Whose idea was it anyway?
This morning I took Tin to be tested to see if he is gifted. This was the outcome of midsummer looking into schools. I had scheduled it in June of 2011 for March of 2009, his birthday week. After enrolling him in Waldorf and learning more about the school, I thought why bother with this test – he’s 3 years old for godsakes. But a friend of a friend (who happens to be a child psychologist) said go ahead and do the testing because it does no harm, and it might be useful.
Well we did the testing this morning and although he scored high in verbal and visual, his analytical wasn’t up to snuff. 3 years old and he can’t analyze well – good lord. The tester suggested I bring him back in six months and in the meantime, train him to analyze the puzzle.
This is indeed everything I loathe about school – teaching to a test – and so my qualms are why get started now, so that we could get him in a free school that will teach him over the next twelve to thirteen years how to take a test? I’d rather teach him how to think for himself. And I believe that is what Waldorf is going to do as well.
The whole testing just got me vexed and so since T was busy at school and I didn’t have a babysitter for the next two hours, I took him to the French Quarter to walk it out. As we wondered around on the Moonwalk looking at cranes and the Steamboat Natchez and then into Jackson Square where we paused to take a mental snapshot of St. Louis Cathedral, I realized the bad feeling in my gut was that everything about that test is/was wrong and I knew it from the get go but I allowed myself to sucked into taking him there.
I had been speaking to one of the fathers at Waldorf who had tested gifted when he was Tin’s age and he said that he was put into a gifted program and the curriculum was very similar to Waldorf. See what I mean?
If you’re wondering why I went through with it, my honest answer is money. If Tin could go to a good school for free, wouldn’t it be a relief not to have to come up with money we don’t have to send him to school? But at the end of the day, we just have to figure this one out.