Courtney+C’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016


 * "Don't Make Me Look Like an Idiot" ** **-Mrs. Kindred **

In my ideal America, I wouldn’t struggle with procrastination, my endless mood swings and chocolate cravings would be more manageable, sarcasm would be its own language, and I would be incredibly wealthy and/or the President. While all of these things may or may not be achievable, they would have little effect on your lives, well except if I became President, but that’s mostly irrelevant. Anyways, that is my super ideal and unrealistic America, but today I am going to tell you about my ideal, relevant, and realistic-ish America.

Every year, we spend hours on end listening to our teachers talk, but that’s what they’re here for. To teach. And why are we here? Contrary to the popular belief that our parents stick us in school to torture us, we are really there to learn. But what exactly are we learning? We learned about the human body, important since all of us have one, we learned about our history, important since it happened, and we learned how to form our own opinions, but according to the state of California and the people who will influence what colleges we go to and in the long run determine the course of our entire future, the most important thing we learned the entire year...was how to fill in a bubble sheet.

This was the year of standardized testing.

Though I personally love sitting in a room full of sniffling high school students, listening to the proctors drone on and on about common sense and all the directions that are already written on our paper, and doing my best not to strangle whoever is tapping their pencil or squeaking their chair, I realize that standardized testing is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Students are unique, and as the name suggests, standardized tests are not. Asking a kinesthetic (hands on) learner, a visual learner, and an auditory learner to take the same test is like asking a monkey, a fish, and an elephant to climb a tree. One of them is obviously at an advantage and the others come away feeling frustrated and defeated. These tests are not evaluating how well a teacher has taught you, they are evaluating how well you can rid yourself of all individuality and fit inside the desirable cookie cutter that has been chosen so arbitrarily. High stress testing environments are teaching students to think inside the lines for the sake of a grade instead of teaching them the values of creativity, perseverance, and any other skill that will actually serve any purpose in their future. Not only are the students losing out on valuable knowledge and experience, teachers are losing out as well. As Mr. Fitz is fond of saying, no one becomes a teacher for the paycheck, they become a teacher because they care. Teachers all over the place care about their students and want to see them succeed, but they are being railroaded by these imbecilic standardized tests and are being forced to ‘sell their souls’ to the testing regime to ensure the “success” of their students as well as maintaining the stability of their jobs. As long as their students “don’t make them look like idiots,” nothing else matters.

But as testing results gain more power for less reason and teachers feel more pressure, who is benefitting? It isn’t the teachers whose curriculum is being strangled by the confines of the test. It isn’t the students being labeled stupid because they specialize in science not proofreading. It certainly isn’t the parents who have to comfort a crushed child because the education system has labeled them below average. The true beneficiaries are the greedy, profit-based companies that create and administer the tests that supposedly define not only your intellectual value, but also the value of your teachers.

When a student with an IQ of 155 (only 5 points below Einstein’s) and straight A’s who suffers from inescapable test anxiety will be unable to thoroughly demonstrate their mental prowess, but an average student who has mastered basic test taking strategies, such as the process of elimination, will show improvement and earn themselves high scores and distinction, something is amiss. I would never wish ill upon someone who received a high score, nor do I condemn those resourceful enough to simply comply and meet, and excel at, the demands presented to them, but it still needs to be pointed out that a system that places cookie cutter mediocrity above individualistic greatness is not a system that should have lasted this long and quite frankly, it is not a system that should ever have been implemented to begin with.