Seattle Boycott Response

As the world developed, technology became available and easily accessible for students all over the world. With all the information and knowledge available every minute of everyday on the internet, television, apps and online books and websites, the old fashioned way of teaching, which includes patterns, standardized tests, lectures and "copying from the board" became, somehow, incompatible to all the information students have access outside the four walls of a classroom.

As clearly showed by the article and the video, students are not the only one that are not satisfied with the "production system" way of teaching developed during the 20th century that the world still has, which, let's be honest, worked pretty well until a couple years ago. But that is exactly the point in which teachers want to get by performing acts such as what happened in one of the public schools of Seattle. The world changed, people changed along with it, and with that, education has to change too. It is not about being against testing, which they clearly state they aren't, as showed on the following quote said by one of the History teachers of the school, "We at Garfield are not against accountability or demonstrating student progress. We do insist on a form of assessment relevant to what we’re teaching in the classroom. Some of my colleagues would propose replacing the MAP with a test that is aligned to our curriculum.", but being against a system that keeps students from developing independent learning, critical and creative thinking, and a sort of test that does not shows the real development of a student, when one is being tested on random topics, and not necessarily topics included in the school curriculum.

The critics, however, is not to standardized tests per say, but to a whole system of teaching-and-learning that has turned into a block to students and teachers who wish to go beyond the limits imposed by the walls of a class room, or perhaps, the walls of their minds. Personally speaking, I do believe that teaching-and-learning systems should be somewhat “reformed“, however, that is not something that is going to happen from night to day. As well as believing on the need of a certain change, I also believe that this change should not be put entirely in the hands of the government, but should be applied to everyone, and even students should be part of it, as we are the ones that are the most affected by how we are taught.