It may seem counter – intuitive to some, but more frequent assessment doesn’t automatically improve performance. As an old farmer used to say, weighing a cow more often doesn’t help fatten it up. The current fetish with testing has it’s heart in the right place, but it’s still dangerous. Testing takes time from experience and instruction. The former is more relevant to student learning than the later. Also, play is important. The paper airplanes in the photo below are over 100 years old and pre-date airplanes.
Kids and their imaginations shouldn’t be ignored. It reminds me of a physicist who asked a bunch of elementary school kids how to make a space vehicle travel faster, and they told him to make the front end bigger. Illogical to an adult, but in the vacuum (or near vacuum of space), it worked. Wish I could remember the source.
Paper airplane image found at http://imgur.com/YRbMqeB
Not sure about verification, but I want to believe it.
