testing

State Testing…and etc.

May 14, 2012
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Boy howdy, I’m really milking this one, huh? I think, after a week and a half, we’re up to number three on our list of teacher tips for state testing. (This pace reminds me of the classic Sr. Mary Elephant bit from Cheech and Chong back in the day: “Now class, Sr. Rosetta Stone has told me that your assignment for the past two months has been to write an essay…”  And then none of them have it finished yet.)  Sister Mary Elephant Ok. So far we have: 1. Teach ‘em to game the test. 2. Teach ‘em how to erase. So, on to number three. 3. Somehow get them to buy into the conflicting ideas that a) the test is important to them and b) not to worry. News alert: Unless they are gluey high-schoolers in danger of failing the graduation requirement or unless they have parents who take these scores seriously, right now there really is no down side to doing poorly, other than pride. Our VP tries to scare the 8th graders by saying the high school (yes, in our town there’s only one) will take away their electives and put

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State Testing — Tips for Teachers II

May 9, 2012
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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

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Blogging the Scoring Session (Part I)

January 11, 2012
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Sounds vaguely obscene, doesn’t it? FINALLY! I have a working computer (a most excellent deal from Costco.com and it really screams) and my net connection is working again. Dang that dang Norton. I swear, I’m betting that almost all the antivirus software out there has been secretly created by virus-makers, in order to make us so frustrated with anti-virus software, that we shut it off and leave our machines unprotected. I know that’s pretty convoluted logic, but it’s been a long day wrastling with my computer and not teaching. I was at a district scoring session. Cue the Twilight Zone theme. Our district is trying to get out ahead of the curve with regard to the coming common core standards. Out new supe got the board to give him 6 mil to jack up test scores, and it looks like we’re trying to game the test in advance of it even being created (which is about 2014). Much of the money was spent on what we call TOSA’s (pronounced TOE-sah): Teachers on Special Assignment. These are teachers that leave the classroom for a year or two or three, and move up to the DO and try to get the rest of us

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Stop the Madness

December 12, 2011
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Day Three… And I already wasted a whole weekend without posting. D’oh. Marion Brady to the rescue. I know listservs are so 1998, but as I have said here several times before, you should still be subscribed to at least one: MiddleL. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of a listserv (or e-mail list), go to Wikipedia and read up. My regulars probably probably remember me beating this drum before, but I’ma gonna do it again. Go join up. People with problems/questions like our MrM’s get answers all the time from people with a lot more letters after their names than I have. You can sign up here. As I have also said before (here’s the first time), my fave contributor on MiddleL is Marion Brady, who has some revolutionary (these days) ideas about education.  We all know that things like NCLB and “Race to the Top” and the testing associated with them are doing more harm than good. The tests are mostly about memorized knowledge and not about the skills need in a future world. Which, by the way, probably can’t be tested for. But there’s a lot of money to be made in the

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Three Weeks

May 19, 2011
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I know. You thought I was done with this whole blog thing. My seventh grade attention span finally got the best of me. It’s just testing. It’s just so… what’s the word? Enervating. I have a sort of love/hate thing with testing. Mostly hate these days, but back in the day, when I was actually a k-12 student, I used to love testing. I loved any chance to compete. SRA’s (remember those color levels?), SAT’s, state testing, spelling bees (we were old school at St. Mel’s); you name it, I wanted to be #1 when the results came out. Also, if you were done early, you could read whatever you wanted. I was always done early. Now as a teacher I have to say, rather guiltily, that testing season is one of my fave times of year. We get huge chunks of time to get something done, while the kids work for once. Over the course of four days of testing, I had about 10 hours of time to…work, yeah, that’s it. That’s more than two week’s worth of my regular prep time. Of course, we were instructed to walk around every now and then, but it’s not exactly an

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Random Featured Post

Quizzes for Dummies?

A few years ago, while we were reading Outsiders aloud, I was about to give them my usual “reading check” type quiz to make sure they were following along, thinking about what we’d talked about, connecting the literary terms to the examples in the book, etc. I can’t quite remember what my inspiration was (probably just to throw them for a loop like I like to do), but I decided to let them “cheat.” My quizzes on the books and stories we read are always open book, but this time I told them they could take the quiz, not only open book, but “open mouth.” I told them they could talk about the questions and answers as much as they want in any way they want, and decide however they want to, which of the answers to choose. “You can share what you know…or not. You can decide whether to heed the wisdom of the group…or not. You just can’t lie. You can’t knowingly tell everyone the wrong answer on purpose.” One class that day came up with the name Quiz for Dummies. The rest of the periods thought that was a little “mean,” so we’ve stuck with Open Mouth. [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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