It is already coming up on test time for my students. Personally, I don’t like giving tests. I need something upon which to base my grades for the term, but if I can avoid using tests, I will. It is not that I want to make my courses easy or avoid that work of writing exams and grading. I prefer not to give tests because they don’t really accomplish what I want them to do.
I don’t want my students to do well on tests. No, I am not on an ego trip, nor do I take pleasure in failing students. I am simply less interested in knowing what my students know as much as what they don’t know. Instead of using tests as an assessment tool, I want tests to be a teaching tool. Let’s face it, as students, we look at our score first and then what we got wrong. We rarely go back to look at the questions we got correct. If, however, we missed a question, we want to know what is the correct answer. It challenges us to think. As a teacher, I am tricking the student into reviewing the material again—after the test.
Tests reveal our weaknesses. They challenge us to grow. Whether in school or life, we learn the most when we are forced to leave our comfort-zone.
We are often taught to avoid failure. In school, we want an ‘A’ on the exam. Anything less and we are underperforming. Some teachers prefer a nice bell-curve. Me? I don’t care what grades my students get on the exam. I am more concerned with whether that have mastered the material by the end of the term. I want them to fail so that they can ultimately succeed.
In graduate school, I studied Anatomy with Dr. Dennis Morse at the (then) Medical College of Ohio. We would spend time dissecting the cadavers through the week and study what we could from our Anatomy textbooks. There were no study guides. There were no lectures. Dr. Morse would come in once a week and proceed in asking us questions. Invariable, he would ask my peers questions to which I knew the answers. To me, however, he would ask questions that seemed to come out of left field. (The case was the same for my friends, as well.) I wondered how I was getting A’s each term when I seemingly knew nothing. Somehow, Dr. Morse seemed to know what each of us didn’t know. Surely, he could have asked me easier questions—or at least some that I actually knew—but he knew better. He challenged me to think about Anatomy (a course for which memorization is the typical path to success). In the end, when I sat for my oral comprehensive exams, Dr. Morse started with questions that I knew he would ask and moved to increasingly challenging questions—questions that were outside the limits of what I had studied. When my comprehensive exam concluded, I had not missed a single question. Now, one could conclude that I am just brilliant—and I wish that were true—but what it demonstrated was that I had actually learned anatomy. It was a valuable experience that I continue to carry now into my 20th year of teaching.
In all areas of life, we need to be challenged to fail. We need to stretch beyond our comfort zone and beyond our experience. We need to practice beyond our current abilities and allow ourselves face challenges that cause us to grow.
Life is not meant to be easy. Life is meant to make us better people. We are meant for growth. Let’s remember what Nietzsche said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Be your best today; be better tomorrow!
Carpe momento!