It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year!

During the past few evenings I have spent time at my daughter’s new school waiting to pick her up after soccer practice.  The soccer field is located next to the football field which is also by the area where the band practices and of course everything is located next to the high school.  As I wait for practice to end, I can see football practice, band practice, cross country practice and even volleyball practice (they came on the track to run) take place.  I bet that there are over 100 students practicing or just wandering around.  What a great sight.  This time of year is a magical time for students and all of us involved in education…it is truly “The most wonderful time of the year”!  Everyone has the hope of a new beginning.  I can feel the optimism of the students as they look forward to the upcoming year and sense the joy of friends and colleagues reconnecting after a long summer.  In other words, this is why we are educators.  The kids are happy, excited, and nervous all at the same time.  The start of a new school year promises unlimited opportunities for the students and teachers alike.

True learning is so much more than the classes’ students take or the grades they earn in those classes.  Our school systems provide spaces for students to learn how to interact with each other; learn lessons about striving hard to reach a goal and become an important focus for their community.  Our challenge as educators is to remember that we are always dealing with those wonderful, complicated, frustrating beings called students.  They are the focus of everything that occurs in the school system.  They are the ones creating the energy and excitement for the start of the new school year.  We must not allow them to become abstractions or data points as our educational system becomes dangerously infatuated with “measuring” students. 

The “success” of a student, school or teacher is now directly related to how well a student performs on a test.  In an abstract way this may seem harmless.  After all, shouldn’t the school system be held “accountable” for what students learn or don’t learn? However, there is an insidious by-product of the infatuation with testing.  As schools, teachers and policy makers pour over the data supplied by these tests and analyze the results, students stop becoming individual kids with a life history and they become number.  In effect, they stop become humans and are just a metric that will be used by policy makers in far away locales to determine future policy decisions affecting local schools.  Students become an abstraction, not a living, breathing person.  Interestingly enough, local communities do not view their children as an abstraction; that is why parents consistently give high approval rankings for their own, local schools.  Communities can “see” their students…they can put a face on a test score.  Policy makers do not “see” individual students, they only view graphs, trends in data, and statistical models…the students have become disassociated from actual learning.  Over the past few nights I have witnessed the joy of seeing students as more than just a number.  We must always push back against the urge to allow students to become an abstraction.  Spend some time at your local school this evening as it gears up for the new school year.  You will see (and feel) for yourself that kids are more than an abstraction.