Quick and Easy

    The teacher of the class that I work in is scrambling to get everyone's grade and progress levels up before progress reports.  To do this, she is allowing her students to move on to different lessons if they pass the pretests with no lessons, homework, or study materials.  This would seem to be a good idea because the students should be allowed to move on if they already know the material. This is not, however, what happens.
    The majority of the questions have only two answer options.  This makes it very easy to simply guess a correct answer.  Because of this, John was able to pass many pretests that covered material that he did not understand.  It also made it very difficult for me to help him because as soon as I would ask him about an answer, he would immediately change it.
     The new way of doing things was also detrimental to John's learning and efforts in learning because he was not forced to read the story that he was questioned over.  When we got to the questions about "The Masque of the Red Death," he wanted to continue on without reading the story at all, but I asked him to pull up the story on the internet.  Once he did and he realized how long it was he did not want to read it at all.  I went through and helped to summarize the story for him but he did not want to be in class any longer.  He was done and even told me that he had a headache because he had been reading and thinking to long.  This new way of learning, taking tests continually for two hours, had drained him of all effort and drive.
    John was able to get through a lot of quizzes because of this new policy and began to become restless and frustrated.  When a question had more than two answers he would sometimes just go through the letters, "a, c, b, d," wanting me to give him the answer.    This is very frustrating for me.  I just want to help John to do his best.  I became more and more frustrated until I realized that perhaps I was.  John has no plans for after graduation.  He is now working and will probably continue to work for the rest of his life.  For this life, he probably doesn't need to know the symbolism within "The Masque of Red Death."  For this life, he only needs to hurry through his 10th grade literature class to get his diploma.  But I believe in giving people options.  If I can help him to develop a sense of exploration in literature that may affect the way in which he views the world that surrounds him.  Who knows? Maybe one day he'll discover an improved way of doing business and be promoted because of the ways in which I have helped him to view problems and stories.  Or maybe he will choose to go on to college and use these skills in a future English class.  Whatever the future is, I will continue to try to help him in his learning.
    Though John probably got through more lessons than he ever had before and his average went up by about ten or fifteen points, I believe that he learned the least that he ever has.  The teacher was very happy with his progress but I did not feel that he progressed much at all.  I have found that the teacher and myself have very different views when it comes to teaching tactics.  She goes for quantity and I go for quality.