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One year I had to sit through endless hours of meetings, analyzing test results (Massachusetts MCAS). The principal, VP, and 10 or so teachers would sit around a table and look for anomolous results (pretty easy to find) where our school really sucked vs. the state average.
Then we would basically be asked to guess what went wrong. We had hundreds of square feet of 'what went wrong' guesses posted all over the conference room. One particular question (with a horrible failure rate) has always stuck with me. It was something like "How many quarter pound hamburgers can you make from 3 pounds of hamburg?"
Our guess? Kids are having problems dividing whole numbers by fractions. I wasn't comfortable with the guess since it was my class that bombed this question and I was very confident that my kids knew how to do such a simple problem. As luck would have it, one of my really bright students was passing the room and I called her in to ask her about the question.
She floored us all. "You can't make hamburg from hamburg." Huh? It seems that in Puerto Rico (school is > 85% Hispanic population) the source material for hamburg is called ground meat. In our New England cacoon we make hamburger patties from hamburg. The real story is that kids were totally baffled by the seemingly bizarre question.
Please don't think I've told this little story to push on test bias. That could be a whole 'nother blog. No, I bring it up as an example of the futility of analyzing test results, especially when there's no kids in the room. You really have no idea what went wrong when kids bomb a question.
Regards from the ice cream shop.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, "Hamburg"?
What is "hamburg"?
In the Midwest, we make hamburger out of hamburger. Somehow I managed to live in Massachusetts for 3 years of my life and never pick up on the fact that, apparently, folks in Massachusetts make hamburger out of hamburg.
From time to time I try to think exactly what kind of book could or should be spun off from Kitchen Table Math.
I'm pretty sure it's a book of stories from inside the black box.
Or the ice cream shop, as the case may be.
