The Existential Pain of Listening to a Child Count to 100
Assessing the Morality of Assessments
Have you ever sat down to listen to a five-year-old count to one hundred?  How ‘bout listening to 28 five-year-olds, individually, one after another, count to 100?
It’s a wee bit of an agony.Â
In the Bellagio buffet of torture methods there is water boarding, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and then there’s having to academically assess a kindergarten class. I’m sure the U.S. government could have broken many more terrorists if they just forced them administer a bevy of kindergarten assessments.
Assessing young children is slow, mind-numbing work mainly because it usually has to be done one-on-one and one-at-a-time. Most people remember taking school exams en masse, all at once, with all their classmates sitting in rows of desks with dividers preventing looky-loos from peaking at the others. But in the younger grades many of the tests have to be administered like personalized spa appointments mainly because young children don’t know how to write, read, or fill in bubbles.
So, for instance, if the assessment goal is to determine whether students can count (and not just call out random numbers like a Bingo caller) a teacher has to listen carefully to the 24 or 28 students utter every single numeral from 1 to 100 (they almost always skip number 15).
However, this type of assessing soon backfires because the teacher ends up secretly hoping the student can’t complete the task. If the slower kids can’t count past fifteen, it’s a win! And a relief.
But smarty-pants children are more conscientious and measured. As they slowly and carefully demonstrate their counting expertise, they eat up your life in sleep-inducing one-alligator, two-alligator, three-alligator nibbles. You can actually feel your life force drain from you by the time the child reaches the 40s and 50s. Children counting can be more potent than Ambien.
In this situation a good teacher wears a solid poker face trying to not look too bothered or resentful or asleep as the student slowly ticks and tocks like a clock never quite reaching quitting time.
Can You Hear the Beep within My Heart?
Every school year an audiologist (a health professional who assesses hearing) would visit my school to test all the children’s hearing.
I always judged her as a cranky old crone who hated her job. She came off as incredibly impatient with the kids. She would be unsmiling and extremely curt as she gave them the instructions to raise their hands when they heard a beep in the headphones she placed on their heads. When they heard the beep on the left side they were supposed to raise their left hand, when on the right, the right hand.
The problem was many of the children were second language learners and had never had a hearing test before. Many kids didn’t know their left from their right sides yet. Honestly, most of the time the students didn’t know what the hell was going on. Who is this angry old white woman and why does she care so fervently about beeps? seemed to be the look on many of the kids’ faces. I’m sure the experience made no sense to them.
The audiologist would snap at the kids when they would raise their hands before the beep was played or if they never raised any hands at all. The entire scenario was very stressful for everyone involved as the audiologist tried to rapidly process scores of kids at a time. But it’s was like fast forwarding through eye exam. It becomes comical.
My blood pressure always went up on Audiologist Day. As the teacher I usually had to stand back and try to keep the other kids from making any noise so as not to interfere with the testing. As I silenced and shushed my class, I was also eavesdropping on the way the old lady was treating my students. I could hear and feel her irritation and frustration. I was always ready to throw down with the old woman especially if she barked too many times at any of my favorites. Why does she do this job if she is just going to be pissed off all the time? I always thought.
But then I realized this one woman had to process tens, if not hundreds of kids a day. I’m sure the Big Audiologist Boss out there somewhere up in the central district office was breathing down her neck, demanding she work faster like some crazed factory boss. More kids! More beeps! Faster! he probably screamed. The audiologist was probably on some deadline I didn’t know about. Her work life seemed composed of traveling from school to school putting janky headphones on squirrely kids and asking then to raise their hand when they heard a beep.
That sounds pretty insane making to me. Teachers weren’t the only ones put in these situations.
The Final Tests
When I was teaching at my third and final school and in what was to be my final kindergarten class, I was at the end of my rope. I was Burnout with a capital, bold-faced, glittery-Beyonce B.
Nevertheless, I was still required to assess my twenty-eight kinder students fifteen times a year. The nine English learners in my class had to be assessed SEVENTEEN TIMES a year.
These assessments were school-specific, district, and state-mandated assessments (ELPAC, DIBELS, Periodic Assessments in math and reading).
Here I was already at the end of my rope yet trying to figure out how to deliver nearly 438 assessments (15 assessments x 28 students + 9 English learners x 2 English language assessments) over the course of the year and still remain a sane human being. Honestly, I was white-knuckling it. There was an old white lady audiologist inside of me trying to get out the same way I imagine werewolves emerge from the cursed during a full moon.
Because this over-assessment bumped up against my own moral sense of the purpose of education, I’ve had some choices to make.
I had pushed back during grade-level meetings against all the testing, but I just ended up in arguments with my colleagues. Ultimately, I was out-voted by them.
As an undermining tactic, however, I implemented some work stoppage and slow-down strategies, such as playing dumb and pretending I couldn’t finish all the assessments because poor little stupid me didn’t really understand how to administer them. It’s Law 21 in Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. Play a sucker to catch a sucker—seem dumber than your mark.
I wasn’t going to win by trying to lessen the number of assessments or by augmenting the assessments themselves; I didn’t have that power. No one teacher ever does. So, I just pretended that since I was new to the grade level that year after a ten-year hiatus from kindergarten, I was so overwhelmed that I could barely understand how to administer something as basic as a kindergarten assessment. It was all very damsel-in-distress play acting.
Administration had to then come into my classroom to assist me with the workload. This strategy served me with two goals: one, I received help with the onerous assignment, and two, administration received the opportunity to see firsthand how stupidly the tests were designed. Let them sit there as a child counts to 100 in slow-motion sloth-speed as their walkie-talkies chirp and their cell phones beep with calls for their attention. Obviously, I could only get away with this dumb bimbo tactic for one year.
Fortunately, I made that year my last.
What is clear to me now more than ever is that this over-assessment is not right. I was suffering both burnout and moral injury.
To assess five-year-old English learners seventeen times a year feels abusive to me.
It’s redundant overkill similar to the police interrogation tactic where authorities keep asking a suspect the same question over and over again in order to break them and force a confession. Assessing is not teaching. It’s not learning. It’s not even true accountability.
With these English assessments in particular, all the English learner children are essentially learning through their experience of constant test-taking is that English is a high stakes interrogative language meant as a tool of evaluation. They don’t get to experience English as a language of play and poetry but of cross-examination, of right or wrong, of multiple choice, of administration and power.
I couldn’t go on implementing these interrogations and so I quit.
I knew that in education as in life every moment counts.