Holly's Response

As I read the article "Fighting Back", I was hoping for some ideas on how to fight back.  However, it seems that the author just gives us more information to fuel our complaints.  He doesn't seem to offer us a way to change things so the complaints stop all together.  Instead, he gives us more ammunition.

I did like his comment on page 63 that if an educated adult could not write a reasonable, well-thought out response to a prompt in the allotted time it is unreasonable to ask a student to do the same.  I think that at times we ask students to do what we would consider to be an unreasonable request.

While I felt this article gave teachers more ammunition to complain with, without actually offering ideas on a solution, I did enjoy reading it just to better understand what goes into an assessment. It's been several years since I took any sort of assessment test, and even then I have never taken a writing assessment test (at least one that is standardized...I did an essay for my Composition 1 class and my Composition 2 class in college, but it wasn't anything like these tests the authors described). In reading the article, I was informed about what these tests look like and what some of the problems with them may be.

When reading the Core Standards, I came across this line which I thought was interesting, "The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document" (6). As someone who doesn't teach and has never taught, I was slightly taken aback by this comment because the question that popped into my head as I perused the 66 page document was, WHEN are the teachers supposed to complement any of this material?  It seems there's an enormous amount of material the core standards want you to cover, but as Hillocks stated in his article, some high school teachers see their English students for only 135 hours a year.  That doesn't seem to be a lot of time to cover all of this material in addition to complementing it with other material.  And it might just be my ignorance showing, perhaps you all know how to implement this.  But as somewhat of an outsider, it seems to be an overabundance of material to cover.