Article By: Josie Herring
“Standardized testing”, every student's worst fear. Whenever testing is even mentioned students often go into a panic. Standardized tests have been proven to be a highly unreliable way to judge a students intelligence, integrity, and character. So why do we still use these old-fashioned methods in schools? The education system still uses these tests because they seem to be the easiest way for them to measure students' academic abilities. It seems to be an easy solution, but only for those mandating the tests. What they don’t seem to understand is that every student is different, so is giving every student the same test actually a good way of judging academic abilities? The short answer is no, it’s not. Every student has different abilities and these tests are in no way a measure of their character, responsibility, and integrity. Albert Einstein, who is recognized as one of the smartest people of our time, once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Every student is smart and has potential but sometimes this potential cannot be expressed because in most classes teachers have to teach to the test. The amount of stress that these standardized tests put on students is highly unhealthy. Studies have shown that teenage students have more stress than psychiatric child patients in the 1950’s. Standardized testing feeds into a large portion of this stress and anxiety. Schools put these huge amounts of pressure on us to make good grades. If we don’t make these good grades we are threatened with the thought that maybe we won’t make it into our dream college. For some students making these good grades comes naturally and it's easy for them. But for many of us, it’s not. We struggle and study for hours just to try and make an A just in our regular classes. Then we add tests like the SAT and the ACT to that pressure to make a good grade. We study for hours upon hours then we are sent to sit in a classroom for four to five hours completely silent with minimal breaks to get up and stretch. We sit at a tiny desk and stare at these test papers until our heads hurt, but there seems to be no way out if this madness, no matter how horrible it may seem. It is absolutely crazy that teenagers are forced to sit for hours and take these tests just to determine if they are smart enough in the eyes of our education system. My mom is a middle school special education teacher. When I ask her how she feels about standardized testing it seems to be something easy for her to respond to, “I hate it,” she says. She teaches students who don’t learn like the rest of us, who need more help in the classroom, and simply just don’t understand everything that is taught. Yet, even though teachers know that these students should not be taking these standardized tests because they don’t learn as easily as everyone else, they are still forced to take these tests. It’s unfair to these students and the teachers who are doing their best to help them. It puts these students under higher amounts of stress because they worry about failure and the teachers who just want to help these children succeed are put under high amounts of stress because sometimes there is just no way. These failing grades can lead to students dropping out of school or just completely losing interest in their education. These failures on a test make kids who don’t learn as fast as everyone else that they are stupid. The people mandating these tests are destroying students confidence in their intelligence just for a few tests that really prove nothing.
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By: Olivia Pinnix
Everyone has heard of the Laurel vs. Yanny audio recording. Some people heard Yanny, while others heard Laurel. This started a huge debate on who was hearing the audio recording “correctly”. Following the release of this controversial recording, several scientists came out with articles and statements explaining the science behind it. Basically, what you heard depends on several different factors, like your age and how well your hearing is, but neither Laurel or Yanny is the wrong answer. Your perspective might have been different than your friend’s or your teacher’s. Perspective alters how you view the world and certain things inside it. This is why it’s so important to not believe everything you see on the internet. It might not be wrong, but one-sided. There have been several of these ‘mind-boggling’ images or recordings that people chose to argue about until a scientific explanation presented itself. But even after people have read the scientific explanation, some still insist they are correct and others are wrong. I can’t help but wonder why people continue to insist that they are right? Is being right so important that even after being proven wrong, that you defy reason? Of course to some people, being right is that important, and will do just that to satisfy their own ego. A quick look into history will reveal the countless instances where people chose to cling onto what they were taught as the truth, rather than the actual truth. The Flat-Earthers for instance, believe that the world is flat, and some people really do believe it is. When the idea of the earth being round first made an appearance, people despised it. They called the scientists who believed in it heathens and insane. Even when proof that the world was round was found, people still insisted that they were right. Another example would be vaccinations.When vaccines became popular, people were skeptical about the long term and short term effects. They didn’t know how they worked, and therefore they were scared and were hesitant to accept vaccines as a type of medicine. Now, hundreds of years later, you learn how vaccines work at a young age in science class. But you still hear stories on the news about whole congregations of churches getting sick and dying from diseases that have vaccines made for them. You still see people with shirts and signs that read “Vaccines cause AIDS” , and “Vaccines cause Autism”, and other variations of things that have been proven false. This mindset isn’t only an inconvenience, it’s dangerous. The average human always wants to believe that their opinion is right, even though a correct answer has been proven. But where do we draw the line? Some people take it to the extreme, in terms of extreme superstition and scientific discoveries causing it to be very dangerous. Theoretical science, like the big bang, hasn’t been proven so debate is expected until a definitive answer has been found. You can choose to agree with or disagree with theoretical science but not proven science. Disagreeing with proven science is like hitting a wall, or just turning around so you don’t see the wall at all. While some people continue to find arguments to throw a proven fact, others simply close their ears and pretend it doesn’t affect them. A lot of people do this, whether they realize it or not. The majority of people who do this, do it to protect the ideals or facts they learned growing up. “There are two ways to thinking you are right; one is that you have more knowledge than the other person, the other way is based in their life experience and in the way they were raised. That one is more challenging because you aren't thinking of one idea you are thinking of a whole life experience or belief system.”, said Mr. Roberts, a science teacher here at WHS. I asked Mr. Roberts why he thought his students frequently argue with him in his science classes. Mr. Robert’s statement helped me understand why it is so hard for people to break away from what they believe. It isn’t like explaining that 9 plus 10 is not 21, it is telling them that a good majority of the things they have been taught, might not be correct. Obviously people don't have the same attachment to the Laurel vs. Yanny audio recording, so that may just be because people like to argue with their friends about peripheral things. |