Here We Go A-WASL-ing

$%#^%$ the WASL. That's all I can say.

Okay, maybe I can say a little more. Because my 12 year old is in a virtual school, he has to take the WASL, which is Washington State's big, bad standardized test. This was news to me. This test, from what I'm told, tests for such a huge amount of unrelated information that teachers here teach only to the test. My kids are getting a thorough, well-rounded education and Tyler scored in the college freshman range on last year's Woodcock-Johnson (another test), so I wasn't too concerned. But just to be on the safe side I bought one of the Grade 7 books from the giganto WASL prep section at Borders.

Here's a sample math question:

Explain in short answer form why the area of a triangle is calculated differently from the area of a polygon.

My kid is doing Algebra and he was baffled. I earned an A in college trigonometry and I can see why they are calculated differently, but I don't think I could explain it coherently. Certainly not in the two-minutes-or-less that the book says should be given to this type of questions. This was not one hard question, but rather a good representative of the questions on the sample test.

I won't even get into the reading portion. I'll just say that a twelve year old can be well-educated and well-rounded without knowing what a précis is or how an author's schema (yeah, they used that exact word) affects his style of writing.

We've been too busy learning real math--you know, the kind with numbers and formulas?--and writing commentaries on some of the world's greatest literature to address these points. I'm glad we bought the book, so we at least know what kind of foolishness we are in for. We will spend the next two weeks memorizing what every other kid in the state has been drilling all year, and I'm sure he will do fine on the bugger because he's a smart kid.

But I'm a little concerned for an educational system with such an interesting set of learning priorities.