Oral History and News Story: Robert Valentine

Oral History and News Story: Robert Valentine

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James Turner

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Reading Then and Now

By James Turner

Professor Robert Valentine, a senior lecturer at Murray State University, said reading comprehension was a focus of standardized testing when he was in Bowling Green High School.

Valentine said his mother made sure he and his three brothers developed the ability to read well. They were often read to as children, and even read to each other. When the Sunday paper was delivered, they would assign roles to each other in the colored comics section.

“We would always figure out who was going to be Dagwood because our mother would always be Blondie,” Valentine said.

He said they also took on roles for a comic strip called Pogo, which is not in circulation anymore. Valentine said Pogo was like the Doonesbury of its day but used animals for political commentary on the faults of the government.

Valentine said that reading at the time was rewarding and pleasurable, and that’s just what people did for recreation when he was a child in the 1950s and early 1960s. He recalled one instance when he was around 13 or 14-years-old when he became ill and was bedridden for about a week and read through a book by H.G. Wells and another by Jules Verne.

“I used to get in trouble for reading books,” Valentine said. “You know ‘Hey you’re supposed to be mowing the lawn, what are you doing?’”

In high school, Valentine did have to go through his own version of standardized tests, which heavily tested his ability to read. He said that since he’d been reading since the age of 3 or 4, he was not intimidated by them and didn’t recall any classmates worrying about the tests either.

“I just found the tests something you had to do…” Valentine said. “I didn’t find them very difficult. Although I’m sure that my scores in the mathematics section, or perhaps physical sciences were not very strong.”

With today’s constant internet traffic, people spend a lot of time reading what’s on the internet, Valentine said. Most of what’s on the internet is not monitored by any editor or publisher, so the ability to construct sentences or even spell currently has weakened.

“We get people who don’t even care about spelling,” Valentine said. “As a result, we’re coming up with a lot of language that wants to express something, but really doesn’t have the tools to do it.”

Valentine admits that he doesn’t know much about today’s standardized testing but said some of his former students had to deal with it.

“I understand from many of my former students who went into elementary and secondary education,” Valentine said. “They seemed to consider standardized testing to be a barrier to learning, certainly a distraction. And it has driven at least four of them that I can think of out of the profession far earlier than they should have left.”

Valentine said that paperwork on measures of diversity, questionnaires about behavior, and people telling teachers what’s good practice in a classroom also had a hand in driving them out of the education profession.

Valentine said if he had to take a standardized test today, he probably wouldn’t do as well as he did in years prior.

“I think I’d probably do more poorly now…” Valentine said. “Because I think I know something now and would spend all my time correcting the test question before I got to the answers.”

Valentine said he wishes he knew more about the tests so that he could help students, some with a fear of testing.

“Some people have terrific test anxieties because they’ve been told everything, every body’s wellbeing, your entire future hinges on this test,” Valentine said. “You might as well tell people we’re going to be attacked tonight and it’s live or die.”

The oral history audio file can be accessed at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f-vU7TPYBbvtJCX1Cm9AzHgxPaWSJNd5/view?usp=sharing