8 #12 and work through page 11 #28. You have got to be kidding me. These are 8 year old children we are talking about. We actually got through that pretty well on Part 1. Then we had Part 2 this morning with similar directions. For some reason it was much more difficult for them to understand today. Maybe they just thought it was a one time thing and they survived it yesterday. After recess they had Part 3 and as usual I sat down to read the test. That's when I started taking notes on "Important things to teach next year." Let's see there were questions on interrogatives, exclamatory statements, articles (there are actually only 3 of them in the entire English language - P-L-E-A-S-E), homophones, the meaning of bi in bicycle, and lots and lots of stuff on syllabication. I guess my greatest complaint is the distraction of the phrasing of questions. They are required to read a big long passage and then the first question might be about the correct syllable division of a word within the text. These kids are ready to answer questions about the main idea or how a sentence could have been worded better and they have a question about dividing the word animal or the key words on a dictionary page for kite. They may call the text they read an article, a passage or a story. We are just not testing skills. We are testing question interpretation and test taking ability. There are even questions that I don't really know the correct answer to. One of the questions was on a folk tale about a lamb who tricks a wolf. The sentence in the story was something about a "lake through the trees." The question asked for the phrase that would give more details about the trees and here are the answer choices: woods, forest, tall green things or oaks and pines. Now I think the answer is oaks and pines but if one of my kids was writing about a lake through the trees you better believe I would conference with them if they wrote a lake through the oaks and pines. Do oaks and pines even grow in the same place? I don't think so. Personally I like "a lake through the woods" Thank God I'm the teacher and don't have to take the test! Well tomorrow we have 2 math tests so we'll see how they can confuse my little darlings in the world of numbers.