My drain is unclogged, but Survivor AND Modern Family are new tonight, so we gotta work fast. I realized, after I left Monday, that I might have been a little flippant about the disutility of practicing for these tests. The kids do need SOME practice with these types of things, especially if they haven’t dealt with the multiple-choice (or closer to the middle school reality, multiple-guess) tests. This will be dealt with in the tips section, but I guess I was thinking of what our school used to do until just this year. Which was to mass-copy packets of questions (from previous years’ tests) from the Department of Ed website, and hand them out to everyone, so their kids could practice for the test. And at our school, we test the kids with their first period teacher, so here we have Mr. Grissom in shop class droning out the correct answers to the practice tests, and kids are already thinking they’re going to fail the real thing because they got so many wrong on the practice, which was lame anyway and maybe they thought they had a few more right, but Mr. Grissom can’t answer their questions about “that English stuff” or “that
Middle school teaching: Five shows a day, 180 days a year.
