The GED is Easy: An Interview (Part 2)

Taking the Test

What was it like when you actually took the test?

Before going in to take the test I knew I was going to pass math, so I did slack a little bit on it.  I knew the reading.  I felt good with reading.  I felt good with everything besides the writing, the essay.  On the science and the history I had a little wondering, like those might be my rough ones right there.  It turned out very differently when I actually took the test.

When I went in for the test they gave us a quick rundown on the booklets and passed them out.  I started with the essay first, the writing essay.  That was the thing I was worried about the most.  Everybody got a different topic.  They happened to give me the topic about making a life change: “What life change could you make that would affect you in the long run and would affect you down the line in your life?”  If you didn’t have something to write about you could just make something up, but I picked cigarettes, and bam!  I just wrote a whole page essay. They wanted at least a page.  I gave them a good solid, first paragraph, where I brought together all the ideas about why it would be good to quit cigarettes.  Then I just gave three good detail paragraphs about how quitting cigarettes would affect my life: I would breathe better, smell better, and have more money in my pocket.  Three real quick things, bam!  I wrote about all those and then summed it up at the end.  It was a little bit more than a page long and I passed the thing with a 4 out of 5.  I barely even tried and thought, “Damn, that was easy.”  That surprised me because that was what I was worried about.

Once I did that I had to do the reading section.  The reading was a breeze.  Everything that you read on the test answers the questions after the passage.  Every single answer is in there.  I got almost a 90% on the reading, because a couple of times I went real quick and didn’t really answer.  If you fail the reading then you probably can’t read that great.  [Laughs]  If you can read, then you should be able to do the reading.  There’s no doubt in my mind.

After I finished the reading test, I did the English grammar section and then was done for the first day.  The second day of the test was supposed to happen a week later, but something happened so the second test was delayed an extra week.   That time it was math, history, and science.  I did really well in science and history.  History was kind of a close call.  I had to guess on some answers.  Time was running out and it was either get it wrong, or read it as fast as I can and try to get it as close as I could.  

On the history and science tests I found that you don’t need to know every single thing about it.  In the test they help you.  They give you a little passage and then you look at it and the answers are there, pretty much.  The science was a little tough.  I did better with the science, actually, than with the history.  But as with the history, they gave you the information.  For example, they had a map of different turfs and then they have five questions about the different turfs.  It was like a graph almost.  It wasn’t just the kinds of turfs, they had time periods too.  It was weird.  They had questions about whether the turf was the same from these certain years.  I had never seen something like it before, but if you have any sense and you look at that graph, the answers are there.  You just have to do the littlest things to find it.  As for GED, I don’t know anybody that couldn’t pass.  I couldn’t imagine not being able to pass the GED.  A lot of the answers are right there for you.  You just have to use your mind to grasp the answers.  

For the science test they had some questions about evolution, food-chains and food-webs.  The questions were like, “If you took this away, how would that affect this other animal?”  There were other questions about molecules and atoms.  I got a few of them right because I remembered some stuff from school.  They threw in a couple of different studies.  They didn’t just have one kind of science for the whole thing.  

They don’t make it totally like you have to figure it out yourself.  There’s information there that you can find the answer through.  For some of the questions you kind of have to know before you take the test, but to pass it you don’t need to know it.  You just need to know common sense.  You literally need common sense and you can pass the GED.  I’m positive. If you have common sense, you can pass because it’s the way they set it up.  There are things you aren’t going to know, but you’ve got to just work at it and try your best at those.  For the rest of it just put your brain to work and use the common sense.  They give you little hints, the answers are there.  I didn’t even think it was going to be like that.

Are you saying that the GED questions are less about memorized information, and more about interpreting problems?

One example is the vocabulary part with the reading section of the test.  It wasn’t necessary to know how to spell, necessarily.  They give you words, and some of these words, I have no idea what they are. You have to think to yourself, “How am I going to know what this word means?  Well let’s see.  Let me use some of my common sense.”  So you read this sentence and then you can kind of figure it out.  Just by reading the sentence with that word in it, you can tell what it’s about.  That’s how I figured out how to get a lot of them right.  I did really well on that, just by looking into the rest of the words around this word they used.  This worked even when the word was weird sometimes.  

I could probably have my little sister go into that GED right now, and I swear she could pass it.  My sister is 11-years-old, and I swear she could pass it.  I’m pretty positive.  The only problem she would have would be with the math.  With the information they give you on the GED any regular person should have no problem at least getting low passing grades, even in the 60-65% area the whole time.  There’s no way you should be failing any of this, unless you were literally not looking at it and ignoring what is in front of you.

Did you take the GED as well?  Tell us all about it!

The GED is Easy: An Interview (Part 1)

Path to the GED

How did you decide to get your GED?

The only reason I didn’t get my actual high school diploma was because some problems came up in my life that caused me to miss some school.  When I tried to back they said I was behind and wanted to put me in the 10^th grade.  At the time, I was turning 17 and didn’t really want to go back with a bunch of young kids to do the next few years over again.  I knew I could pass the GED because… it just felt like it couldn’t be that hard.  I’d only made it to 9^th grade, but I figured getting my GED at the time would be better than going back to get my high school diploma.  If I had done that, I’d be in 12^th grade right now at 20-years-old.  In a way, it might be nice to go back and get your high school certificate so you can have the extra advantage.  But to get your GED, it’s good to have something, and I didn’t want to do three more years of school.  It didn’t seem practical.

How did you prepare to take the GED?

At first I went to this community center and they gave me pretests of each part of the GED: the writing, the reading, all the different topics that they have.  I took practice tests on all of them and every time I got them back, they kept being 90 or higher.  They were easy.  By the time I finished all the tests and the writing essay the woman there, she told me, “You’re ready. “  Some kids when they take the practice tests find that they need to work more before taking the GED.  She just told me I was ready.  There was a little concern with the writing test.  That was my low thing.  But that was because I just slacked off at that point.  I knew I could have done better, but I was trying to get out of there.  I knew I was going to write a better essay for the actual GED.  I felt very comfortable on everything else.  

I saw her for 2 or 3 three days and then I decided to go get my GED.  I took the tests on two days and then the third day I got the scores back.  She scored most of the tests right away.  But for the essay, she scored me after on that.  I went and did the practice tests; and once I did that, I felt comfortable.  I thought to myself, “Man, it’s time to get my GED.”  It felt like it was going pretty good.  

Did you take the GED as well?  Tell us all about it!

Oppression and the purposes of school

Purpose and the failure of schools

My strange sort of fanaticism towards education reform has likely irritated my friends over the years. On one of my phases in this process I pestered everyone with the question, “What do you think should be the goals of our education system?” This was during a time when it occurred to me that one of the great problems in our education system is that, as a society we want schools to accomplish a huge range of tasks. An introductory teacher education textbook offered the following list:

1. Teach basic academic skills
2. Build student self-esteem
3. Promote critical thinking skills
4. Teach cooperative prosocial behaviors
5. Promote equality of opportunity
6. Prepare students for college
7. Prepare students for the world of work
8. Transmit our cultural heritage
9. Preserve our cultural richness and diversity
10. Promote national unity and patriotism
11. Build and maintain a strong economy
12. Promote social justice
13. Promote global understanding
14. Combat social problems (discrimination, AIDS, drugs, etc.)
15. Provide social services (child care, health services, etc.)

(Arends, Wnitzky, & Tannenbaum, 2001)

 

You might think of others to add to this list such as cultivate moral virtues, prepare students to participate in a democracy, or provide technology access and training.  Either way, this is a great deal of responsibility, unrealistic to be expected of any organization as small as a school is. Consider the legal requirement to provide this “free and reasonable” education for every student in your area, regardless of family finances, natural intelligence, native language, cultural background, and disability status. In addition to meeting all these objectives for students of diverse abilities and inclinations, schools have to work under the constraints of arbitrary state-mandated curricula, federally required testing, local policies, constrained budgets, community values, and parental expectations. If the magnitude and constraints weren’t enough, notice that many of the proposed functions of school arguably contradict each other (e.g. transmit cultural heritage vs. combat social problems) and that between federal, state, district, community and individual levels there is no real consensus on what the list should include.   Add to this the things schools do outside of the classroom such as sports, dances, lunch, and busing. When I think on it, it is actually quite natural for schools to become garbage. Who could possibly orchestrate this sort of mess successfully? 

Some authors have claimed that compared to other organizations and cultural institutions schools have undergone surprisingly little change, appearing in form and function much as they might have fifty or even a hundred years ago. This is in spite of numerous major attempts at reform.  The lack of a clear and realistic purpose is a key reason why improvement is so slow and school approval ratings are so low. (Jones, 2012)

The numerous, competing, contradicting, and externally imposed purposes result in a form of oppression inflicted upon the students in these schools and ultimately upon the greater community that they are released into.  It may seem strange to say that something as important and beneficial as school is a form of oppression.   Lately, reflecting on my work with my students, and in studying for my special education license, have come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, an agent of oppression.  Huzzah!

The IEP as evidence of oppression

The experience of working with IEP[1]s has helped me to see one way this oppression works. One of the major components of an IEP is a set of goals determined to be appropriate for the given student and his suite of special needs. The goals deal with academic performance, socio-behavioral issues, and reference long term education and career goals. Two things about this process really stuck out for me. First, and perhaps most important in terms of my becoming an instrument of oppression, is the fact that the student almost never has any input regarding these goals. And when they do, it is frequently overridden by the various “agents of interest” who write these plans. Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the second grade here. I’m talking about 17-year-olds on the brink of legal majority. I’m not only talking about students too old to be sensibly left out of the process of making their life decisions, I’m talking about those for whom this system didn’t work. Whether they are disabled or not there is something about them that doesn’t fit the mold and if our objective was to try and help them attain whatever kind of success we can, we ought to be more interested in consulting with them on what that success should mean. Instead we almost invariably create programs that will try to force them back into the mold as best we can. In other words, we choose to impose the schizophrenically unresolved purposes of school on the student rather than let him discover and articulate his own.  What this tends to mean is that instead of letting students develop talents where they are able, we stunt their growth under the pretense of what’s in the student’s best interest and providing a “fair” chance.

The very existence of the IEP demonstrates that the system is oppressive.  On the one hand, it is supposed to provide an education suited to the individual student but is actually used to enforce conformity.  On the other hand it is only provided for students who have specific types of struggles with school. Does it make sense that only a few students need an individualized program? Aren’t all students different?  Don’t they all deserve their own programs? But most students are expected to willingly conform to the system simply because they can.

The reality is that the students themselves are not the source of our established learning goals.  They are stuck with an education that’s determined by political battles between business interests, parents, colleges, and government bodies.   The debate over teaching intelligent design in schools is an example of this. Although all parties claim they want children to learn critical thinking skills, when it comes down to it, atheists and creationists alike will choose indoctrination to their own paradigm before taking the risk of allowing students to search out the issues for themselves. If the young people are encouraged to critically make up their own minds, they might come up with the “wrong” answer.  And hence, policy is made.

Aside from the problem of coercing all students to be the same, the dysfunctional goals of school are the basis for other forms of oppression as well.  These forms include contradictions to human nature, misalignment with student development, as well as an old-fashioned wasting of time, issues that I will discuss in a later post.  But there you have it. I’m an oppressor. I force kids to sit in a classroom and learn a bunch of stuff they have neither the interest nor inclination for. In many cases they lack the ability.  And just so you know I did it all correctly, my students were suffering the whole time. Huzzah!

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[1] An IEP is an “individualized education program” that is developed for students who receive special education services.  The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), requires that all students who are diagnosed with a learning disability receive an IEP.

Works Cited

Arends, R. I., Wnitzky, N. E., & Tannenbaum, M. D. (2001). Exploring Teaching: An introduction to education. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Jones, J. M. (2012, June 20). Confidence in U.S. public schools at new low. Retrieved May 27, 2013, from Gallup Politics: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155258/Confidence-Public-Schools-New-Low.aspx