Testing, Testing, 1, 2 . . . Eternity

Today was disappointing.

Last night I accompanied Ty to the STEM fair. He had earned his way into the competition with his water quality project, and at the end of the night was awarded the first-place prize! Ms. Bright was there, and she and I spent some time talking about what the class would be doing during my volunteer time the next day. Ms. Bright invited me to do the reading—two chapters out of one of my favorite children’s novels, Island of the Blue Dolphins(!)—and I jumped at the chance.

However, when I arrived at her classroom this morning, Ms Bright informed me we’d be proctoring a test instead of reading. She’d not been aware of the testing schedule the night before, and I could sense that she wasn’t exactly thrilled to be administering a test in place of our previous plans. What I had no way of knowing was just how laborious testing would be.

The test was comprised of twenty-five math questions. My explicitly-stated job was to walk around the room and make sure the students were marking the same letters on the bubble sheet that they’d circled for the corresponding questions in the test booklet. If, for example, I noticed that a student had circled B but bubbled C, I was to point to both the circled and bubbled answers to alert the student of the discrepancy—nothing more. Ms. Bright was to answer any questions and pass out the calculators when students raised their hands to indicate they’d reached that point in the test.

As it was my task to monitor students’ answers, I had to peer over their shoulders as they worked. This made me uncomfortable, as I instinctively felt the need to respect their privacy and was concerned about the possibility of making them nervous. But when, after only ten minutes into testing, I pointed out a discrepancy and saw the appreciative smile on the student’s face, my task took on new meaning and I felt some enthusiasm for what I was doing.

One boy, “Jake,” concerned me. By the time I reached his desk for the first time (so, maybe two minutes into testing) Jake had marked all his answers. I knew I couldn’t say anything to him so I watched Ms. Bright for her reaction. She didn’t seem surprised, and she did little to intervene other than tell him to check his work and sit quietly until the others were finished. Jake’s desk was separate from the others (the classroom is arranged with the desks in groups of five) and facing a wall. He was the only student not wearing a uniform. After Ms. Bright instructed him on the post-test protocol, he brought his knees up to his chest, wrapped his jacket around his entire body, zipped himself up in it, pulled his hoodie down over his head, and sat like that in his chair—mummified—for the remainder of testing time . . .

. . . which was torturous. It dragged on, and on . . . and on. Every twenty minutes Ms. Bright interrupted testing for a stretch break. Most of the students were more than halfway through with the test by the first break. More than half the students were through by the second break. By the third break, all but four were finished: three girls and one boy, out of a class comprised of nine girls and eleven boys. I’m not sure what that ratio means on a deeper level, if anything, but it seemed remarkable to me, and I found myself mentally designing a research project around it, out of sheer boredom.

One student (“Charlie,” from last week’s post) seemed to be taking the test-taking to a whole new level—a new level of time-consumption, I mean. Whereas the remaining three female students marked their final bubbles about five minutes into the fourth go-around, Charlie seemed determined to inhabit question seven for the remainder of his grade-school years. And I say he seemed determined to do this because he refused to even work on the test. For the entire two hours I was there, he did everything BUT work on his test: stare at the ceiling, lay his head on the desk, twirl his pencil, rummage through his desk. I don’t know how he even got to question seven. Every time I looked at his bubble sheet to see he’d answered one more question, I felt a wave of relief . . . and a certain level of wonderment.

When I left the classroom, the students were in quiet craft time—all but two students, the boy wrapped in his cocoon and Charlie. It was these two boys I thought about the rest of the day, and that I think about the most as I write this. How can I help these boys?