Standardized testing is a big deal in public schools. As much as people in the educational business like to downplay its importance, the honest administrators will admit that, although it shouldn't be that way, the results of the standardized tests are the only data that matters. When I worked as a high school teacher, we were instructed not to teach to the test, but to *wink wink* teach to the test. In an ideal world, I would teach the skills necessary organically so that when the test arrived, the students would be prepared. Unfortunately, these students came to me so far behind that it was way more successful to address the test directly. In the case of the high school exit exam, students needed to pass that test to earn a high school diploma, so I would be doing them a disservice if I didn't prepare them for this test directly.
Prior to the week-long state standardized testing, my administrative team began doing the usual cheerleading and providing suggestions on how to prepare before the tests. Additionally, they gave each staff member a shirt to wear that had the school's name and the test's name printed on the front. We were instructed to wear the t-shirt all five days that the test was administrated to show support to the students. Several teachers complained about receiving only one shirt, thus having to wash it each night. Honestly, this was not a problem for me, as I would gladly wear it dirty before doing laundry every night. No, my problem was with the text on the back of the shirt:
What kind of nonsense is that? One of the principals had devised it as the official "slogan" of the testing week. The sentiment was a nice gesture, I reckon, but as an English teacher, I was thoroughly offended. We spend months teaching/begging our students to use properly English and avoid texting language, then we as the adults promote just the opposite at the time that matters most. For crying out loud, the test we were trying to encourage them to do well on had dozens of grammar questions on it!
Since I had already resigned my position for the end of the school year, I was a little looser and didn't even try to hide my contempt for the shirt and slogan, complaining about it at the next department meeting. "Don't be a grammar snob," said one of my coworkers (who notoriously always used "good" instead of "well,") as if we weren't being paid by the state of California to be just that.
I was going to defiantly refuse to wear the shirt, but decided to turn it into a "teachable moment" during the shortened class periods following a few hours of testing on the first day. Like most days, I started class with a grammatically incorrect sentence for the students fix. Of course, I used "ALL IT TAKES IS ALL U GOT" The students had a field day with it; the (smarter) students identified the following problems:
1. All capital letters
2. No punctuation
3. Passive voice
4. Text abbreviation of "you"
5. Informal "got" instead of "have"
I congratulated the kids on a job well done and proceeded to rant about how inappropriate it was for the school to endorse such a bastardization of the English language. Then I turned around to reveal that I had used white-out to write our corrected sentence on the back of my shirt: "You have all it takes." (The lettering was more vibrant before it partially flaked off in the wash.) I was surprised to find that many of the students found it cool and rebellious to dare to vandalize the official shirt. In fact, I even inspired some students to take action themselves and By the end of the week, I received some flak from a higher-up for destroying the uniformity of the uniforms they were striving for, but I felt justified enough to not let it faze me. The school was ridiculous for throwing grammar by the wayside in an attempt to sound "cool" for the kids. Meanwhile, I found a way to use grammar that actually was cool for the kids. (Heck, the students even listened to an explanation of the difference between the active and passive voice for the purpose of this exercise!) And that is how we should prepare kids for a standardized test.
2 comments:
No No No.
This displeases me.
I feel like your edit changes the meaning of the original sentence.
I think that "It takes everything you have" would be more appropriate to the original meaning.
But feel free to challenge that.
Challenge accepted!
I would accept your revision, but I don't see why my interpretation is so displeasing.
ALL IT TAKES IS ALL YOU GOT
The phrase "all it takes" tends to be used to indicate that it doesn't require much to accomplish something. I googled famous quotations using the phrase "all it takes" and took the first two:
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy." - Alan Moore
Neither of these indicate that "all it takes" is something in its entirety, but something minor, which comes at odds with indicating that it will require "everything" of someone.
Maybe it's also the context of being at the school, knowing that they were probably trying to promote "you have all it takes" or, in short, "you can do it!" and not "wow, these tests are going to CHALLENGE you! You'll need everything you have!" (We already have a problem with a lot of kids just filling in bubbles and never even trying because they don't give themselves any credit.) That said, if the administrators were being honest and not hiding behind poorly constructed and meaningless sentences, they'd probably prefer your sentence. "Uh, kids, you're already behind in every facet, so you better give these tests 100% in the hopes of doing adequately."
Bring it!
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