Exams at Ambleside School
This week we enter our time of exams- a time of gaining a window into our students' minds. This is an opportunity for us to see how your students are organizing knowledge, synthesizing ideas, and mastering skills. We can also gain valuable insight into the habits of learning that are formed or lacking in the young scholar.
Any time there is an assessment, we are challenged to shed old paradigms for evaluating learning. As a parent of an Ambleside student, you can do much damage if you encourage your students to review and cram for these tests. The desire for knowledge is fragile and can be destroyed by your anxiety. Instead of asking, "How well did my child perform?" you can begin asking another question. "What habits are forming in my learner?"
How do the exams reflect your child's developing attention? "Attention is hardly even an operation of the mind, but is simply the act by which the whole mental force is applied to the subject at hand," Mason says.
Consider the habit of application. Does your child apply himself to his work? Is she just interested in doing what is required and no more? Is your student growing in giving rapid mental effort to a task rather than plodding through his work?
What about the habit of thinking? Thinking is "a real conscious effort of mind...not the fancies that flit without effort through the brain." There are many opportunities, at home and school, to cultivate thinking- tracing effect from cause or cause from effect, to compare and contrast, to summarize and draw conclusions. "Thinking comes by practice," Mason says, " and every walk should offer some knotty problem for the children to think out-- 'Why does that leaf float on the water, and this pebble sink?' and so on."
Our goal here at Ambleside is to keep your child eager for the "attractiveness of knowledge itself, and in the real appetite for knowledge with which they are endowed."
Virginia Wilcox,
Head of School