S.O.L.......how appropiate

Wow, it's been awhile. Being a full-time student again is a little rough. Anyway, I'm in Chemistry lab on Monday, and at the end of the lab, the professor.......now, the first time I was in college, 10 years ago, all my labs were taught by grad students. Now that I'm taking Chem 111 at the community college, my lab is taught by a molecular biologist who has a degree in chemistry and two doctorates. She did work on cloning amylase for Christ's sake, and now she's my lab instructor.........where was I? Oh, so she assigns the questions she wants us to answer: #1, 2, 3, 8, and 9. Simple, right? Apparently not, because a girl in the back of the room raises her hand and asks "Sooooo, does that mean we don't have to #4, 5, 6, 7, and 10?" I think I would have been justified in smacking her in the face. The real problem is, she wasn't cute either, so doesn't at least have that going for her. This is what I think standardized testing, especially the SOL, is doing to kids now.

Last night was the first PTA meeting of the new school year, and all of my kids teachers said the same thing: they were teaching the kids test-taking skills so that more kids would pass the test and the school could remain accredited. My oldest son's Language Arts teacher even went so far as to say they had been successful in getting children with very low comprehension to pass the test, even the ones who couldn't read very well, by teaching them how to eliminate answers that made no sense. How is this helping these kids? They're develping a skill that they will rarely, if ever, use once they are done with school, and in the meantime they aren't learning how to think analytically at all. I used the girl in my lab as an example, but my kids do the same thing. They frequently ask me questions to which the answer is obvious and requires very little thinking. That's okay when you're 2, but my boys are in the 3rd and 4th grades. What's happens when the question requires some problem-solving skills? That's what they're lacking the most. They are being taught how to get the answer without understanding the application.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm just overthinking things a bit. Who knows, maybe my kids are just dumb, but given their genetics, I doubt it. I do know the kids spend way too much time preparing for the SOL and not enough time doing any thinking.