Testing

Yes, it's been a while since my last post, and right along with it has been a painful week and a half of prepping for the state test that was altogether too long and too short. In retrospect, I believe the most bang for my buck in prepping my students was the hours I spent reminding them that all I wanted from them on CST day is just for them to focus for the entire testing period. I told them that it didn't bother me if they did not know a single answer as long as they read every question and made educated choices by eliminating incorrect answers. My new angle for this year was to honestly tell them multiple times that it will be the hardest test they have taken all year, and maybe even ever.

It was easier this year to flesh out a game plan for how CST prep would go, knowing that I would actually be in the room with 27 of my own students as they take it. Last year, I had a full class of kids I'd never met, making the teacher-to-student motivation less than effective. Luckily for us, this year our admin made sure to make it such that the staff would set up the best testing atmospheres for our students based on the small learning communities in which they were already organized. Of course, being the martyrs that we are, the English teacher across the hall and I decided to let the two other teachers from our freshman House have first pick to create their ideal class... and did they ever. My pick gave me 18 boys and 9 girls, with the process involving sports-like trades. Some students left on the list were clearly more "valuable" than others and thus could be traded for more students. Often one of us had to take one for the team and set the agreement that if I take _______, then you HAVE to take _______. I almost feel like we should earn badges for some of the things we have to do in this job.

To my surprise though, these kids were pretty amazing in that they really tried - reading every single question and answering the best they could. For as much faith as I have in the secret internal drive that everyone has to learn and succeed, I was admittedly talking to myself in the mirror the morning of the first test, giving a couple wake-up slaps to the face to be on my game for what was sure to be one of the most challenging days of the year. If getting 27 kids to stay quiet and seated for three hours of standardized testing isn't a test of your patience and determination, I don't know what is. As it turned out though, my metaphorical suit of armor didn't even see the battlefield, because these freshmen believe it or not actually wanted to give their best effort on the test. All I could think the entire testing period that first day was how diabolical it is that we succeeded in tricking these kids into doing exactly what we wanted. They love us too much.

Whether or not that is true is completely beside the point, but I was super happy with this new development that actually slightly changed my perception of my students. It had been slipping for a while, and I had begun to realize how powerful relationships really can be in the world of education. This inspired a short bout of happiness regardless of the fact that we got hardly anything accomplished in the shortened periods each day immediately after the morning testing. After all, it's not normal that we should expect these kids to be motivated to factor polynomials right after three hours of synonyms and reading comprehension. What I should have done is had a mini-lesson on all the ways that students at Richmond High get screwed in their education. Discussion point number 1: scheduling classes after CSTs so as to reach the quota of classroom hours while avoiding paying teachers additional money. The thing is, these students would not be surprised by this. I think the one way that these kids have a fuller education than anyone else is in the sense that they understand the difference between the way the world theoretically works and how it REALLY works. It's definitely one thing that I am glad I was able to see from having this job. Along this point it is no wonder I have so many kids who actually think that Osama bin Laden's death was a hoax. Quite the cynics for being only 15.

Anyway, I am sitting down to write all this because today we took the math exam and man oh man was it hard. I can definitely say that in class we haven't yet covered half of the material in the questions. It's so hard because the test is very much weighted towards the end of the year, and we begin the year way back in middle school objectives like adding and subtracting negative numbers. I was armed with two stacks of word searches for them finishing early (who the hell can take a math test for four hours?), but they were super squirrelly nonetheless. One of my students suggested that we sue somebody for them having to take a test that they are not prepared for, so to distract her from her own discomfort of not knowing half the test, I asked her to take a break and write out a letter to someone we could sue. It turned out to be more of a distraction than anything else, but hey, not all my creative ideas work. I was trying to pass the time just as much as them. In the end, I am just so impressed at the students' willingness to try their best (for me, really), and yet so discouraged by the thought that we will still have to sit through the same meeting at the beginning of next year to hear how far behind the math department still is of our goal. At the current time all I can think is how all I have done is in vain, but I know that at the bottom of this glass of wine I hold in my hand, I will be able to remind myself that there is so much more to education than a stupid standardized test.

But, since the wine has yet to be drunk, we will begin the countdown at 26. There are 26 school days left until the end of the school year.