Classroom Assessment What Teachers Need to Know 7th Edition by W. James Popham
ISBN 10: 0132868601
ISBN 13: 9780132868600
Educational Assessment in Flux
Perhaps you have heard the ancient Chinese curse, May you live in an interesting
time! Perhaps you haven?t.
Well, I can definitely tell you where and when I first heard this curse?and
how puzzled I was by its meaning. The year was 1961, and I was a rookie assistant
professor at San Francisco State College. A campuswide speech was to be delivered
by Robert Maynard Hutchins, an educational celebrity of that era. Hutchins was the
founder of the Great Books Movement and had been the youngest-ever chancellor of
the University of Chicago.
It was a simply marvelous speech?so fine, in fact, that I subsequently obtained
an audiotape of the address and played it often in my classes. Hutchins
opened his address with the following sentence: ?Perhaps you have heard the ancient
Chinese curse, ?May you live in an interesting time!??
As I indicated, upon hearing Hutchins?s first sentence, I was immediately
perplexed by the meaning of this ?curse? that I?d never heard before. After all,
if the time in which one lives is ?interesting,? this would seem to be a positive?
not a negative. What?s interesting is typically better than what?s dull. But then, as
Hutchins continued, he pointed out that an ?interesting time? invariably involves
changes. Indeed, the more profound the changes, the more ?interesting? the time.
And changes, at least for most of us, cause discomfort. We must accommodate to
what?s new. Routine, experience-honed approaches no longer work. New, ?interesting?
times simply bristle with uncertainty. Hutchins was warning his audience
that education in the United States was entering an era of unprecedented change
and, as a consequence, U.S. educators should clearly regard themselves as consummately
cursed.
