What is cheating?

Comments from a teacher who admits to assisting students on state testing...

Confessions of a Cheating Teacher

State testing dishonesty has been in the news a lot as far as teachers and principals sanctioning changing answers, etc... but the type of "cheating" discussed in the article must happen in every school. I'm sure I've "cheated" at times unintentionally. As a teacher you work hand in hand with every student 9.9 months of the year, then for 4 days you're supposed to have no interaction with them? Our whole goal is to work with students to give them ways to think on their own, yet we can't even say "well, think about what we did in class, what would be the best strategy we talked about for solving this?" All of our professional development, all of our teacher instruction encourages teaching for a 21st century student, yet we have to tell them that they (and their school) are a failure if they don't meet an arbitrary benchmark on an arbitrary multiple choice test. (Which, by the way, is 100% proficient by 2014.) When I practice questions with my kids, it's not that they don't understand the questions, it's that they are so used to discussion and analysis that they can't narrow down to 1 answer. Normally this would be lauded: "My students led their own debate about the merits of A over B for 15 minutes!" Yet somehow I have to make them understand that on these 4 testing days, only 1 answer counts. And if you have a bad day, you won't get into the class you want.

I watched Waiting for Superman last night, so I'm extra agitated about the education system. According to the movie, basically, charter schools are the best. More classtime and no excuses win! Of course, if every school was filled with super motivated students whose parents are super involved and everyone involved accepts that the school has the final say on discipline, etc... then we'd be back at #1. Is that really reasonable for the entire nation though? I interviewed at a super successful charter school and the kids all sat in class in silence, no interaction, no groups. It was a classroom management dream, but shouldn't a class have some collaboration and energy?

I don't know the solution. All I know is I have lots of great, talented kids in my classes. Many of them come from backgrounds ranging from tough to impossible. I know they have a good teacher in me. But as good as I can be for them, as much self esteem and grammar tips as I can give them, I can't make all of them good at taking a test for whatever reason (they're just too nervous, their parents don't get them to school on time, they can't relate to the stories about periscopes and President Reagan at age 11 no matter how much we practice), and without that they are deemed failures.

Back to funny dogs tomorrow.