Pretty confrontational headline, huh?  Well, you can fix this problem at home and you can fix this problem by speaking out.  The answer is “standard testing”.  The explanation is next.

loading...

I hope I haven’t bored you with this story before, but when I was in Algebra, I always seemed to ‘just know’ the answers (seriously, without cheating).  Somehow, everything just added up in my mind and I’d always have the correct answers, however, I didn’t do well in algebra class.  Wanna guess why?

The reason I didn’t do well in algebra class was that I never showed my work.  Now my teacher knew I wasn’t cheating, but he wanted me to show my work anyways.  The reason?  I know now in retrospect that my teacher wasn’t trying to teach me the answer to the problem but HOW TO GET answers to problems.

With standardized tests, your child is asked for very specific answers to very specific questions.  Since the advent of standardized testing your kids are being taught answers and not how to think.  Do you know how many people come to this website and type “hey when is so and so coming to town” when all they would have to do is use the search box?  See, they weren’t taught to think, they were taught a specific answer for the question.  It’s like this, it’s good that your kid knows that the answer to “what is three squared” is “nine”, but it’s world better if they know that “three squared is three times three which equals nine”.  Just by knowing this little difference, your kid can figure out that say ‘nine squared” is “nine times nine” as opposed to trying to remember the number.  All of this somewhat follows that old adage, ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime’.  So if you teach a kid an answer, he’ll get that answer correct, if you teach a kid how to think, he’ll get all of the answers correct.

Do not let politicians standardized testing is good. Its so riddled with flaws that it should be illegal.  Teach you kids to ask WHY?.  It’s the most important question in the world.

More From 106.3 The Buzz