performance...

We know that there are many things in life that cannot easily be measured. There are folks that resist that notion. Do you remember when performance meant something that was visible, that you practiced for and that was put on display to be witnessed, understood and enjoyed by others? Think theater, here, or dance and music. Now school performance refers almost exclusively to standardized testing.. even though we know standardized testing is a poor measure of future success and indicates almost nothing with regard to the traits of character that matter most.

A lawsuit in California is challenging teacher tenure laws that keep crappy teachers in place, where they bore kids leading premature death of interest. Administrators can't fire them, or shame them into retiring, and so the idea that some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have put forth is that teacher tenure be denied those teachers who do not perform at a level determined by the standardized test scores of their kids.

I ask you if there have been teachers in your life that have meant something to you that could not be directly measured? You can use the comments area of this blog to reply.

I can remember the last day of wood shop in junior high school, when my 8th grade shop teacher and I conferred over a nail that had missed its mark and left a small split at the side of a book shelf I had made. He said, "Don't worry about it. You have done well." Teachers are often there for those important moments, and to put their performance on an arbitrary statistical index would be a crime. It certainly is a crime, too, that teachers who don't give a damn about their kids can't be expelled just as easily as a child might. But the true test of a teacher's value may not actually appear until years later, when just a few encouraging words are remembered.

This morning one of our parents was telling me about the sword her daughter made in wood shop last year. She and her family still love it, and last night when a strange truck drove up into the yard,  and her mother was away, my student grabbed the wooden sword as the best protection at hand. She is so proud of that tool, and that she made it herself, and there will be no standardized test necessary to measure the impact of having made it.

Make, fix and create...