1 thought on “Transcript from Audrey Watters’ Talk”

  1. Thanks for posting this, Maura, I really enjoyed Audrey Watters’ talk last night. I’m new to her blog and work through the ITP Program and I like her take–her insights are incredibly researched and delivered with a candor and an infectious sense of humor. Her observations are invaluable in our “data-veillance” era, and I especially enjoyed her unique, intellectual musing style on such topics as “where did the multiple choice test come from…?” Yes, WHERE did it come from? I so agree with her that education is not its own planet, but rather, requires a sociological, socioeconomic and psychological lens to be examined, understood and ideally to be “fixed” some elusive day.

    My parents were both teachers whose career paths morphed into Urban Studies (my dad) and Education Administration at the state level in NJ during the Special Ed and Title 9 era (my Mom). She eventually moved on to editing and Social Work because the “fixing” was a process of reinventing the wheel.

    I really wanted to share an anecdote from childhood last night but pulled back–when I was in Kindergarten, my Mom once gave me a standardized test at home as a “guinea pig”. When I went to school the next day, my teacher administered the same test. I told the teacher, and true story, the school officials locked me in the janitor’s closet for the duration of the test. They were nice about it so it wasn’t traumatic, but still! Is there any way I could email this to Audrey? It happens to tie together both standardized testing and Skinner’s Teaching Machine in the closet that she spoke at length about, albeit in a stranger than fiction way…

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