When a home becomes a house.

For those of you not in education, you might not know that this week in Ontario, EQAO, (Education Quality Accountability Office), moved its test of grade 10 literacy skills on line.  Grade 10 students across the province logged on to write the test and the entire system crashed leaving students, teachers and administrators frustrated and angry. Setting aside the irony of that organization's title, after all there is no quality nor any accountability coming from it, the whole mess does raise some interesting issues.

Mrs. Pearce had to prepare us for our fire safety drill.  No doubt that is what the system called for.  I was in grade 3 and there was a movie that we had to watch.    I remember the people jumping out of burning buildings.  Then we were told that we would have a fire drill.  "WALK ("DON'T RUN, DON'T RUN") out of the school."  It isn't a bell, the fire drill, it's a buzzing sound; a vibration that throttles in my chest.

My only recurring nightmare is of people jumping out of a burning building.

I love Mrs. Pearce.  She was kind and caring and yes, very pretty.  We did clay models in her class and she had us bring in a small box to store our "favourite words."  Her classroom was kind, it was home.  The last thing she would have wanted to do was cause any one of us anxiety, or stress or nightmares.   She was told to prepare us for the fire drill and the movie came along with that preparation.  She was doing her job, following the rules.

Teachers and particularly administrators, are rule followers.  They are people who have succeeded in systems by doing what they say and doing it well.  A Superintendent of Education didn't get there by questioning a rule.

Richard Jones, the director for assessment at EQAO, didn't arrive there by swimming against the current.

When the EQAO fry up occurred, I was in a class of ESL students and students who had failed the test in their previous attempt.  There was stress in that room.  At one point when we had the students try to log on for a final time, a girl in front of me looked up at me and with a great tremor in her voice cried "It's in French now!"

This was her fire drill.  This may well be her recurring nightmare.    I followed the rules, just like Mrs. Pearce and my rule following hurt a kid.  I let the personal become the impersonal,  a home become a house. All of us decided the person was not as important as the data.

In March, when EQAO  asks teachers to sacrifice kids one more time for the accuracy of their data points, maybe we should break some rules.