| SEARCH OnWEAC |
|---|
|
By Erica J. Ringelspaugh
After class, my co-teacher Mark looked at me. “So, what should we do?” I twisted my palms in my lap. “I don’t know.” Mark continued underlining key terms in the AP study booklet open in front of him. “So, what should we do?” Mark repeated, looking to me for answers. Mark underlined a few more terms. Flipped the page. “So, what should we do?’ he persisted. “Mark, enough!" I exploded. "I don’t know." Mark jerked in his seat. “Use your indoor voice, Erica.” “Yeah, well, I hate this.” • • • Our Advanced Placement students were scheduled to take the AP History exam in exactly four days. For the last week, we’d done our best to review key terms, dissect the format of the AP exam, and ready our juniors for the four-hour exam that would determine if they earned college credit for our integrated American History, Literature and Composition course. Mark and I both know that our students worked really hard all year -- they can now form a thesis about any subject, write a decent five-page essay in 45 minutes, using quotes and specific examples, and critically analyze patterns of American history and social change with thinking skills some of my college classmates lacked. We just worried whether they would pass the 80-question multiple choice, 55-minute section of the test. “Ms. Ringelspaugh,” one of my students whined earlier that day, “I’m so dumb. I don’t know any of this stuff,” she said, reflecting a sentiment also expressed by other students. They did know it. They successfully tried the Robber Barons of the Industrial Revolution, wrote contracts of Independence for the Northern, Southern, and Middle colonies during the 17th century, and created a political campaign for presidential candidates of the Election of 1936. And yet, they were totally intimidated by this test. Giving up, they put their heads down on their desks, cried in my classroom after school, or just lashed out defensively at Mark and me, “Why didn’t you teach us anything this year?” Understandably, Mark and I felt frustrated, too. After meticulously training our students for eight months, they refused to recognize their own intelligence and abilities. After learning, analyzing and evaluating the whole of American history, they wanted to give up before they began. These students, who had mastered playing school, blanked out all the information they had truly learned when they saw the test worksheet format. They panicked that their class grade would be tied to passing the test, and they shut down. Mark and I tried to wrangle with their defeatist attitudes during class, tried to reassure each student individually, and tried even harder to prepare them, cramming the information in their heads: reviewing and reviewing and reviewing. And we saw them feel even more like failures. Mark and I fought for the first time in our co-teaching career. Then, we finished fighting and realized how stupid we were behaving. We asked for help from another teacher. And we changed tactics. The next day, three days to “the test,” we entered our classroom in the morning, handed out copies of four previous years’ tests printed on brightly colored paper. We told our students not to take the test, but to divide into groups, read the tests and underline key terms. Groups compared those key terms, finding 15 terms that were common to all the tests. Then, our 17-year-old juniors made up silly songs about the terms, explaining each term in the lyrics. Some songs were to the tune of nursery rhymes, some to the rhythm of pop radio songs, some just made up off the top of their heads. We sang each song multiple times. We had a good time. We laughed. We If a person sings a song seven times, she’ll remember most of the words to the song. And if a person finds an opportunity to laugh in a stressful situation, his stress level lowers. Prohibited from being even in the same building as my students on test day, I asked them the next Monday, “How’d it go?” “It was hard,” I heard, but coupled with success stories, “I think I did OK.” They had done their best. Which was all we wanted them to do in the first place. Posted August 25, 2006 |
