Brandy Barnett

Service date and time: October 12, 2007 8:00a.m-10:00a.m.
Fridays just must be test day, nationwide, and not specific to generation. I remember taking tests every Friday in school. Now I am witnessing the same pattern is still used in this new generation, even at the first grade level. Friday morning, as soon as the bell rings, a spelling test, grammar test, and reading comprehension test are given. No wonder the kids look forward to the weekend. It’s a wonder how they look forward to Friday. I guess Friday would be the best day to administer a test, if you were going to do so. It gives the assumption that you covered the material all week. It alleviates the fear that the children will not do as well if the test was given on Monday since they may forget it all over the weekend. If such a fear exists, are the children really learning? Has the teacher spent enough quality time going over the concept? Does the student understand the rationale behind learning the concept? I dare say that the latter question is not given very frequently in the classroom. If the child is not “shown”, notice I did not say “told”, the reason behind the learning, why would they want to learn? Being a good student is not a character trait every child holds as a personal value. I see this first hand in my first grade service learning classroom. There is a little girl in the class who shows no interest in learning. She will probably be held back. She is very smart when she applies herself. Her willingness to learn to directly connected to her emotions at the moment. She has a hard home life. Both of her parents are in jail. She lived with her grandmother and TEN other children until her grandmother just recently went to jail. Now she lives with her aunt. Yes, I did say she is a first grader. That is a rough path to walk through in life already at such a young age. She has stolen things from other children two times and always fails the majority of her tests, assignments. It is truly associated with her emotions at the time. If she is getting along with the teacher she does fairly well. If the teacher does something it upset her or makes her mad, she refuses to even try. If she doesn’t know the answer to the first problem, she absent mindedly fills in the blanks to all of the other problems. In her mind, her lack of attempt to do her work hurts the teacher. She doesn’t realize how much she is hurting herself. I did a read aloud today to the class for an AR test that I administered individually afterward. I was so excited that she only missed one out of five questions. That was an 80%. (She had failed all of the other tests that morning.)