My Teacher, the Inanimate Test Packet

Moving away from Lowell was a big deal for my family, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. This was because most people didn’t move away from Lowell. Andover Street, the road connecting Lowell to Andover, was the fanciest street in town—lined with mansions that we used to compare when driving by, mansions once inhabited by the owners of the textile mills where members of my family had worked. Some had towers and stained glass windows, wrap-around porches and balconies.

We moved to a newer subdivision that had once been acres of farmland; the stone walls still stood, but they didn’t match with the evenly spaced ranch houses all painted in coordinated earth tones, and their placement seemed random. Our house had a deck facing the woods and a large level yard, and in the summer we could not really see any of our neighbors, which was quite a switch from Lowell, where we could see people eating dinner from our living room. It was not really a neighborhood; we all kept to ourselves. Everyone in Andover seemed to speak English and golf, everyone was white, and the Welcome Wagon lady came to our doorstep and left a welcome basket with things like free samples for laundry detergent and attorneys’ business cards. My parents were on friendly terms with the neighbors, but they never became friends with any of them.

The school in Andover was much bigger and more modern than my beloved Varnum, and it was also something called “open concept” which meant that instead of walls it had wall-like partitions that functioned as walls. I took a bus to school for the first time and had to sit with my little brother, who was starting the first grade. The kids in Andover seemed much hipper and older than the ones in Lowell—they had nicer backpacks and sneakers, and they wore real Levis corduroys instead of Sears Toughskins. I felt awkward and babyish in my jumper dress and knee socks.

But the biggest adjustment of all was learning reading and math from a series of test books instead of a sentient being. I was used to reading out loud in small groups in English, and for math, being led by the teacher in a lesson and then doing worksheets. At the elementary school in Andover, they practiced something called “individualized instruction, “ which meant that you worked on one math packet on your own and then went on to the next one. The math packets were like SAT tests which require penciling in the circles with your answer, and I’m not sure whether a teacher or machine read and scored them. Reading was the same way: the school was committed to something called AIRS (Andover Individualized Reading System) which meant that we went to the book selection shelves in the hallway, picked out a book, read it, filled in the appropriate answers on the worksheet, and then picked out the next level of book, and so on. Our packets were kept, in alphabetical order, in a file cabinet; it was our responsibility to retrieve them and then return them when the bell rang. It was school with no teachers; we had a homeroom teacher, and someone who taught us social studies, gym, and art (there were no individualized modules for these subjects) but that was it. AIRS was not taught—it was monitored and supervised.

My first day in this system confused me. I was told to pick out a book, so I picked out a first grade book, even though I was in fourth grade, because I figured it would allow me to work my way up and start with easy questions I was sure to get right. If the goal was to get correct answers, this seemed the way to do it. I remember the homeroom teacher scolding me when she saw me reading The Windy Day (yes, I do remember the exact title of the book), which wasn’t even a chapter book and had only a single line of text on each page: “That’s a baby book. You need to choose a book for fourth graders, unless you have a problem reading. Can you read a fourth grade book?” I could read a fourth grade book, and even a seventh grade book. However, I said nothing to Mrs. Kelly, and the next time I chose an appropriate fourth-grade book.

This is probably why I cringe whenever I hear educational acronyms or buzzwords being used. I understand that it’s not the acronyms themselves that are the problem, but every time I hear the term NEASC or NCATE or hear terms like “critical thinking” or “experiential learning” I think back to that school in Andover, to rows of fourth-graders reading silently and filling in bubbles with their # 2 pencils, and I think, was I really supposed to learn from that? It is probably also why walking around my former high school and seeing lockers and walls and rooms is strangely satisfying. We like to think of all new ideas in education as progress, but those freshly painted walls tell the real story.