Race Day and Test Day

 

To help with these questions, I find it helpful to turn to running. I promise the connection will be clear in short order.

 

Why do runners get up early to log miles, press their pace on a speed workout, strength train, and push through long afternoon runs? Why do athletes sign up for a sport that is “just running?" The answer is not the same for everyone – to the point some runners live for race day, while others ask me if they can be a part of the team without racing, at all. 

 

Why do students spend hours reading, writing, and taking notes, memorize information, and practice countless computations and conjugations? Why do parents (and hopefully students themselves) want their children to learn “a basis of solid contextual common knowledge for the development of mature literacy and critical thinking”? The answer is not the same for everyone – to the point those conversations over course selection in my office range from college credits, to the beauty of literature and art, to potential career opportunities.

 

We have a saying on the Liberty Common cross-country team: “Race day is the best day of the week!” This is met with excitement by some, groaning by others, and fearful reluctance by still more of them. I just greeted one of these runners with this salutation this morning as she entered the school building, and her response was, “Eh…we’ll see.” I don’t quite have them convinced yet, but we are getting closer. 

 

I have tried to gain momentum in my class with the same rallying cry: “Test day is the best day of the week!” They are understandably less convinced than the cross-country runners. Very few of us would whole-heartedly endorse our love of test day, but I think we should welcome it more readily as a part of the educational journey.

 

Race day is not the best day of the week, because races are our only purpose in running. On the contrary, I love coaching cross country because of the long-lasting benefit for an athlete’s physical, spiritual, and mental health. The joys of running go far beyond race day. Race day is the “best day of the week” because it is an inflection point – an opportunity to refine your training, sharpen your mental toughness, and evaluate the strength of your legs, lungs, and will.

 

Similarly, to evaluate how far along the journey any student is toward those goals, we use indicators as inflection points. These indicators are assessments. An exceedingly small minority of these are standardized, or even traditional, exams. Even these, tough, are an inflection point, a motivator, and/or a cause to celebrate. Like races, they help us to refine our instruction and classroom practices. Races and assessments are part of the journey toward joy and flourishing. No less important are the long conversation during hours of trail miles or the countless class discussions that clarify a students’ thinking before they solidify their arguments into a written response. No less important is the character won and the doubting voices silenced when a runner completes a workout that feels ever-so-close to impossible. No less important is the wonder gained by seeing the beauty of mathematical equations as not merely rules to be memorized and endured, but small secrets to the inner workings of reality. 

 

Mirroring the long-lasting and ultimate beauty of running, the ultimate goal for Liberty Common students is stated in our philosophy:

 

Liberty Common School endeavors to cultivate the minds of its scholars in preparation for authentic liberty…capable of independent thinking and understanding what is required to “live the good life.” [The will acquire] accurate familiarity with essential concepts rooted in literature and philosophy – joy and despair, happiness and tragedy, dignity and corruption, and other indispensable juxtapositions. 

 

Scholars are cognizant of significant scientific achievements in biology, chemistry, and physics…They grasp nuances of relevant cultures including their languages, religions, governments, and economies…

 

Liberty Common School scholars fully appreciate art, truth, beauty, goodness, and perfection. Robust exposure to these values renders specific genius marking creativity, imagination, inventiveness, and moral seriousness.

 

My children go to Liberty Common because of this philosophy. When I was evaluating schools as my oldest was entering kindergarten, I came across these lines on the school’s website and quickly added the next public-info night to my calendar. I want this for my children much more than a high SAT score. The irony is providing a curriculum aiming at “the good life” and “indispensable juxtapositions” will most often result in positive indicators of their learning. If we aim at the test score, on the other hand, we will gain neither.

 

For indicators to be meaningful, we need to ensure the race or test is appropriate for the training athletes and students are doing. It is inappropriate to evaluate the skill and training of a runner training for a 5k by entering them into a marathon, while a marathoner will be woefully behind in a 400m dash against trained sprinters. We try to concentrate our assessments to better evaluate the philosophical commitments we cherish. We have recently added the Classical Learning Test 10 to our repertoire to see if we can find a better inflection point for our classically-oriented high school, and we evaluate CMAS scores through a lens recognizing it as a bit of a 5k for our half-marathoners. 

 

We had the highest composite SAT score in the state this year. That means the school's 84 current seniors, in April of their junior year, ran a race after 12 years of formal academic training. Their accomplishment is not to be glossed over in my philosophical wonderings – this is a remarkable feat. As a group, the largest in LCHS history, they performed better than approximately 648 other test-taking, high-school entities. The most remarkable part is we never gave them practice SAT questions to pour over in class. We do not spend our time as a staff discussing these results and “digging into the data” to determine how we can raise scores on standardized tests. Liberty students accomplished this because they are on a journey toward robust, intentional, and meaningful learning.