TP #13 Jude

On Sunday I met with PJ for a tutoring session. It had only been a week since the last session, so we were still in the groove to achieve the reading goals we wanted to accomplish. When I arrived at PJ's house, I was told PJ had not done well on a reading test, so we went over the story again and answered the questions.

I was surprised to see that PJ hadn't done well on exam, but I immediately wasn't surprised when I found out that the worksheet was a sample FCAT test. This brought back a flurry of bad memories from when I was in elementary school. The story PJ was tasked to read was pretty ridiculous (even for children's stories), and the questions were absurd! One questions was pretty straight forward, "why did the children name the club X?" and the next question was, "How is the story divided?" Although the answer was simple to me, it came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with the other analysis questions.

Additionally, there was a read and response question where students had to write short responses to small prompts, and the questions were very poorly written. It really surprises me that the state of Florida still gives this test, let alone still has the same ridiculous questions I remember from when I was a child. 

It was difficult to explain the questions to PJ, let alone answer them myself. I would never want to teach to a test like this, it really limits creativity and abstract thought. I hope this changes!