Week two was pretty uneventful, other than the fact that my classroom was a disgusting cesspool of germs. The seven dwarfs were alive and well in my classroom: Sneezy, Hacky, Coughy, Phlegmy, Snotty, Drippy, and Wheezy. Good times. I had a sore throat the whole damned weekend. Those parents did their duty - send those kiddos to school come hell or high water!
Once again, I was discouraged by the tests - both the types of questions and the number of questions. So many trick questions. So much developmentally inappropriate content. Such a colossal waste of time. Do these tests tell me what my kids have learned? HELL NO. Poor kids. Six days of this crap. They were SO DONE.
Scores will come out in the summer, and when we return in the fall we will have the dreaded meeting where we go over how we did. I have gotten used to the annual humiliation. And I deal with it much better. Last year I started keeping track of a variety of assessment results - both standardized and assessments that are actually meaningful. My kids show growth on all of them, except for one. District benchmarks and CSTs. Well, they show improvement from Benchmark 1 to Benchmark 2. This is supposed to be an indicator of how the kids will do on the CSTs. It never is. *sigh* But I take heart in knowing that my kids have made growth. I take heart in my kids who started the year at the pre-primer level and are now reading at the beginning second grade level. What an accomplishment! But those kids will still score Below Basic on the CSTs. Yeah. Those tests don't mean jack......
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