Hi newbie! Or established reader. Or alien exploring Earth’s mysterious culture. Hello to all my readers.

I’d like to start today by quoting from the eminent sage, Fred Rogers, gone but not forgotten in a time when Fred Roger’s neighborhood is a reminder of soft songs, puppets, and quiet messages about kindness, compassion and sharing.

“The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling that they are worthwhile,” Fred once said.

What does it take to feel worthwhile? I’d ask. In other words, what does it take to develop self-esteem? We debate nitty-gritty details, but in the end I have come to believe that most kids’ self-esteem will stand up to challenges when a student feels lovable and competent. We can work to make our students feel lovable, but that piece will seldom provide resilience by itself. Students need a sense of agency, a sense that their actions can change their lives and world.

That’s what poorly-handled testing can take away. If your administration demands that you regularly administer tests that your students are “failing,” based on common lesson plans, the Common Core, a fierce desire for ever more benchmark data, or whatever — you MUST do damage control. What can you do?

1. After emphasizing they must do their best, tell students they are taking a diagnostic test to find out what students in the grade know so that instruction can be prepared to teach them what they don’t know. Emphasize that not knowing answers is fine. The questions they miss will tell teachers what to teach.
2. Have students make a note of what they don’t know that they especially wish to learn, if appropriate.
3. Create the tutoring time necessary to get at least some students ready to pass. If that time does not exist in school, try to come up with a library, McDonalds or similar afterschool plan. Call parents. Get as much buy-in as you can. Sometimes a few extra weekly hours of tutoring may do the trick. In my experience, kids who will not go to the library will go to McDonalds.
4. Give extra tests or projects that you know students can do. You may be drowning in required tests, but that extra Martian calendar project can be a win for students who are never winning. You have to create wins — and real wins that represent genuinely successful academic efforts. What those wins might be will depend on student ages and the content you teach.
5. Never miss a chance to praise a successful academic effort.

For some readers, this post may not apply at all. But I lived through the year of six benchmark tests combined with unreadable tests written by an East-Coast consulting firm based on math years above my students operating levels, and mandatory quizzes based on those mostly deadly tests.

Should the inappropriate tests be coming too thick and fast, please, new teachers do what you have to do to make sure your students hang onto the sense that they are worthwhile. Make sure they get regular chances to produce worthy efforts of which they can be proud.

P.S. I admit the McDonald’s plan has nutritional drawbacks. You could do this in the classroom with healthier popcorn and water. That would be cheaper, too. Kids mostly bought their own McDonalds — and tried to buy mine — but I sprang for the occasional treat. If you came, you did not go hungry. Food is one of your best weapons in the meet-me-for-tutoring arsenal.