Take Me To Post Comment Form Kathy Cox e-mail address: state.superintendent@doe.k12.ga.us

A thoughtful letter from a demoralized teacher in Columbus, Georgia:

On 5/20/08, P C Hudmon wrote:
To Whom It May Concern:

This is the first open letter that I have ever written,
but I simply cannot contain my frustration and feel that I
must have an outlet. I teach seventh grade social studies
at a Muscogee County school. I have more than a decade’s
experience educating. While far from being perfect, I am
as dedicated and devoted to my students as a teacher can
realistically be. My workday begins at 7:20 when I arrive
at school and usually ends when I leave at 5:00 (or
later). During my instruction this year, I have been
active, engaged, enthusiastic, and accurate. My students
have consistently communicated to me that they feel they
are learning so much and that they are enjoying themselves
doing it. I really don’t know of any other way to teach,
and have never considered that I should change my
technique because I have consistently met with success.
This year I was blessed with mostly bright, positive, and
well-behaved children who are excited about learning and
meeting the standards that the state of Georgia has set.
I am so proud of my students and the effort that they have given to learning the social studies curriculum this year, and until April, I also felt a sense of pride in my efforts as well.
On the afternoon following the Social Studies CRCT last month, one of my brightest students came to me in tears. She was devastated because she felt that she had failed
the test. I initially told her that she would be fine. I
knew what the standards were, I knew I had taught them
well, and I knew she had learned and understood them.
However, once she began recalling for me some of the
questions on the test, I began to feel less and less able
to reassure her. From the standard which states that
students should be able to describe different economic
systems (I suppose) comes this question, “What is the
modern currency unit of Cambodia? Our textbook covers
over one-hundred countries. Nowhere in the standards am I
instructed to have my students memorize each of the
monetary units from every one these. If I were asked to
do that, I would do my best, but that is not teaching
critical thinking skills, it is trivia. Another question
asked how Chinese checkers got from the Arabian Peninsula
to Asia. That’s not in our book, but I suppose I should
have taught it anyway. On a test with seventy questions,
this distraught student told me that every one she could
remember was trivially specific and not at all related to
our curriculum.

I am well aware that anytime someone begins to try to give
reasons for what appears to be a failure on their part, it only makes that person appear to be making excuses for not meeting their responsibilities. I would be thinking the same thing if I was on the other side. But this test was NOT an accurate assessment of what we were charged to teach to these children. I liken it to a baseball coach being told to train a team for over 2000 hours only to
show up on the day of the game and find out they are
playing golf. I have already had it explained to me by a well-meaning colleague that the reason the scores were so
low is that we (the social studies teachers) were
not “properly trained in teaching using the GPS. More
training is always helpful, but in this case, lack of
training was not the reason for these results. You cannot
be trained enough to teach students the art of great
guessing. Superintendent Cox has released a statement
saying that the “rigorous and detailed questions may have
caused the students to struggle. That sounds to me as if
I didn’t teach with enough rigor and detail. I wish she
would just admit that the test was a terrible mistake, not
at all written appropriately for the curriculum or for the
grade level, and that no amount of effort on anyone’s part
(other than God’s) could have prepared these students to
pass this test. The social studies students, parents, and
teachers deserve a heartfelt apology for being put through
this and these scores should never become a part of any
student’s academic record.

Sincerely,

P. C. Hudmon
Social Studies Teacher
Muscogee County