I quit running around finals last term, and I just got back from my first attempt at it since then. It’s been at least a month, and it shows, and the cold air is unkind to my raspy secondhand lungs–but I feel better, and I haven’t slipped as much as I thought. Then again, I also have new shoes, so that could be part of it.

Part of KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act, which went into effect around seventh grade for me) meant that we wrote a lot more in school. I think that’s a good thing. What’s stupid about it, though, is that we were doing the work for nothing. As we got older we started to realize it. I have no doubt that the low scores for our junior KIRIS tests were due not to a lack of ability, but to a lack of caring.

My tracery of KERA results:

• Students began to write more.
• Because this writing was intended to judge teacher ability levels, teachers made students spend time on these pieces instead of regular course work. At the same time, students were not graded for said pieces because they were portfolio-bound. This had two direct results.
  1. Students were not taught as much useful material.
  2. Students were taught that it was more important to write more than to write well.
• Students did a great deal of work for which they were not held accountable. They got a wishy-washy level like “apprentice” or “distinguished” for it, but they couldn’t put it on a college application.
• Because it was stressed that students have a wide variety of work available for portfolio assembly, no piece could be thrown away–which, as most teachers translated, meant no criticism.

And that’s what really gets to me about the whole damn thing. We as a generation have not been taught to separate critiques of work from personal criticism, a desperately important distinction that most of us are forced to learn on our own. I think it hurts a lot of people when they get to college, and it’s not their fault.