Testing for Intelligence

In the school setting, children learn so much and cover many types of material but I believe they should only be assessed on what they have actually been taught. The big stress of many administrators, teachers, and their students is the PARCC assessment, as many states in the United States administer this assessment to their elementary school children. While I may teach kindergarten, I still sit through meetings about PARCC and how we can begin to prepare even our kindergarteners to be successful when they get to third grade. How is this appropriate? How is this the best path to take in educating our young learners? Why are we only concerned about how well a child does on an assessment?

            Testing a child on their reading and math skills are important but so are their emotional and social skills. Can a child effectively express their emotions? Can a child interact with their peers and adults in an appropriate way? These are things that I think get pushed aside when children get to school and the focus shifts solely to their learning. I think it is important to remember that we are working with a child, a whole child, not just the academic part of their brain.

            In the Netherlands, children are enrolled in primary school from age five to twelve. At age twelve, students take a national exam which then determines what path of secondary school they will take. There are three paths of secondary school; general, academic, and vocational. Although placed in a certain path, students are able to change paths if they would like. While it sounds nice that students are given the choice to change their path, I wonder how these placements may effect children's emotional health. 

Resource:

http://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/netherlands-overview/netherlands-instructional-systems/

Disease

As a child, I grew up in a home with a mother suffering from mental illness. While not a physical disease, this illness could cause lack of physical motivation and practically immobilize someone for days (or longer). As the youngest of five children, and the closest to our mother, I always took it extremely hard when she started to display her warning signs and eventually decide to get the help that she needed in hospitals.

I leaned on my siblings quite a bit when this illness crept up on our mother as She was unable to take care of herself, let alone all of us at particularly bad times. Our father always stepped up and took over with everything when she became ill and he was the backbone of our family for so many years. I also had a couple of friends that I could stay with when things at home got difficult and I needed a distraction and their families were always amazing about letting me join them whenever my mother was having a tough time.

El Salvador is a country in Central America where many of my students migrate from. In El Salvador in 2014, 31.8% of people were living in poverty (The World Bank, n.d.). While Poverty is a big stressor for children, natural events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, and even volcanic eruptions, causes loss of life as well as property. When these natural events occur, funds from public and social services are taken to help with emergency relief. This means that schools and other services that help children and families are the ones that suffer first. To help prevent this from happening in the future, The El Salvador Disaster Risk Management Development Policy Loan (DPL) was designed by the Salvadoran government and the World Bank. Hopefully, with this loan in place, funds will not be taken from those services that help children and families and will instead give El Salvador the funds they need immediately after a natural disaster.

References

The World Bank. (2015.). Better Disaster Risk Management for El Salvador. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2015/09/22/better-disaster-risk-management-for-el-salvador

The World Bank. (n.d.) El Salvador. Retried February 4, 2017 from http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador

The World Bank. (n.d.). Overview. Retrieved February 4, 2017 from http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/elsalvador/overview