The recent spate of snow days twisted up my curriculum in such a way that I ended up with two unit test falling on Tuesdays instead of Fridays. Amidst all of the things I hated about the missed days (loss of more than a week, canceled after school detention, lazy lazy students)-- this turned out to be my silver lining. Tuesday test are a godsend. Here’s why.
Let’s pretend for the moment that I have only my students’ best interests at heart, and start with why Tuesday tests are good for them.
1) Focus. The kids need monday to get the weekend kinks out, and especially in math -they need to get back into the language. By Wednesday they remember that really the only reason they come to school is to socialize. Thursday comes before Friday and on Friday they are checked out. A test or quiz in every class leaves many of my struggling learners bubbling in at random. In my limited experience tuesday is when they put their best foot forward.
2) Remediation. Giving a test on Tuesday means that the kids still have the material fresh in their minds and care about the grade on Wednesday when you hand it back (I realize this is easier for those of us who give multiple choices tests....). Handing back the test on Wednesday allows me to require/offer tutoring after school thursday for students who failed and to then do a partial retest on friday- still while the material and sense of grade urgency is relatively fresh.
3) Long term retention. You might reasonably fear that testing on tuesday will increase the disastrous effects of the weekend memory wipe. Yes. Sigh. I hear you. But if we are willing to challenge ourselves a bit... as teachers we really should aim higher than ‘process and regurgitate.’ Long term retention is ultimately what will serve them best. Testing on tuesday increases the pressure on us to be teaching our students to internalize the material and not just cram for tests. (Also a disclaimer: Testing on Tuesday doesn’t mean that monday is a “review’ day-- I usually choose one easy last topic to present- something that will incorporate earlier material but isn’t just “review” which inevitably seems to be a synonym for “I don’t have to work hard today.”)
So when do you quiz? Fridays. Definitely. The kids are checked out on friday and the discipline of sitting and working independently for high stakes is one of the few ways to make the time productive. (If you haven’t seen it this recent article from the NYT discusses research suggesting that the act of taking a test/quiz is one of the best ways to practice/retain information). At the same time, by quizzing instead of testing on fridays the grade is weighted slightly less.... and... if your quizzes are open note, open response as mine are-- this gives you the weekend to grade.
...which brings us to the benefits from the teacher’s point of view...
1) Flexibility of curriculum. As a young teacher I often find that the material I want to cover on a particular topic doesn’t fit neatly into a 2 week unit. This leaves me with an unpleasant decision: do I cut it short? or do I let my unit length vary with the material. Either way is less than ideal. Cutting it short inevitably means shoddy teaching or brushing things under the rug which will likely come back to bite later. However, letting unit length vary too much risks loosing a sense of rigor and pace -- not to mention the benefits that students derive from predictable, frequent assessment. By testing on tuesday I have the option of an extra 3 days if I realize late into the unit that the kids really need more time... and then a logical start to the new unit on the following monday. On the flip side if 2 weeks works fine then starting something new on a Wednesday is still pretty feasible.
2) Beat the Sunday-Monday Blues. This is the big one for me. The weekend is never as productive as I want it to be. Inevitably sunday night sees a big pile of “oh i guess i’ll grade that later” and “well, they really don’t need more grades this week.” Try as I might my saturday morning ‘sketch for the week’ almost never turns into hard and fast materials for more than Monday and Tuesday. Then, to make matters worse, Mondays are always 2x more exhausting than I expect- like walking into a wall. By testing on Tuesday, your tuesday lesson plan is instantly done AND requires no prep on monday night. Thus, I can use monday afternoon to 1) finish the grading that I had wanted to finish on Sunday 2) Make materials for the rest of the week or 3) go to bed at 8pm. I found these past two weeks, that the knowledge that tuesday was going to be an easy day of proctoring and review games helped me be more excited about planning the rest of the week.
And so I rest my case with an apology for a mundane post... although in some ways these practical discoveries are just as true to this experience as any of my more theoretical musings.
