Since Bubble Testing Season is upon us, it seems only fitting to talk about the Bubble Tests.

Today is just a link… one that makes me want to vomit when I see the downright farce being perpetrated on American education.

Here are but a few quote from this former “test scorer”. (No, the tests are not machine scored; one of tons of worthwhile reasons to read the link.)

“Test scoring is a huge business, dominated by a few multinational corporations, which arrange the work in order to extract maximum profit.”

“Test-scoring companies make their money by hiring a temporary workforce each spring, people willing to work for low wages (generally $11 to $13 an hour), no benefits, and no hope of long-term employment—not exactly the most attractive conditions for trained and licensed educators. So all it takes to become a test scorer is a bachelor’s degree, a lack of a steady job, and a willingness to throw independent thinking out the window and follow the absurd and ever-changing guidelines set by the test-scoring companies. Some of us scorers are retired teachers, but most are former office workers, former security guards, or former holders of any of the diverse array of jobs previously done by the currently unemployed. When I began working in test scoring three years ago, my first “team leader” was qualified to supervise, not because of his credentials in the field of education, but because he had been a low-level manager at a local Target.”

“Company communications with test-scoring employees often feel like they have been lifted from a Kafka novel. Scorers working from home almost never talk to an actual human being.”

“Scoring is particularly rushed when scorers are paid by piece-rate, as is the case when you are scoring from home, where a growing part of the industry’s work is done. At 30 to 70 cents per paper, depending on the test, the incentive, especially for a home worker, is to score as quickly as possible in order to earn any money: at 30 cents per paper, you have to score forty papers an hour to make $12 an hour, and test scoring requires a lot of mental breaks. Presumably, the score-from-home model is more profitable for testing companies than setting up an office, especially since it avoids the prospect of overtime pay, the bane of existence for companies operating on tight deadlines. But overtime pay is a gift from heaven for impoverished test scorers; on one project, I worked in an office for twenty-three days straight, including numerous nine-hour days operating on four to five hours sleep—such was my excitement about overtime.”

Excuse me while I go puke. (Props to Diane Ravitch for turning me on to this article.)

I wholeheartedly endorsed a film the other day. Here’s how it came to cross my path.

I am dear friends with the filmmaker. Of course, my endorsement suddenly opens me up to accusations of cronyism but trust me when I tell you, I know a lot of “artists”. I know writers up the wazoo, filmmakers, musicians and painters, and you almost never hear me publicly go to bat for them just because they are my friends.

Even if their work really, really rocks, I am still often quite reticent because I am not much of a fan of “the good ol’ boys club” of endorsing the work of people just because I know them.

So the documentary I would practically insist you see – especially if you are over the age of 40 – is an anomaly for me. I really didn’t think I’d be willing to so publicly go to bat for the thing but now that I have seen it I am on the bandwagon blaring with a megaphone.

Here’s the link. Trust me on this.

The filmmaker is a teacher. A Teacher of the Year award winner in fact, class of 2007, same as me. That is how I got to know him. TK (his name) is from Wisconsin – he once brought me a 3 pound block of cheese just to prove it – and he’s quite the remarkable guy. 6’5” former basketball player who now teaches 4^th grade. Just seeing pics of him with the kids is enough to make you smile.

But he is beloved, he is phenomenally well-read and he’s got a heart as big as any hunk of cheese in his state.

He also learned that he closest brother had terminal cancer the same day that we met the President of the United States in the Oval Office of the White House together.

Just remarkable. And that set him off on a journey exploring how we die (in lieu of the way modern medicine can keep us almost unnaturally alive in this day and age).

And how we die gets the ball rolling on where we’d like to die. And that gets the ball rolling on how we are truly one of the first generations to be so disconnected from death.

I mean we view death as a failure, as if it’s a shortcoming of some sort instead of a natural part of life. And when you “consider the conversation” (that’s the title of the film, you can’t help but reflect on how you are actually living.

And what’s important to you. Like truly important. Family. Work. Community. Spirituality. Meaning.

I described the journey of watching this the other day as, “Be prepared to be terrified, illuminated, profoundly moved, confronted and warmly hugged all within 60 minutes. Just knocked me off my feet!”

Probably, just hearing the subject matter makes you want to say, “Nah, thanks.” But the piece is so tastefully done, so thoughtful in its manner and so insightful in its selection of people who appear throughout that I can promise it’s gonna break through the ice of even the most emotionally frozen of us.

As I said, here’s the link. Trust me on this. Way to go TK. Magical!

March is always the longest month of the year for me. Since my life revolves around a school schedule, this is the time when I can see the end of the year but it’s still fairly far away, the start of the year seems eons ago, and the realization that the ambitions I held to do this, this and that are not going to come to pass before the 2010/2011 school year turns its last page.

But if I step on the gas, I know I can make sure I at least do this… or that.

Or something. So March is when I MAKE A PROJECT.

Look, March is a 5 week month. At least there are 5 Tuesdays, 5 Wednesdays, and 5 Thursdays in this month and ostensibly, those should be the most productive work days of my week. Point is, the time is there. Additionally, I always feel it’s great to ensure that I have something tangible in my hand that I have really done after long slogs of time if for no other reason than the sense of actual accomplishment. March is a month where minutes can all-too-easily slip into hours, hours into days and days into an entire month. Doubt me? Just where-oh-where did February go?

It’s that sense which drives me to advocate for making a project in the month of March. It can be a personal project for my life outside of work lines (like exercise, build a tree swing, read a really thick by James Joyce) or it can be a work thing (like bringing Project-Based Learning into the classroom, locking down an outline for my next book or following up with that long lost uncle in Ghana who has all this gold bullion waiting for me once I give him my social security number).

But have something to show by April Fool’s Day because on 4-1-2011, the first third of this year will be over… and the question of what will I have to show for my time will be on my mind.

Writing is re-writing.

That may sound like a cliche – and often it is – until you have to toss 4,000 words of your new book because “it’s just not right” – as I had to do this past week.

I mean, talk about an OUCH! moment. That was a lotta work I had to dump. But books are whole projects and the journey of completing them, no matter how many one writes, will always be filled with clear-sailing on some days and back alley knife fights on others.

And sometimes, you just gotta look up and realize that hey, in the process of “discovering” this book, I just discovered that this giant chunk of X pages isn’t working. So off it must go – and off it went. And you know what? It liberated me. See, amatuer writers very often feel that if they did the work, wrote the pages, then they somehow have to use them.

Nope! Bzzzp. Wrong.

Sometimes all that work is just work leading up to the process of discovering the real work which needs to be done – and by holding onto things that are not working simply because you put in a ton of effort into creating them, you risk losing sight of the big picture when writing a novel… which is, to write a great book!

I mean no one cares if it takes me 4 months or 4 years to write my next novel. (Except my publisher, perhaps.) Quality matters over expediency and sometimes, that’s a painful lesson to learn. Especially when you are re-learning it over and over and over again. It’s not that a “mistake” was made. It’s more that an evolution occurred… and growth sometimes requires pruning.

So my great progress on writing this week was tossing a heck of a lot of pages that had taken me a really long time to pen. But, will the reader ever know this?

I doubt it. But will they notice? Well, they would if I wouldn’t have made sure that some of my pages went to the dumpster.

The trash heap: often a writer’s best friend.

There are a variety of stages when writing a book. One of the most interesting times is the “Approach of the Midpoint”.

Being that I am a meticulous outliner – that’s just my novel writing style – it’s a curious time for me. (BTW, not all authors frame their books the same way. In fact, some authors just start slamming away at the keyboard, starting at page 1, penning no outline at all. However, I’ve also heard that those authors also toss away hundreds of pages of work because it by the time they find the plot, the soul of the characters, and so on, so much has changed from where they started that they have to dive back in and start dumping work. To each their own, I guess.)

The Approach of the Midpoint is exciting because it’s when I can really start to smell blood in the water. It’s been said before that writing a novel is like eating an elephant and the only way to do it is one bite at a time. The more books I write, the more I believe in that statement. However, as I approach the midpoint of a book, I start to eat a little faster.

See, the midpoint represents a turning point. I’d venture to say that if you go back and de-construct many of your favorite books, you’d see that somewhere about the halfway point of the story, there was a spin, a twist, a moment which snapped and sent things sailing forward into a new and powerful direction. As a writer, once you approach this moment, you know that the snowball has just begun to descend down the bigger mountainside and if things are set up well, the next stretch of writing is going to be spent with momentum gaining, the snowball building, and a full head o’ steam a gaining.

It”s quite an exciting time, too, because you think about your book more and more and more throughout the day. Brushing your teeth. Driving in traffic. Reading other books and articles. And each time you get the opportunity to work on your own book some more, it becomes even more exciting and fun.

I once heard a story that Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, The Andromeda Strain, ER tv show and more), when he hit the midpoint of his books, would start getting up earlier and earlier to work on them. I guess a regular workday began around 9 for him, but then it would begin at 8. And then, as he crossed into the the 3/4 of his book, 7:00 am. And then, when he was heading for the home stretch, 6, then 5, then 4:00 am.

I’ll never forget reading an interview where he said was getting up at like 3:00 a.m. because writing and finishing the book would just consume him. He said that during this time, he was an absolute lout to live with and that his new novels would just entirely take over his life.

Me, I have been known to stay up until 3 (even when I had to be up by 5:30) because of “the fever”. But “the fever” rarely happens – at least for me – until I cross the midpoint.

And now I am approaching that with my next book. And in my blood, I am starting to feel the bubbles percolate. All writers are different, but all writers are human and I have a feeling that seasoned fiction writers each have that time, that point where they see the light at the end of the tunnel, when the work just takes a center stage role in you life in a way that becomes consumptive.

It’s almost a sickness. Almost unhealthy. But it’s a bender I really do love.

As much as I have been on the technological bandwagon of late, as we migrate towards online state testing, I see problems and problems and problems arising. This came to the fore for me during a distraught phone call I got from a really keen educator in Indiana.

Apparently, the high stakes state tests are now online. No pass, no diploma, you know the type. And online testing is wreaking havoc on some of her kids. In no particular order…

–Apparently there is a writing section to the test. This means that students who are hunt-n-peck typers are at a distinct disadvantage. Now standardized test makers always claim that the length of your composition plays little to no role on the evaluation of your composition on tests like these. However, every released sample essay of a “not passing” piece of student work is frequently characterized by its shortness of length (its insufficiency of content, if you will). Conversely, every exemplary piece of written work was frequently characterized by a sense of voluminousness (so to speak). One paragraph essays bomb, 5 paragraph essays soar and the middle ground is the middle ground. They are fence sitters.

As the teacher pointed out to me, this means that typing acumen is now playing a role in whether or not students will earn their high school diploma because if you are an 18 word per minute typer who was an academic fence sitter anyway, the chances of you finishing your work is severely reduced due to time limitations. However, if you are a 90 word-per-minute typing fence sitter, your ability to fly around the keyboard gives you more of an ability to cover more ground and thus puts you in a better position to pass the test.

But the school does not teach typing. They figure kids “ought to know”. Is that fair?

Makes me wonder if this was this ever an issue with hand-written essays? I don’t recall it being so. Sure, some kids might have penned their essays more slowly than others, but I doubt that the words-per-minute rate ever approached a quadruple the time difference.

– She also bemoaned the tech glitch at the start of the online test which cost some of her kids 20 minutes of actual test taking time. And being that the state controlled the start and stop mechanism through the software – rendering the teacher entirely disempowered to remediate the circumstance (side note: they love to disempowere the teacher, don’t they?) some kids got shorted time in a way that was never resolved.

–Beyond that, simple test taking strategies such as underlining key words in the passage, X-ing out wrong answers via process of elimination and writing in the margins have long been advocated as habits often demonstrated by strong test takers.

The online tests offered limited ability to highlight and annotate but the software was entirely unfamiliar to the students so that a technical acumen was needed in order to use a variety of the functions which would have allowed students to incorporate the strategies strong test takers frequently use when taking standardized tests. And for every moment a kid fiddled around with the “How do I annotate this or highlight that or strike through this?” question, it was a moment not being afforded to the student to actually answer the questions. On timed tests, this stuff matters.

Plus, it’s distracting to the test takers. And it’s frustrating. Souring their mood and creating aggravation can’t really be expected to actually enhance test performance, can it? And when a student’s diploma is on the line, is this really a prudent way to assess their worthiness?

It sounded to me as if the software engineers presumed all kids had a facility with navigating the online testing terrain, a facility that could really only be had by actually having had some instruction as to how a student was supposed to navigate the online testing terrain – as well as some practice.

These things literally required practice.

Now online testing is most assuredly going to play a larger part in assessment going forward. And I am sure a lot of the “wrinkles” will get ironed out. (All? No way. But we haven’t ironed out all the wrinkles in bubble testing yet – despite the billions of dollars we spend every year administering them – so it would be unfair to hold online tests up to a standard which doesn’t really exist for the current format.

The problems of online testing are, to turn a phrase, starting to “bubble up”.

I have a stack of stuff to do on my desk… but no matter how much stuff I do, it seems as though the stack remains at the same height.

And I swear, I do a lot.

I mean it’s just a wee bit before X-mas and New Year’s and I am still cranking at full speed, as if it were mid-May or something.

Question: If I stop actually doing work, does the stack of work for me to do stop growing? I mean it’s clear that doing work doesn’t reduce the stack so maybe not doing work will not increase the stack.

It’s Alice in Wonderland logic, for sure… but perhaps we’ve all got it wrong. I mean slackers never really have much to do and highly productive people (who do a lot) always seem to have a lot to do.

There’s gotta be a law here, somewhere, Murphy style.Here’s my first stab at it – I call it Sitomer’s Preposterous Law of Work. (Why not, right?)

To not do work will result in there being less work for you to do, but to do a lot of work will result in there being a lot more work for you to do.

In other words, “Work or Work not, that is the question.”

I like to read stuff from all sorts of perspectives written by all kinds of people. If they are “thinkers in their field” in any way, shape, or form, I will often cut them a wee bit of slack and try to hear what they have to say.

Not that I always agree, but listening to others weigh in helps me in many ways”think about what I really think” in my own life.

And often I see connections to school from what people “think” about life from outside the world of education.

To wit, Seth Godin just wrote a blog post which illustrates this point exceptionally well. (Here’s the link.) Essentially, his basic point is, when someone asks you what you are working on, you ought to be enthusiastic about your reply… or else you are, as he says, “wasting away”.

I am not sure I agree with the “wasting away” part because I truly LOVE what I do for a living but still, there are times where it’s a heck of a lot of blue-collar, roll up your shirt sleeves and execute, execute, execute type of work. (Nothing is ever all glamour and people who try to sell that idea to other people annoy me because persevering through the mundane – after all, God is in the details, right? – is a very under-appreciated quality of success, in my opinion) However, I do agree with the idea that the over-arching energy behind what “you are working on” ought to be fueled by enthusiasm, inspiration and passion.

And when I think about how so many kids go through school these days, I can’t help but be shocked by how absent these feelings are from their educational experience.

Top students, well, we often see how fervent they get when it comes to things like math-a-thon or science fair or moot court or debate club and so on. But if you slice away the top 10% of the highest achievers in any school and you took a measurement of “the enthusiasm for learning barometer”, I fear the ratings would be in the tank.

And who does well in anything that they do not find meaningful, personally relevant or authentically exciting.

Seth Godin is preaching to the business world in his blog post but I think the same thing can be said in education. The kids need to care (internal motivation; Daniel Pink has spoken to this a great deal) and the teachers need to feel enthusiastic and driven about their profession duties as well. (Which of course, can’t ever be legislated, much less measured… another post entirely.)

If you don’t care on the inside, eventually, it’s going to show in the work on the outside.

Recently, a bunch of people have been asking me about how to blog. Or rather, how to build a big readership of blog readers.

While a quick google search will reveal all sorts of tips and tricks and so on, for me, I think that the key element comes through voice. You gotta find your voice.

The truth is, building a blog takes time, effort and persistence. I’ve been blogging now for two solid years. (Really, it’s like my 2 year ann of starting my blog this week.) I used to blog 7 days a week for the first 6 months – now I crank out about 4 or 5 posts per week. Me, being a writer, makes it feel like a duck-in-water type of situation, though. I love doing it and keeping up with my blog is not anything like “work” to me at all. It’s fun. It’s energizing. It stretches me in ways I like. And let’s be honest, not everyone is made from this weird writer fabric where they get their kicks out of banging away at a keyboard as much as I do.

As with all writing, blogging forces me to think about what I really think… and therein I find the personal reward of blogging. Sure I goof around and embed fart jokes whenever I can – cause they’re a gas (get it, a gas? Oh so immature!) but blogging is equivalent to mental exercise for me. As mentioned, it keeps me sharp… and current. (Puts fart jokes in a whole new light, no?). Like most work, I think you have to find some sort of internal reward in doing the work if you are going to produce decent work.

So the answer is that for most folks, to build a blog where you get a decent sized readership, well… it’s gonna take a while and it’s gonna take the creation of a lot of content. And that content has got to come at people from an angle. It needs to have a voice. I don’t think having a “product” (i.e. my books and such) really drives my blog and/or brings readers. It’s that I have found a blogging voice which is my own… goofy and irreverent as it may be.

And if you are going to “be a blogger” you’ve got to find yours.

So if you want to build a blog you have to start writing and writing and writing and then see where it leads you personally. Once you find your own voice I think you will also find more and more readers.

There are no shortcuts these days – especially with so many people blogging. But there is always room for good, interesting, valuable content. (As a reader, I dig reading people that “move” me in some way… and I’d read you if you hit that bar.) Create that kind of blog and you will find an audience.

My best advice is to be persistent, be fearless and be honest. Trying to please others is a recipe for being boring and inauthentic… and who wants to read that?

Thus fart jokes. They may stink, but they are never boring.

As many of you know, I put a heck of lot of effort into demonstrating that standards-based education does not need to devolve into drill-n-kill worksheet classroom assignments highlighted by a bubble test for summative student assessment.

I believe kids should – and want to – DO and PROVE they have multi-dimensional interests and capacities.

Have them demonstrate their knowledge of the ELA content standards by exhibiting their comprehension of the content standards (such as plot, tone, characterization, and so on. Really, SO MUCH is at our fingertips these days.)

To that end I put together a free digital book report contest and WOW! the entries are in from all over the country. (We even had some international contributions.)

It’s down to five finalists in each of the following categories with over $20,000 in prizes being handed out once the people have their say.

• Grades 5-8
• Grades 9-12

The polls are now open… please vote for your winner.

BTW, I can’t tell you how many teachers have written to me THRILLED that they participated. It really is the “Teach a person to fish” parable because so many of them said that now that they have tasted how Project-Based Learning could be meaningfully married to standards-based classroom assignments, the win/win/win scenario crafted between the kids, the curriculum and the teachers made the whole process of teaching and learning a challenging and exciting joy.

Teaching rocks! And when your kids are excited about the work – and the work is demanding and purposeful – it’s just incredible what can be done.

Like I said, check out the finalists and vote. Clearly, these students have all kinds of skills that we, in this loony NCLB world, are all-too-often are never asking them to tap.

Congrats again to the finalists! Clearly, a ton of hard, good work went into these projects.