Adam’s just posted about how one student in Texas is wisely resisting state-wide standardized testing: Mia Kang stared at the test sheet on her desk. It only was practice. Teachers call it a “field test” to give them an idea of how students will perform on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. But instead of filling in the bubbles and making her teacher happy, Mia, a freshman at MacArthur High School, used her answer sheet to write an essay that challenged standardized testing and using test scores to judge children and rank schools. “I wrote about how standardized tests …

Found on Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi, this quote could as easily be applied to therapy, language learning, or many other subjects: There are Zen students who are in chains when they go to a teacher, and the teacher adds another chain. The students are delighted, unable to discern one thing from another. The risk as an ESL teacher of adding another chain to a student is perhaps not as pronounced one might think, just as one’s effect on a student may well be less pronounced than we imagine. However, the damage from such a mistake is minimal, and limited …

I’ve finished the first day of camp, just fine, but I came home to pick up some bedding and my PC and I found a big piece of dog poo in the inbox of my email. It’s an email all in Korean, asking why the guy got an F in his English class. Not a single word of English, not even an attempt to communicate with me in the language I was grading him on. And he’s wondering why he got an F. And it’s not signed with a name at the end, but the user’s handle is the name …

I’m home today, working through the monumental task of marking the essays and journal work of my students in my writing class. Of course, this is all the evaluation that they’re getting all term—while I provided feedback in class during writing exercises, I simply wasn’t provided with enough time to mark assignments along the way. Still, I noticed who among the students dug in and tried during in-class assignments, and who usually wasted an hour staring at a blank page, embarrassedly writing nothing and saying only, “It’s very hard” to me when I asked why he wasn’t trying. Well, the …

I’ve just finished the first class-and-a-half worth of testing for the week. I have a couple of recommendations for students: If you find English difficult, then I recommend studying harder, and more, as a solution to the problem. Not studying, I find, tends not to resolve the problem at all. If you fail English in your second year and require the class to graduate, and if you don’t manage to improve your English skills somehow, the least you can do is not leave it to the second semester of your 4th year, because you’ll probably still suck at English then. …