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Test Taking Tip

Posted on February 8, 2010
Filed Under CTEL, testing | Leave a Comment

As my loyal readers may remember, I passed the dreaded CTEL test last June. Having a CLAD certificate (which passing the CTEL gives you) is the only way to remain employed as a teacher in California, and a lot of teachers are going through a lot of stress these days as the deadline for passing looms.

The pe and math teachers at our site have been particularly stressed about it. Several didn’t pass the first section (the one with all the lingo and language acquisition theory) the first time, and were really worried about the retake in December. Some of them asked for advice on passing.

“You’re an English teacher; you know what a morpheme and a phoneme are, and you’re used to writing essays and stuff (there are three “open ended response” essays over the course of the three sections). No wonder you didn’t have any problem.”

My tips for them came down to four things.

“You can game this test, especially the essays. This is the kind of thing where the test writers have a party line, an ideology. They want to hear their own words back.

“One. Read the book. Focus especially on the vocabulary and the little scenarios that are supposed to illustrate the concepts. A lot of the test is questions like, ‘A teacher with these level of EL kids does this…Is it the right thing to do?’

“Two. Read the example essays on the CTEL web site. They really don’t expect a whole lot out of the essays. Use their buzzwords, use the vocabulary from the book…

“Three. Remember, most tests give away answers to questions in other questions. This one does it a lot. Also there are only four answer choices for each question, none of them is none of the above, AND on almost every question on this test, two answers can immediately be thrown out, and you’re down to a 50/50. You only need 74% to pass; on a fifty question test, you can miss twelve.  Put a little mark next to the ones you don’t know; if there are fewer than twelve marks, you’re gold. Get those down to a 50/50, flip a coin, and move to the essay.

“Four. When you write the essay, if you’re stumped,  steal language from the multiple choice questions. Find a question that covers a concept similar to the essay question, and use their lingo to write the response.”

They laughed about that last one. I think some thought I was joking. But then…

I asked one of the pe teachers if she passed in December.

“Yeah baby. Thanks a lot. I did just what you said on one of the essays.”

“Oh yeah, what did I say?”

“I had no idea what they were talking about, so I looked for a question on the test that looked like it was about the same thing. I don’t think a word of that essay was mine. Everything I put I took from somewhere else on the test. And I got a 4* on that one. ”

“Thanks a lot.”

As they say, that’s what I’m talking about.

(*A 4 means you answered the question mostly correctly. They don’t actually tell you your score, unless you fail, because they don’t want it used for competitive hiring practices.)

Shmart?

Posted on February 4, 2010
Filed Under SmartBoard | 3 Comments

I have a SmartBoard in my room these days. When we were awash in grant money a few years ago, our site bought three. Two were mounted in classrooms, and we put the third one on wheels (just like the pic in the link) so it could be moved from room to room. The idea was that one would allow people to try out the idea and learn how to incorporate it into actual lessons. Then we might buy more. The reality was that when I got all the software dialed in and all the issues worked out so I could do tech support for the others (about a month), I passed it on to my then-BTSA mentee for his social studies classroom. I figured with all the maps and pics and suchlike, he might be able to use it more fully than I could in English. I mostly just doodled on it. He’s had it ever since.

A week or two ago, he asked me if I wanted it back. He said he hadn’t been using it that much, and he was going in the computer lab for a while, and then…etc. He wasn’t going to use it for the rest of the year. So my servant wheeled it over, and we’ve been doodling ever after.

Mostly it’s been a novelty item. I prefer writing on the virtual board with my wireless slate/pen. It has all the same toys as the SmartBoard software, and I don’t have to get out of my chair to write on the board. Plus there’s the added bonus feature that the slate takes quite a bit of practice to master, and so the kids can’t really use it. ;)

But lately I’ve been having them just go up and circle answers and such with the pretend pens. They still think it’s soooooo cool that, as long as you’re holding one of the pens in your hand,  you can write on the SmartBoard with your finger. Whoa. I guess it does encourage more attention-paying and participation and the like, but I’d like to be using it a bit more fully.

When I was the lead teacher on the past tech grant we got, I did a couple of ShmartBoard trainings for our teachers. The math and social studies teachers were into the idea the most, so I found some groovy stuff for them, but I’ve haven’t really done all that much looking/figuring for language art ideas. I did do a couple of sentence scramble exercises, where the kids could physically manipulate pieces of sentences to form different variations. (Wait! We’re rolling with that on Tuesday. I hadn’t even thought about that until just now.) But I’m looking for more ideas for using the thing for more than just doodling and drawing moustaches on kids’ pics. (Oh, and whiting out parts of the school bulletin, so it reads something like this:  ”Lag     id le       c ool  Daily Bull    .   Attention  Stud   s:”    – The seventh grader with a badge strikes again.)

So if you have any groovy ideas or links for using this shmartyboard, gimme a holler.

Seventh Grader with a Badge

Posted on February 3, 2010
Filed Under Literature Anthologies, Stories of Seventh Grade | 4 Comments

Those of us who have been teaching junior high for awhile (and still like it) know that part of the enjoyment of the job is the opportunity to act like a seventh grader now and then. Some of us take that opportunity more often than others.

In the movie 48 Hours, which was the last Eddie Murphy movie I’ve seen, there’s a great scene in the all-white cowboy bar, when Eddie gets all bad cop on them and says, “I’m your worst nightmare, I’m a n***** with a badge…” (Obviously the quote, coming from a young Eddie Murphy, has been cleaned up a bit.) I have always considered myself a sort of  ”seventh grader with a badge.” In some of my battles with district administration over the years, I’m sure they’ve had similar thoughts.

Anyway. Lately the kids have been working on one of the few things I actually use that came with our literature anthologies. (I will devote a whole ‘nother post to the lameness of said anthologies. I didn’t even bother to write numbers on my set of  giant books – 8 pounds! As if the kids’ backpacks aren’t giant enough– because I didn’t send them home. We read exactly one story out of it –”Thank You M’am“– and one Emily Dickinson poem. ) Part of the deal with buying the anthologies was that they came with a workbook kids could write in, and do the whole “active reading” thing; write in the margins and answer questions and suchlike. Most of the work book is just large print versions of some of the stories in the anthology, with lines on the margins for “notes” and answers to questions. I don’t use that. But in the back of the book are a bunch of exercises similar to parts of our state tests, with things like reading a textbook and getting info from a weather map and other such practical reading applications. The exercises are a bit simple in themselves, but with a bit of in-class discussion and quizzing, they’re pretty useful.

Last night’s reading was focused on looking for what they called “signal words” that show order, importance, chronology, etc. The example they worked from was a brief piece on the life-cycle of the butterfly. Well, what’s the stage after caterpillar called? No, it’s not chrysalis. What’s the thing inside the chrysalis called?

Here are the first three questions from the quiz. (It was open book; the point was to practice extracting information from the reading. NOTA is our shorthand for none of the above.)

  1. Once a caterpillar has ______ for the last time…  a) cracked the egg  b) shed its skin  c) made a pupa (haha) d) metamorphosised e) NOTA
  2. …it becomes a _______… a) chrysalis  b) spiracule  c) caterpillar  d) pupa (haha)  e) NOTA
  3. …with a hard covering called a ______. a) pupa (haha)  b) egg  c) spiracule  d) chrysalis  e) NOTA

The quick readers start laughing right away. I can’t resist.

“What?”

Giggle. Giggle.

“Get it? Made a poopa?”  Seventh grader with a badge.Yes, I know it’s pronounced pewpah. That is not nearly as much fun to say.

One class lost it altogether. It was so much fun, I didn’t care.

“Get it? Made a poopa?”

“Did you put haha after every pupa?” She pronounces it correctly. There were eight questions on the quiz, and most of them had pupa as one of the choices.

“I tried, but I sort ran out of steam toward the end. Get it? Made a poopa? ”

Seventh grader with a badge.

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