Chapter 2: Listening to and Nurturing Interested, Passionate, and Thoughtful Sixth Graders

When Karen Phua made the previous comment, she was a sixth-grade teacher in New York, which did have an elementary social studies test but whose test was given at the beginning of fifth grade, in the grade preceding hers. The next state assessment in social studies was not administered for three years, until the end of the eighth grade. That eighth-grade assessment addressed New York and U.S. history or the curriculum of the seventh and eighth grades. Karen, a keenly logical person, deduced correctly that the New York State sixth-grade social studies curriculum, The Eastern Hemisphere, was the one year that was not tested overtly by the state. As a passionate and thoughtful teacher, she saw this anomaly working both in her favor and in the favor of her students.