Outro

To look back at all of my blogs, makes me laugh. It’s funny to read how passionate I was about the article when I read it. From all of my zealous rants, I think I learned a lot about NCLB and how it actually affects teachers, as well as ways to combat it. I’ve always had these opinions about NCLB and our education system in general, but it wasn’t until this year that I have any evidence to back up my opinions.

Also, I think my new favorite word is “bureaucracy”. This assignment really made me start looking into politics and instead of being completely bored in the first 5 minutes, it actually made me want to learn more. With the presidential election coming up next year, I think this new interest in politics will really help me out. Who supports changes in education? What changes do they support? Were these changes tested or are you just proposing theory? Where’s the funding coming from? How much? These are all questions I want answers to before voting for a politician.

Now to relate this back to literature—which I definitely should have done more often. The most obvious connection between NCLB and English is ESL students with special needs. These populations are NOT exempt from the standardized testing. How that makes sense to anyone, is beyond me. As for the idea of getting kids to actually enjoy reading and writing (what we’ve focused on all semester) how is that possible when we’re teaching to tests? If you take away creativity from the teaching profession, even more teachers will burn out. Then we’ll have to produce a greater number of teachers, which we can’t even do now.

In an ideal world, everyone would be concerned about this—not just teachers and future teachers. But since this world is everything but ideal, I’ve realized how important it is for teachers and future teachers to become the activists for better education.

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