Living in 7.5 Billion Different Worlds

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
~ Horace Walpole (1717 – 1797)

I like Walpole’s quote, but I regard this as one of the many oversimplifications cluttering up our attempts to make sense of life. In the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, hardly anyone tests out as 100% feeler or 100% thinker. I tend to be more thinker than feeler, but I “feel” plenty. Myers-Briggs lays this personality trait out as a spectrum.

mbthink

Interestingly, I’ve become more of a feeler as I get older. One reason why I knew the time had come to retire from teaching: I’d reached the point where I no longer felt like bringing down the hammer on my cheaters. When administration required that I give impossible tests to my students, tests set sometimes a full six years above their documented, functioning, academic level, I had a hard time getting excited about cheating. If I had to play a game I could absolutely never win, no matter how hard I tried, I might have cheated too.

I sometimes reflect on my last formal group of students. A few students succeeded under the Common Core No Excuses regime — the academically strongest kids and a few others with exceptional drive and willingness to seek help. But almost everybody else got clobbered. I worked relentlessly to keep them in the game, to salvage their hope. Sometimes I bought them Saturday morning McDonald’s treats just to get them to stay in the game and come to tutoring.

But every single child in the world is unique. In a fight on the playground, some fold into a fetal position, some come out swinging, some run away, some call for the teacher, and some keep pounding away even after they realize they have lost, and the blood from their nose chokes them. Some fight fair. Some pull out hair, clumps that blow through the hallway later. I have definitely seen too many fights.

The Common Core Standards will fail us because those standards have been designed to be One Size Fits All. One size never fits all. My last year felt unreal at times, as administrators allowed me no flexibility in tests and quizzes that my students often could barely read.

I’ll close with a copy of a 7th grade Common Core test given to a bilingual student, I have copies of lots of tests like this. The special education teacher had to give the same tests and quizzes to her cognitively delayed students, too. Readers, tougher standards may sound like solutions to our academic challenges, but they are not. The wrong standards might as well be directions on how to walk to Mars.

IMG_1483(Click on pic for a better view.)