When I was about eight, and in third grade, our class was ordered to report to the nurse’s office for vision testing (this was back in the day when schools could afford music programs, art instructors, and school nurses). We dutifully lined up single file in the hall in alphabetical order, and when it was our turn, we stood with toes up against the strip of colored tape on the concrete floor of the hallway, peered into to the well-lit office, and followed the nurse’s instructions to read the lines on the chart as she pointed to them.
My last name began with a W, so I was the last kid in line. No one had actually explained what a “vision test” was, but I wanted to pass the test, whatever it was. I didn’t want to face the ridicule of my fellow students if I couldn’t perform as well as they did, and I didn’t want my parents mad at me for failing a test.
So I listened carefully to the students ahead of me in line, and memorized the chart, effectively plagiarizing their work. It didn’t occur to me that I was cheating; I simply didn’t want to face the consequences of failing an assignment.
When it was my turn, I put my toes on the tape, smiled brightly at the nurse, and rattled off the letters on the chart, none of which I could actually see, other than the huge E, and even that was fuzzy.
As a result, my very real near-sightedness went undetected for year, and I made a quite a few extra trips to the pencil-sharpener to get close enough to the blackboard to read any assignment instructions that were too hard to read when viewed from my seat on the other side of the room. When this behavior continued the next year, my fourth grade teacher contacted my parents. They were not happy that I hadn’t told them I was having trouble. They weren’t happy that the solution involved a lifetime of expensive doctor’s visits and glasses. But they took me to the optometrist.
I still remember putting on my first pair of glasses, looking out the doctor’s office window, and seeing for the first time, not a blur of shifting green, but individual leaves on the tree outside, moving separately in the wind.
Education at Scholars Online isn’t about acing a test. It’s about gaining disciplined skills to see complex situations and ideas clearly, and to evaluate them honestly with charity. Unless students do their own work, however well or badly, so that the teacher can identify, address, and correct each student’s own problems, students won’t resolve their blurred vision of the subject, or their own integrity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was about eight, and in third grade, our class was ordered to report to the nurse’s office for vision testing (this was back in the day when schools could afford music programs, art instructors, and school nurses). We dutifully lined up single file in the hall in alphabetical order, and when it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character-formation","category-edu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}