How Well Can a Fish Climb a Tree?

Disclaimer: This post is not a result of me being aggrieved over the ACT I took this past weekend. This topic has been on my mind for quite a while and I thought this week would be a good week to post about it due to our discussions in class of what education is through Wallace's speech "This is Water".

As Leo Buscaglia once said, “The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be.” However, in current times, students in the United States are no longer valued for who they are; they are valued for how well they do on a leveled playing field. How far has education come to resort to the fact that students are no longer meausred by their own personal success but their success in comparison to others? Standardized testing may indeed set a benchmark and standards for the students around the nation; per contra, the tests fail to take into account the individuality of each student and is an inaccurate method of measuring student success and growth throughout their education. This topic speaks to me personally as I took my first official ACT this past Saturday. I thought it was a relatively difficult test, and the preparation I spent beforehand paid off. However, one section that really got me hard was the reading section. I had never fully grasped the concept of reading in an accelerated rate and then answering questions based on comprehension of the passage I had just rushed through. Then I thought, the reading section is not actually a measure of how well you can read, but a measure of how well you can practice and solidify the structure of the section. The only sure way to success in the ACT is to continously practice and practice the test until it becomes second nature. From my perspective, that is not an accurate measure of how well one student does in school, but rather how well they are able to memorize the structure of the ACT. The ACT fails to accomplish many things: foster the thoughts of students, teach them how to think individually, and measure the individuality of all the students. Different students possess their own unique skills, which are not always shown through standardized testing. For example, if a student excels at computer programming but has a very limited scope of understanding in determining the purpose or strategies an author utilizes in an essay, they will not succeed in the reading portion of these standardized tests. It is as esteemed physicist Albert Einstein once stated: “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.”