Annotated Bibliography Outliers

sacrifices or will make them accidently. Sometimes, people are not sure how to deal with

Henry L. Roediger III believes that “testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it” (Roediger pg. 1). If we stop forcing students to shove information down

My report was on Going Home Again: The New American Scholarship Boy by Richard Rodriguez. In delivering my assigned report in front of the class I wanted to stir up in the discussion the relationship between culture and education and the tensions that exist between the two. In addition I was also hoping to see if anyone in the class, being college students, had experienced this.

Asians are one of fastest growing minority groups in America today. During this century, various factors at home and abroad have caused people from Asia to immigrate to the United States for better or for worse. Due to these factors, Americans and American teachers, in particular, need to educate themselves and become aware of the Asian American students’ needs in terms of success and happiness. Before beginning my research, I felt I had an easy subject: studying Asian Americans in relation to their education in public schools. How simple! Everyone knows they are smart, hard working, driven to succeed in spite of their nerdish, geeky, non-athletic, broken-English stereotype. Of course they are

However, the incessant hovering and excessive involvement from Asian parents can add tremendous pressure and stress onto young Asians. In the Daily Collegian News, Penn State sophomore Trevor Hsu expresses, “It puts pressure on Asian [students] themselves to fit that stereotype…they can feel that they let themselves [and their families] down because they have not achieved the level of excellence that the stereotype has set.” (qtd. in Dailey). Because they feel guilty and shameful, many Asian students are reluctant to admit to their parents and teachers that they have difficulties with class works and assignments as much as their non-Asian classmates and consequently, they do not received the support they need to improve their performance.

The test is administered in the spring and the results provide students, teachers, and parents with an objective view of the student’s strengths and weaknesses. The listening and speaking scores are combined to obtain an overall scale score, as are the reading and writing scores. The overall performance is determined by the scores in each combined area. A conversion chart is provided in each grade band, to convert the raw score to a scale score. Then depending on where the scale scores land will give you the placement level that the student is at. To move from one level to another both component scores must land in the upper level range. A student, who advances in only one

She was dismayed to see, upon returning one day from lunch, that the books for her week’s lessons had been set aside. In the center of her desk was a stack of test-prep booklets with a teacher’s guide, and a note saying, ‘Use these instead of your regular curriculum until after the TAAS (a standardized test)’. The TAAS test date was three months away (Meier 4).

These two stories have few things in common that can be described in a way that

The general argument made by author Alix Spiegel in his work, How Eastern and Western Cultures Tackle Learning, is that children often tend to give up too easily. More specifically, Alix argues that for the most part in american culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern Cultures, it is not only tolerated but is sometimes used to measure emotional strength. He writes, “They have taught them that struggling can be a good thing.” In this passage, Alix is suggesting that if struggle indicates weakness, it makes people feel bad, and so they are less likely to put up with it. But if struggle indicated strength, people would be more willing to accept it. In conclusion, Alix’s belief

The stress settled in once the word ‘testing’ echoed through the classroom. The students knew what it brought, and they knew how dreadful it would be; sitting in one room, hour after hour and day after day, silent and still, with only the sound of the clock resonating through their heads. Standardized tests are assessments that local and national governments may require their students to take. However, these tests do not properly evaluate their intellect, and only lead to tension and mental strain on a student’s attentiveness. Although many schools believe that these assessments are productive, it is proven that they are not beneficial to students because standardized testing leads to stress and anxiety, it is wasting valuable classroom time,

It is true that we sacrifice certain things for what we care about most, which reveals our

The education system serves to be another oppressive institution as the teachers purposely alienate the Asian American students from the others. Instead of being seen as unique for being first-generation citizens, they are viewed as being deviants and hassles. The teachers, though some have Asian roots, refuse to understand the struggle or lifestyle of these children who have come from immigrant families. This is seen when Florante talks about Mrs. Takara saying she is, “A Japanese and an American wrestling in one mind. He says that her American upbringing has blinded her from reading between the lines of the history textbooks where silent people choke from invisibility and humiliation” (Linmark 49). This mindset definitely results in the obvious racist undertones that are evident throughout the education system.

Today, it can be observed that society has shifted education drastically from the time schools were constituted, to now. Throughout history, schools have gone from private, where only the elite can attend, to public schools where virtually anyone can attend. One of the factors that goes along with education is standardized testing. Frederick J. Kelly, father of the standardized test, once said, “These tests are too crude to be used, and should be abandoned.” Not only has this shift occurred within education itself, but it has occurred within the testing concepts found within standardized testing so much so that the founder of these tests has chosen to give up on it.

This allowed the students to be retested on the first and third passages and tested on the second and fourth passages for the first time.

Tomorrow was the big day. The day that every student despised, but came every year. The problem that transcends national borders: standardized testing. Before I knew it, it was the final week, and time was running out. In my case, the Connecticut state test, the CMT, was in just two days. More than nervousness, there was a cloud of confusion surrounding this test for us students. Some said that preparation and study are necessary for this test, while most thought just the opposite. Some people were even saying that the scores for these tests somehow will affect our progress in school. Looking back, I don’t remember the test being all that hard, but it didn’t make sense to me. How could this one test, filled with questions that require shallow thinking and zero creativity, show the state the performance of my hard-working teachers, or the individuality and strengths of each student? Or on a larger scale, every student in the entire state?