My mouth could not voice my concerns because I was having difficulty picking my jaw up off the floor. Excerpts, passages, short stories, anything that resembled the beast that is the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness. I traded concerned glances with like-minded colleagues and silently left to pick up my son. With a babbling baby in the backseat of my car, I bawled the entire drive home.
A few have not understood why this affected me so much. Wouldn't reading excerpts and doing all STAAR prep make planning easier? Grading easier? After all, you only have to prepare for a passage no more than ten pages long. For God's sake, no more than ten pages long!
I am a bibliophile. I love books. My life is not complete without books. Books rank somewhere just below my family, oxygen, water, and food. My passion for literature is what pushed me to become a teacher; I want to share my love with others. I believe literature holds the answers to life's questions. To be told to stifle that passion for a test which is, at best, flawed broke my heart. Literature is the Romeo to my Juliet; our passion is young, all-consuming, and a little irrational. While reading Fahrenheit 451, ironically, without permission, I could commiserate with the woman who burned with her books. Do you get my point? Literature is BAE (as my students would say), before anything ever.
To take a more logical approach, this will not help our students in the long run. Hundreds, if not thousands, of students in the next few years will graduate high school in Somewhere, Texas, having never read a book. Some of them plan on entering college, having never read a book. What will they do when their professor expects them to purchase, read, and analyze books? Complete books? Or at least, something longer than ten pages? For those who choose not to attend college, they will probably have to read something at their future jobs. My husband J did not attend college and is a blue collar worker, but he still has to read and understand manuals, many of which are longer than ten pages.
I was written up for insubordination the week after this directive. For reading a book. For reading a book the week prior to this directive. For reading a Fahrenheit 451 with my PreAP students. The teacher within me has died. I am to become an automaton for the STAAR test. As teachers morph into standardized testing machines, unfeeling, soulless, without creativity or passion, students will follow.
The picture is from http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/burning-book-royalty-free-image/90247043
