The Revenge of Testing Season

The most wonderful time of the school year

My memory of it is clearly carved: a bright, spherical hall, hundreds of round, little-boy heads, an Pliapa, our mathematics teacher. We called him Pliapa— he was rather vintage and disheveled, and when the monitor inserted his plug from behind, the loudspeaker started up “Plya-plya-plya-tshhhhh,” and then the lesson began.

-We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (Translator: Natasha Randall)

Last year around this time, I wrote a piece called “The TAM vs Mental Health”. While many things have changed since then, the central point is truer than ever: after years of using the pandemic as inspiration/ cover for all kinds of supposedly big Shakeups™, Disruptions™, and Reforms™ in education, we mostly just went back to what we always do: test, test, test.

As Indiana science teacher Ronak Shah puts it in his excellent recent piece for Chalkbeat,

Students, teachers, …