Your View of the World

While thinking about our discussion in class today about (dis) advantages to tests for different people, I thought about something I had heard my mom say about the students in her classroom. She told me that one year when she was teaching in a rural school, she was teaching the kids the “wheels on the bus” song. She then had to explain to the students why there would be babies, a mother and a father on a bus because the kids didn’t understand. The only buses they knew of were school buses, not city buses like the one in the song. Since they had never seen or heard of people riding a bus to get around, they couldn’t connect to the song, or really understand its meaning. I thought this connected to our discussion because these kids were from perfectly good families, but were in rural surroundings compared to city kids. The same goes for city kids who have never been to or seen a farm (or another setting besides a city). These children get two totally different views of the world, which could affect them later on. When they get older and have to take these standardized tests, life experiences and situations can play a huge role in how well somebody does on a test, as we had mentioned in class.

Laura Kalinowski Post #16