Assessments and Testing

I'm not doing "normal" school this week as I'm pulling everything together for our annual homeschool assessment next week. That's an Ohio requirement. There needs to be some kind of assessment to "prove" to the powers that be that the kids are making reasonable academic progress.

 There are 3 options, but the 2 most popular are either standardized testing or having each child's work looked over by an Ohio certified teacher (known as a teacher assessment).

We've always taken the assessment route.  I rather enjoy looking at what we've accomplished each year, plus this way I don't need to deal with trucking the kids back and forth to our local homeschool group's standardized testing. For the record, I very much appreciate the hard work of the group's leadership in putting testing together. BUT, it is administered over 3 days, and it is 25 minutes away one way, and a parent has to be present to help out. That just doesn't work for me as I can't leave the young ones home alone (of course!) and my big ones would be taking the test!

However, Naomi and I ARE talking testing.  She has taken very few tests in her life, and in particular has not taken standardized tests.

But we are inkling towards college.  Shocking, but true.  Our precious eldest is 15!!

So the ACT, at least, is in her fairly near future.  Maybe even this coming fall for a first attempt?  I can also order an Iowa test and administer it to her at home..  (I could do that with all the kids, but I would need to administer it correctly and think that might be hard in a home full of screaming toddlers.  Naomi can go off by herself and block out the world, but the younger ones -- not so much.)

Naomi is an good student and I'm sure will do fine on the Iowa and ACT, but there is no doubt that it helps to have good test taking strategies in addition to just basic knowledge.  Naomi hasn't, for example, EVER filled out a bubble chart in taking a test. That is one simple skill she'll need to practice.  It is something a 7 year old COULD do, but you have to know the procedure in order to avoid silly mistakes.

One other HUGE thing on my mind is this; it is not very important to me that our kids do amazingly well on standardized tests.  I don't anticipate our kids will attend super selective colleges because mostly, super selective colleges annoy me.  I always visualize their collective buildings and bell towers holding up their snooty noses in the air while charging people $30,000 or more per year to attend their hallowed halls.

I attended Michigan Technological University to get my bachelor's degree, and I mostly liked the atmosphere.  It is a smallish engineering college way in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and has a "working class" air to it.  The buildings are fairly close together so people don't have to walk too far in the arctic blasts of the long winter.  There are no bell towers.  The gardening is minimal, since winter covers the land most of the time normal classes are in session.   Tuition was (and I believe still is) moderate, and the teaching was excellent.  I mostly had real professors teaching my class, not hapless graduate students. And I was a grad student later, and I taught, and I was probably decent at it, but some grad students just aren't any good.  I guess some profs aren't any good either, but at least it is more in their job description to teach than a grad student.

Then I went on to the University of Michigan to get my PhD.  And let me tell you, UM is snooty.  I think I've pontificated about that before but it just irritated me.  If anything, UM has only gotten MORE snooty.  They don't accept most students and give the general impression that acceptance to UM is some kind of signal honor and we should fall on the floor with gratitude if we are so blessed.  There are good things about UM, but there are bad things too.  It annoys me that many undergrads get LOTS of classes taught by graduate students (many of whom don't speak English well) while the profs hide away in their offices and labs doing research.  Now don't get me wrong, there were some great profs at UM and I appreciated my time there, but to say that the UM experience is 3 or 4 times "better" than a college 1/3rd of the cost is inaccurate, in my not so humble opinion.

So unless something miraculous happens, our kids will not be going to UM, even though their parents and their grandparents (on my side) attended UM.

We'd rather the children went to a practical, sensible, fairly low cost school than to a UM. And practical, sensible, low cost schools usually don't require stellar ACT or SAT scores.

So we'll work on teaching test taking strategies, but I'm not going to freak if the kids don't do amazingly well.

Now one other issue is that high standardized test scores CAN improve chances of merit scholarships. So...yeah...that's a factor.  We're still sorting all this out in our heads but I'm still not going to stress too much.  They are just tests.  And tests are not "real life". They are not a reflection of the value of our children.  They are somewhat important, but not amazingly important.  We'll work hard to keep them in their place.