My education in education is providing lessons never particularly intended. I’ve already noted how the classes that teach not to teach to the test teach to the test—in this case, the PRAXIS exam for professional qualification. I’ve noted how the prof who damns punishment of curiosity hands out extra assignments to students with really good questions. Two more observations this week.
One: multiple choice questions don’t belong on final exams, which are supposed to test comprehensive knowledge, even in elementary school. They definitely don’t belong on graduate level final exams. Adding insult to injury, many of the questions I answered today had the same eerie dissociation from practical mastery that you might recognize from your driver’s exam—the kind of question that relies on pulling an arbitrary number from the air, like “How many feet must you allow from a fire station when parking?†or “What percentage of New Jersey secondary schools offer calculus only as an ‘advanced’ or ‘honors’ or ‘AP’ course?â€
Two: teachers don’t belong on hall monitoring duty. It’s a waste of their training and experience, and I’m sure of their salaries.
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