Devil's Advocate in Response to Coloring for Fun

Thanks Cauffeemamma for the encouraging comments on Coloring for Fun. For future readers, I guess I'm used to an attack on my ideas about education so I thought I would attack first myself. A lot of people might think that it is the very "waste of time" of which I wrote about in Coloring for Fun that brought on the "needed" changes in education. Too much relaxation, too much fluff, too much freedom of choice in curriculum, no uniformity in teaching made us fall behind. Fall behind on testing. I would agree with that-yes, on testing, but I will NOT agree to falling behind on learning. I learn new ways of teaching in every class I visit. I have learned literally thousands of things about teaching from books, principals, technology, younger teachers, older teachers, other subject teachers, students, books, trial and error, video, workshops, youth groups, service clubs, my own child, my family, my friends, ministers, and the list goes on. Almost every teacher I know wants to learn something new everyday. Few I have met are stagnant.  I really miss the idea of how teachers got to be the boggeyman of the country. Before testing was the end game in education my students knew world events better than most adults, knew the world’s countries and capitals and their location almost up to the minute changing in the map weekly. They could draw, create, research; they visited the library often and for varied purposes. We had computer projects, inter-disciplinary units, almost "college” level research papers. They wrote often and well and in varied forms. They could write a limerick, haiku, quatrains, and many other poetic forms as well as a five paragraph essay. They could outline, they could write in cursive, type on the keyboard, and even learned calligraphy. They had English Teas, Chinese Stir Fry, Egyptian date balls, they constructed pyramids, dug for artifacts, made castles and shields, created mosaics, read novels, wrote reports, read and read and read some more. And they colored! Yes, I ran off map after map after map because I wanted them to handle any map they would ever see for the rest of their life and I hoped that those real life maps would take them into the big world that they were trying to understand. Then came the test and one by one almost all those things began to disappear. My scores went up and _____________ went down. I'll leave you to fill in the blank.  I heard Gov. Haslam asked the teachers and adminisrators to just be patient for a year and anything that needed to be fixed in Race to the Top and the new evaulation system would be taken care of.  I witnessed how things were taken care of during the summer of 2011.  If you trust the Gov. on this one, I have some land holdings in Yemen I'd like to talk to you about.  Don't know where Yemen is?  Don't worry, it's not on the test!