In my reckless, ignorant youth, I used to think of hotels when I heard the word "accommodations." That fragment of my innocence has fled, however. Now, "accommodations" has taken on a new and complicated meaning involving diagnosed learning disabilities, specialized classroom instruction, and standardized tests.
Learning disabilities can qualify students for a number of accommodations on tests. Some get extra time. Some get to type their answers. Some get a scribe to transcribe their responses for them. Some can have the entire test read to them. This seems sort of unfair at the outset, as it seems that some of these things would give disabled kids an unfair advantage. That's not the case, however. I read a study last year that investigated this issue and found that typically developing kids didn't do significantly better on standardized tests when they tested in the same conditions as their disabled peers. This makes sense to me: While I felt a bit rushed on some portions of the SAT, I don't think 50% more time would have improved my score much, and having someone read the test to me would have been excruciating.
On Saturday, I woke up early and headed to Churchill School on the Lower East Side. Every student at Churchill has some kind of learning disability (except that they call them "learning differences" there). It's a public school, but it gets a lot of parent donations and grant money and so it's a gorgeous facility with really outstanding instruction. Kids who go there generally have average and above-average intelligence coupled with pretty severe learning disabilities. Classes are small - 12 kids at most - and a huge part of the school's mission is to develop kids' extra-curricular talents in art, sports, etc.
I, and about 20 other adults, administered the PSAT to students with various learning differences which qualified them for various accommodations. My assigned student, a darling sophomore named John, got double the amount of time for testing, and a "reader" and "scribe" (me) to boss around. Of course he was very sweet about it and kept apologizing for making me read things over and over, and he didn't ask me to write anything for him. I read the entire test to him, item by item. Sometimes this meant reading long passages, sometimes it meant math problems. He wanted me to read each question and each of the possible answers. I read the titles of graphs and charts. I repeated sentences with different words inserted in blanks so he could determine whether they "sounded right." In all, we tested from about 8:45 until 1:15 with only about 9 minutes' worth of break time.
Friends I met with later that afternoon cringed when I told them about it, but I'd done this for Churchill once before and enjoyed it enough to come back for more. For one thing, the kids at Churchill are great, and I really enjoy getting to know them; if there's leftover time in one of the testing segments, we chat until the time is up and we have to move on. Also, it's really interesting to work with kids who are learning disabled but also highly motivated. It's a pretty uncommon combination, particularly by the time they're in high school, because they tend not to have gotten the right kind of instruction and are usually fed up with school by the time they're teenagers. And the money I made for doing this ain't too shabby, either.
The hardest part of the test is that you're not allowed to help the kids. It's incredibly tempting - you're alone in a room with them and no one would ever know. Both kids I've read for have had a terrible time with the test, and you have to keep your face blank while you watch them bubble in wrong answer after wrong answer. (I did my best to send telepathic messages to John, but apparently we were not on the same wavelength.)
John's vocabulary wasn't great and his language skills were terrible - every time I'd get done reading an especially wordy sentence, he'd groan "Oh my GOD!" - but he seemed to be decent at math. Alas for John, over half the questions in the math sections were tortuous and wordy. There were word problems and explanations about what would happen to y if x equalled some number phrase and the poor kid really struggled. To pass the time while he was trying to make sense of the problems, I worked through them myself in miniscule writing on a scrap of paper. Never a math student, I was rather pleased to find that 2/3 of the way through graduate school I finally seem to have a command of basic algebra skills.
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