Confused, perplexed, puzzled...

Confused...

Are we allowed to change the assessment tasks or not?  My prac school lead me to believe that we were not allowed to alter them.

What if you believe a task to be so outside the realms of students being able to succeed, that the majority would fail?

If their vocabulary knowledge and comprehension ability is below expectation for age group/year level, what do you do? Allow them to fail?

I do have high expectations for students... (sometimes maybe too high) but the C2C assessment I saw at Prac for English: Poetry was in my (and my mentor's) opinion too challenging for the students in our class.  Also the subject matter of the assessment task poem was not relevant to these students.  They don't live in a desert!! They didn't know what incandescent means!! There was so much unknown vocabulary in the poem that the mood and meaning were lost.

Also, as I began to teach the unit on poetry, my mentor seemed puzzled as to my 'teaching to the test'.  I found myself sitting on the fence.  And it's mighty uncomfortable up here!
I noted that yes, in an ideal world we would be 'inadvertently' teaching content that would arise on the assessment task anyway.  But if this is the task they MUST perform, I must give them the skills to perform it.  If you need to find example of 'onomatopoeia in a stanza', you must know what onomatopoeia is...and know what a stanza is.  Otherwise they will FAIL!

In an even more ideal world, the task itself would be relevant to not only the student now, but to the students' future self. 

When have you ever been asked in the 'real world' to find an example of onomatopoeia?  Most adults don't know what the word means... 

Poetry is a wonderful thing and in order to write poetry it can be important to know of the many devices there are to choose from in order to satisfy the audience.  But when I went to school we did this in HIGH SCHOOL grades 9 or 10.  Grade 3???  Come on!

In our classroom, we read lots (and I mean lots) of poems and stories to the kids.  They began to develop an appreciation and occasionally a love for poems.  It extends their vocabulary and their level of reading comprehension.  It teaches them the 'code' of literacy.  This is surely what we need to do, develop a love of literature and literacy through enjoyment. Through enjoyment comes the understanding that poems and of course writing is intended to be read (maybe even enjoyed) by someone and as such it must be understandable.  Thus paving the way for spelling, punctuation and grammar all the way to persuasive texts.