HAM Cram

On Friday, January 27th I knew very little about HAM radio. By the end the next day I knew just a wee bit more but I had a Technician Class amateur radio license from the FCC.  From 8:00 until 4:00 that day I crammed using the actual test pool of questions along with the answers, 58 pages in total, from which 35 questions were chosen for the test. The regimen was to study for 45 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes, and then take the exam the end of the day.

I don’t think I had ever had an experience in which “teaching to the test” was the objective of the day. In grade school, I recall taking a standardized test but have long forgotten the detail. In high school I took the PSAT and the ACT tests with no preparation on than the admonition from my teachers to simply “try your best.” For graduate school I was advised to take the Miller Analogies Test instead of the GRE as it was both easier and shorter.

My day with the HAM radio training suggests that my soon to be issued FCC license is really joke: eight hours of my life given to earn a piece of paper (good for 10 years) that enable me to legally begin my real learning “on the job” within a patient and experienced community of HAM radio operators.

Given the kazillions¹ of dollars earned by standardized test companies and test preparation firms each year one would hope that current high-stakes testing in education are  more than licenses to learn the real stuff. But perhaps that is, in fact, what they are.

So perhaps educators can relax a bit and, for eight months out of the school year, do real teaching that enables real learning to take place. And then, for a few weeks (or less) simply teach rote memorization and the test taking tricks of the trade that enable kids to get their “license” to proceed to the next level, the next phase where real learning, surrounded by patient and experience teachers, can again take place.