What’s the purpose of being in school?

The students in the school where I work spent most of this schoolyear learning from home. Since last week they are partly back in school. One week in school, one week at home. At home, where the learning conditions are far from equal. Some students didn’t even have proper access to a pc or internet. During my lessons this week I asked them If they enjoy being back in school. Most of them don't. When I asked them why, they told me that they spent most of their time in school writing tests. Mostly 3-4 tests per day. It made me very sad.

Is that really how we choose to spend the precious time we have with our students? To let them write tests? And what do these test results reflect? How can we give standardized tests after a period of unequal learning conditions? It’s very sad to see that we work in a system that is completely build around outcomes of tests. This situation shows it even more.

Don’t get me wrong. A test can be a good thing. But only if you use it as a tool for reflection. Just to see what they have learned at home without any marks attached to it. So that the teacher and students have some feedback from where they can build meaningful learning activities. But please not as a way to quickly put some marks in the system. It’s highly unfair to give the same test to a student who had proper access to a pc, internet, and family support on one side and the student who was home alone with minimal access and no support on the other side.

School is a place to come together. A place where we can try to create equal learning conditions for all of our students as well as we can. School is not a test location. There are already enough of those…