{"id":854,"date":"2016-05-13T20:18:31","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T20:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chimneyrabbit.com\/?p=854"},"modified":"2016-05-13T20:18:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T20:18:31","slug":"testing-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/?p=854","title":{"rendered":"Testing times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>These are testing times for kids. A couple of days ago, Abi Elphinstone (author of\u00a0<em>The Dreamsnatcher<\/em> and\u00a0<em>The Shadow Keeper<\/em>) took sample SATs tests for English and Maths and failed horribly.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">I made this for all the kids sitting SATs this week after taking a sample online test &#x1f618; <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/SATS2016?src=hash\">#SATS2016<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/SATsweek?src=hash\">#SATsweek<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/SATS?src=hash\">#SATS<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/FlcASRfaYU\">pic.twitter.com\/FlcASRfaYU<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Abi Elphinstone (@moontrug) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/moontrug\/status\/730405029543325700\">May 11, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>If a professional author, with two books under her belt and more on the way, only manages to get 40% in the English test, you have to wonder if the test is measuring anything useful at all.<\/p>\n<p>So for fun, I decided to take the sample tests, too. The results were interesting.<\/p>\n<p>For Maths, I scored 100%. (I&#8217;m guessing that a pen and paper were allowed &#8211; if they required all the working to be mental, I wouldn&#8217;t have scored so highly.) This probably isn&#8217;t too surprising. I was always <em>reasonably<\/em> good at maths and arithmetic at school: I\u00a0scraped\u00a0an A at Higher Grade, and my Masters degree involved a lot of Boolean algebra. So getting 100% on a test for 11-year-olds isn&#8217;t really a lot for me to brag about.<\/p>\n<p>For English, I scored 70%. And if I&#8217;m going to be completely honest, I made some wild guesses, so I might easily have dropped to 50% if I hadn&#8217;t got\u00a0lucky. Wait, what? I&#8217;m <em>so much better<\/em> at English than Maths that it isn&#8217;t even funny. I got As at Higher and Sixth Year Studies in English. I was always top of my class, all the way through school. (I definitely couldn&#8217;t say the same about Maths!) I&#8217;ve got a decent degree in Classics from the University of St Andrews, which taught me more grammar than any sane person would ever want to know. I&#8217;ve been a professional technical author for 23 years, with tens of thousands of pages of documentation under my belt; in my current job, I&#8217;m the sole authority for spelling and grammar, and official company policy is that no document goes out the door until I&#8217;ve given\u00a0it my stamp of approval. In my career\u00a0as a children&#8217;s author, I&#8217;ve had\u00a0one book published, there&#8217;s another on the way, and while you might take issue with their literary merit, at least they&#8217;re literate &#8211; I haven&#8217;t made any editors cry (so far).<\/p>\n<p>But I got just 70% (or 50%) on a test for 11-year-olds?<\/p>\n<p>I write manuals for a living, novels for fun; with the exception of being an editor or translator, there is no job on the planet that would require better English skills than I have.<\/p>\n<p>But we&#8217;re telling 11-year-old kids that they&#8217;ve failed the English test if they know as much about English as I do?<\/p>\n<p>What worries me the most is that it will stifle creativity. I always knew I was good at writing &#8211; even at university, if I turned in a sub-par essay, my tutor would say &#8220;at least it&#8217;s well written&#8221; &#8211; which is how I ended up as a technical author, and a big part of why I&#8217;ve been so driven to get my fiction published. If I have deficiencies as a writer of fiction, they&#8217;re deficiencies of art; but even\u00a0if I say so myself, I&#8217;m reasonably competent\u00a0at the nuts and bolts of putting sentences together, and it&#8217;s\u00a0<em>that<\/em>\u00a0ability that&#8217;s given me the confidence to work on the bits I&#8217;m not so good at.<\/p>\n<p>What if I&#8217;d been tested at age 11, which was around about the time I started getting the urge to tell stories and began writing fiction for myself, only to be\u00a0told that I was rubbish at English, just because I couldn&#8217;t understand the made-up grammatical jargon of government bureaucrats? (To be honest, even having looked it up, I&#8217;m still not entirely sure what a &#8220;subordinating conjunction&#8221; is.) I wouldn&#8217;t have the job I have now, and I wouldn&#8217;t have a book published; in fact, I&#8217;d be a completely different person.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d still have had the stories inside me, but I&#8217;d have had no way of getting them out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These are testing times for kids. A couple of days ago, Abi Elphinstone (author of\u00a0The Dreamsnatcher and\u00a0The Shadow Keeper) took sample SATs tests for English and Maths and failed horribly. I made this for all the kids sitting SATs this week after taking a sample online test &#x1f618; #SATS2016 #SATsweek #SATS pic.twitter.com\/FlcASRfaYU \u2014 Abi Elphinstone&#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/?p=854\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Testing times","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-dM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}