Lions and Tigers and Test, Oh My: The Jungle of High Stakes High School
When I first began teaching, the heated debate was about homework - not whether to give it (in my opinion, a worthy debate) but rather whether to post it online so students and parents could access it if a child failed to write it down in school. I remember being too new to the field to have a strong opinion either way and found the conversation tiresome and distracting from the work I really needed to accomplish. Too new to the field, I also didn't think much about the ramifications of parents and students having constant access to homework. Now, I wish I had been paying more attention. Today, students and their parents not only have continuous access to work on platforms like Canvas, Schoology, and Google Classroom, but they also have constant updates about missing work and dropping grades. This access is so ubiquitous my students can’t even imagine a time when I had no idea how I was doing classes and final grades seemed like some kind of magic amalgamation of tests, quizzes, HW, and a generally favorable or unfavorable opinion by my teacher. What was better, some might ask? I tend to favor my childhood experience, but most people my age often do without good reason. I think, however, that I have a good reason. Students these days are too tethered to this constant external feedback. They are constantly adjusting, reevaluating, and strategizing based on a grade. Learning feels like it has been gamified. Those who can analyze at that level and readjust do better than those who clam up and avoid uncomfortable feedback.
Additionally, and admittedly without any empirical data, I think all of this posting of homework, assessments, and grades has created a strange relationship between the learner and learning. I cannot help but think back to Marx’s theory of alienation from the means of production. Today’s students are simply disenfranchised from their learning, and I often wonder if it has to do with the constant need to produce paired with the ongoing oversight.
There was a time when school felt like a black box. Parents had no idea what their kids were learning except for the occasional worksheet that came home. By high school, my parents had no idea how I was doing or even what I was doing until grades came out. As my husband recently put it, he knew he had to endure four sessions per year of disappointment and some scolding. He was left alone to do whatever he wanted the rest of the time. Maybe that was bad, but he is a professor now, doing what he does best, loving his job, and living a successful life by middle-class standards. And what he knows how to do very, very well is stop and recharge.
I don’t see this same skill of recharging and calibrating developing in today’s high school students. They are either totally avoidant due to a constant sense of anxiety created by an ever-increasing to-do list in their online homework systems, OR they are always on - never taking a break, time blocking their lives like some high-powered executive. And what is worse, the parents of the successful students think that this is how it should be. They are thrilled when their children show superior executive functioning (EF) skills, but they don’t realize their children only demonstrate the ones around task mastering. Metacognition is an EF skill that helps us know what we know and how we feel. The suppression of self and feelings among today’s teens is troubling. It can come out sideways from that prolonged suppression, manifesting in addictions, depression, and anxiety, all of which are on the rise in this age group.
It is hard to know if it is the chicken or the egg. Did the constant need for productivity drive the transparency, or did the transparency fuel the continued need for productivity? Put another way, do teachers feel an increased need to constantly assign and assess to show that there is no wasted time because that was always the expectation, but now it can be seen by others? Or has pressure (from standards-based learning, 40 more decades of knowledge that needs to be imbued, and a mantra of greater accountability) created a scenario in which parents demand more? Either way, the trickle-down or rather deluge lands on our learners. In short, no matter which came first, the constant transparency hurts our young people’s ability to focus on anything other than school. Some students rise to the occasion, becoming automatons of productivity. Others react oppositionally; feeling they can never win in the race, they learn to drop out of it or play some truncated version of the game, walking a line that gets them passed along while simultaneously feeling bad about themselves. Of course, some figure out how to maintain a balanced equation of a decent GPA + social life + family time. Those students don’t tend to come to me, but I am forever trying to help the latter two types of students balance their equation and find a more fulfilling path through high school, hoping they can find a more balanced path through the rest of their lives.