What's the Point?

I tried to type in an overview of my educational career stretching back to 1976 when I took my first job teaching 5th grade at a private school (Manning brothers & Harry Connick Jr. attended) in New Orleans in my profile. I went over 1200 characters, so I'll get around to that another time.

Six days until students show-up and I am basically ready. Maybe I'll start work on the first bimester exam. This is something they started half-way through the year last year and is supposedly mandated by the Honduran government. Every 9 weeks we stop at week 8 to review what we have covered the first 7 weeks and then take a week to give the students a 2 hour exam in every subject. About half the students study (and then promptly forget) and the other half take a 2 week mental vacation.

I find it fascinating how we write missions and visions of creating life long learners and then test the fun right out of school. When working in teacher training in London, I did some research on the effects of high stakes testing in the UK - higher drop-put rates, increased vandalism and juvenile delincuency. Later when I was the director of a charter school in New Orleans I took a similar look at the effects in the USA. The first 10 states to introduce high stakes testing had the highest drop out rates and highest percentages of vandalism and juvenile delinquency. Hopefully one day some lawyer will get a class action suit together with all the students who have been victimized by high stakes testing and sue some sense into state departments of education.

I recently received an email from a student who was in a school I ran in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. It was a small (70 students K-10) international school at the foot of the Kopet Dag mountains that separate Turkmenistan from Iran. There were probably 10 nationalities represented in the student body. Once every 2 weeks or so we would break the school into their "tribe" - based on the tribes in Turkmenistan. There would be kindergarteners with 10th graders and all sorts of language mixes in each tribe. We would have half a day of activities for fun and points and school spirit building.
The school (part of the Quality Schools International) system "graded" students on their mastery of skills and concepts. Parents got a report card that showed what skills and concepts students were working on and had mastered. Students worked at their own appropriate pace. We gave the Iowa Tests every year and parents were able to see how their multi-lingual internationally educated child compared with average students from the USA and we could use it to gauge how the kids did with a similar aged US cohort - but it didn't determine anything else or change what we did.

Below is the email from the former student. Her parents were with the Indian diplomatic corps.

Hi Dr. C,


Im sorry about the previous mail you got. I didn't send it, must have been spam. Everyone is fine on this side too. I am not in NYC anymore. My dad got transferred back to India last August. Nishtha is in 8th grade now. I got into med school but it's very tough- the studies I mean. I just hope I can get through and finally become a doctor.
What's new on your side? You must be having summer vacation, right?
You'll find it hard to believe but after all the schools I have studied in, I still find Ashgabat International School to be the best. I really miss AIS. Wish I could rewind time and then pause for a while. Those days were the best! Miss you guys a lot!
Love u
Take care
Neeharika

In that email I find the point of education. A person who now aspires to be (I'm sure) a great doctor values above all her educational experiences in a tiny little school that encouraged little more than enjoying learning and learning at her own pace.