Saturday, June 04, 2011
Testing Young Skulls Full of Mush
I'm going to do my second stint as a Test Administrator for the SAT this morning, supervising about 20 young skulls full of mush as they take the almost 5-hour exam. I did this once before and it was an interesting experience. Funny thing was, the hardest part of the whole exam was the paragraph each kid had to write in cursive promising not to cheat or divulge test information. Nobody writes in cursive these days, especially high school kids, and they really struggled with that. We'll see what happens today.
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4 comments:
I've worked with student nurses, and I am appalled at there inability to write a proper sentence. Nurses' notes in a patient's chart are considered a legal document, and these nurses, on the verge of graduation, just can't write...or spell, for that matter.
I hope there clinical skills are better.
Cursive writing is a lost art to the younger generation. Kinda like dialing a rotary dial telephone.
I'll second Nightingale's comment. My Sweet Polly Purebred is a Registered Nurse, and she works with me to ensure her mechanics and grammar are up to snuff.
My students can hardly write more than a paragraph, if that. Street kids with absent fathers and single parent mothers produce youth with no desire to learn the written word, much less the spoken variety.
Trying to find online a suitable video explaining step by step how to write a typical five paragraph essay is fruitless. The ones available are either for English learners or for college level learners. Mine are in some cases neither. . . so frustrating sometimes.
Administering the SAT is more fun than teaching writing to unmotivated, bewildered youth. Sometimes for fun I drag out my SAT tutorial book and wonder if and when I will ever use it with a student. Sigh.
"Their", Nightingale.
Sam!! I hate it when that happens!!!
But seriously, I read an EMT report on a patient recently where he wrote: coments instead of comments; abol instead of able; ofic instead of office; sean instead of scene; and so it went on for a full page.
Certainly no one's perfect, including yours truly, but honestly! And how did these people get through high school?
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