Publication Date: Wednesday, July 07, 2004
First Person: Testing away our days, and lives
First Person: Testing away our days, and lives
(July 07, 2004) by Jonathan Steinman
The greatest aspect of summer vacation for high school students is supposed to be the freedom to waste time without any consequences.
The school year is for work and summer is for relaxation -- or so the school district says. Yet, sadly, many of the district's stated intentions are overridden by the goal of efficiency -- specifically cramming in as much test-time as humanly possible -- during the school year.
Each year, the Palo Alto Unified School District and countless districts like it spend huge sums of money administering pointless, mind-numbing tests and surveys. To the students, these tests can be a prodigious waste of time -- so boring that many actually ache to be in regular classes instead of "bubbling" answer sheets or clicking through surveys on a computer.
To make matters worse, many tests and surveys go beyond academics to quiz students about issues in their lives. Some issues are crucial and should be addressed, such as students' contact with drugs, violence and intolerance.
But surveys are an ineffective means of addressing the problems associated with these and other challenges in teenagers' lives.
Instead of working to remedy the nearly omnipresent problems, these surveys divert money toward assessing the severity of issues of which everyone is already aware.
Anyone who spends a significant amount of time at a high school will acknowledge that alcohol, tobacco and other drugs are used. Therefore, surveying to determine the precise number of students who abuse each substance is unnecessary. Even if the surveys were accurate, they are of little help to school officials, parents and professionals attempting to confront the problems.
In my experience at Palo Alto High School, substance-abuse surveys are highly inaccurate because of the attitude many students bring into them. High schoolers have answered so many questionnaires about their habits and actions that they cannot keep from regarding them as farces. We feel like the last primitive tribe being studied by hordes of anthropologists.
Students joke about how they dupe the system by making bubbling patterns or clicking through computerized tests in record time. Students, who because of promised anonymity feel no responsibility for their answers, would much rather bubble quickly and finish than agonize over true and correct answers.
Time saved by flying through surveys is time that can be spent chatting with friends, studying or repaying a crushing sleep debt.
Given that high schoolers I know do indeed approach such tests with tremendous indifference, it is a tribute to students' testing prowess that results of many of the surveys even remotely resemble the truth -- though the resemblance is often extremely remote.
The real deficiency of substance-abuse surveys is that they offer no solutions to problems they purport to assess but do not really expose (because we already know the problems exist). Great.
One particularly boring recent survey reported that "nine out of 10 Paly students don't drink in a typical week." What should the school do with that information?
Everyone knows that substance abuse exists, but quantifying the problem does little to combat it. Instead of surveying for the presence of this deleterious behavior, the district ought to combat the culture in which it grows.
The problem in Palo Alto is not generally that students' lives are unusually difficult. No -- one of the most common reasons given for drug abuse is plain boredom. High schoolers just do not have enough exciting activities to do and interesting topics to discuss.
Schools should replace the time spent surveying students into brain-melting boredom with class time. The money currently allocated for surveys would be better spent giving everyone something to do that is productive, safe and enjoyable -- not corny.
That way, when teen-agers search for the most blissful form of summertime laziness, they will find more enjoyable and productive ways to waste their time than puffing or drinking it away.
Jonathan Steinman is a junior at Palo Alto High School and an editorial-pages intern at the Weekly. He can be e-mailed at jonathan1091@yahoo.com.
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