This Is a Test!

High school kids have been visiting Panera the last couple of mornings. In groups of 2 or 3, notebooks and texts in hand, they entered, bought some sweet stuff, and settled down at tables.  I wondered at first if they were home school students.  In the past, groups of home schoolers have met at Panera for group presentations.  It didn’t take me long to realize that this last week of January was midterm exam week across the state, and that some of those kids, not having to be at school at that time, were probably prepping for those exams, and possibly even studying for a midterm REGENTS EXAM.

Only in New York does the word “Regents” have a special meaning.  In the other 49 states, people might think of the regents as a group of people charged with running a university.  In a monarchy, a regent is the person who takes rulership of a kingdom when the monarch is indisposed.  Only in the minds of people who spent their high school years in New York, does the word Regents immediately recall a series of tests deemed proof of proficiency in a variety of disciplines.

From the time I was the taking the exams through the first 25 years or so of my teaching, the Regents exams were proof of the effectiveness and often superiority of a high school education in New York State.  These special state exams in math, the sciences, history, English, languages and other areas were both finish line and possible prize in these races to comprehension.  Serious students wanted to earn “Regents” diplomas, maybe even “with honors.”  High Regents grades were something to be bragged about to your peers.  Low Regents grades were something to be concealed from them.  When I was teaching, one young man at Chittenango earned 100% on 8 Regents tests!  To New York high school students this is an achievement akin to climbing Everest without portable oxygen.

The Regents was a handy prod for a teacher to use on a class, especially on a hot day in May as final exams approached.  More than once I used the line, “Come on, you guys,  Let’s concentrate here.  This is going to be on the Regents.”  That generally served to bring focus to the unfocused at least for a couple more minutes.  Threatening the “Regents” carried some weight.

A few years before I retired, the Regents Exams began to change.  They were probably in need of some overhaul after all the years they had been used. The English Regents, however, wasn’t overhauled.  It was exploded.  It went from an exam that could be completed in two hours, to a 6 hour marathon that stretched over two days.  The idea was to make it a better test.  Truth be told, for the better students, it became an easier test, just one that was more exhausting to take.

Enough said about the English Regents, because it is just another symptom of the mess that testing is in all over the country.  And here in New York, we have a governor who neither respects teaching as as a profession or teachers for the important people that they are.  I wish the kids studying in Panera today all the best on their exams.  Because the way government tends to look at education now, exams are all that count.--Greg Ellstrom