testing

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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Walk Around

May 5, 2011
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We got another STAR testing pep talk yesterday. There must be serious pressure from the new superintendent on our admins to bounce back from our dip last year. The way I see it, we’re lucky the damage wasn’t worse, considering the seventh grade bunch we had last year. A lot of them had trouble bubbling their names. (Seriously.) And the talk I hear from the eighth grade teachers is that they haven’t really wised up much, so that doesn’t bode well for this year. But I will say that the one period of eighth grade that I have this year (first time in 8 years, only the 3rd time in 18), which has four reruns–students I also had last year–is doing pretty well, academically anyway.  They’re still a pain in the Heineken. So needy and whiny. They all seem to need a dad to kick some metaphorical a** on them. Statistically, half of them probably don’t have one at home. Anyway, this time our vp was all, “It used to be that our school was the one everybody tried to beat. When my boys were in jr. high down in _____ (a school in the county, but not the district),

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Buy Better Erasers

May 3, 2011
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(I’m posting this from my Nookcolor…How cool is that?) We had a meeting yesterday morning–the first day back…after two weeks off…a meeting…in the morning…after two weeks off. Anyway, there was an item about our upcoming STAR testing, and our admins were talking about ways we could raise our scores, since we dropped about 20 points last year. We talked about getting the kids to take the test more seriously, we talked about patrolling the aisles and making sure kids aren’t just bubbling shapes…but nobody talked about whether calling those kids on that would actually make them do any better. There was talk of incentives. I’m not a fan. It was suggested that we offer extra time at break for a week as a “reward.” Ugh. That’ll help. Great, more supervision time for some poor souls. One person brought up that many of the elementary schools hand out gum during testing week, claiming that it keeps them more focused and less fidgety. Uh huh. Like why don’t we just make it nicotine gum? Luckily our custodian nixed the idea of rescinding our no gum policy. (Dang how I hate to see them chawing away like cows or cowboys.) Then the talk

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Random Featured Post

“Do you love me?” (Also: Weird “Week”)

Wotta “week.” Considering how tired I am, I can’t believe it was only a three-day week – for some reason we had a 4-day weekend for Veterans’ day. And I done clean forgot that I was supposed to give the “District Benchmark Test #1″ (that’s a whole ‘nother post) by Friday. So we spent Wednesday darkening ovals to generate data for the district, AND there was a “multi-media” assembly that, amid the rock and rap, touted the beauty of trust and honesty (also: don’t do those things which I obviously can’t mention, because ads for them started appearing here). AND, yesterday was “parent visitation day.” Whole lotta scare quotes today too. Usually I get a pretty good turnout for these parent visitation days (it sounds like a Catholic holiday). Our previous principal (our present principal is an FNG, both to the job of principal AND to our school) instituted these as a sort of PR for parents. Many parents of ms’ers are more than a little leery of sending their little angels to the big bad junior high. (You should have seen the reaction a few years ago when the district proposed making our school 6-8. OMG. You’d have thought [...]

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

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Recent Comments

  • mrC commented on It’s Go Time!@Sarah-Most excellent! Keep up the good work, and don't let any of them talk you out of it. Glad to hear your kids recognize the value too. Fight the good fight!
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Illin’Feel better soon! There is nothing worse than being at school and trying to be "on" when you feel like death.
  • Sarah commented on It’s Go Time!I just came across your blog...I am a second year teacher and I am currently reading The Outsiders aloud to my seventh graders. I read it to them last year, too. I catch a lot of criticism for reading it to them...but they LOVE to have me read to them. I actually had a group
  • joan commented on Illin’I'm on day two of out-with-the-crud. I needed the rest. Hope you're in tip top shape by Monday!
  • mrC commented on “The Sub Used One of Your Sticks!”That one oughta be strung up like they used to do to horse thieves.
  • Heather commented on “The Sub Used One of Your Sticks!”The last sub I had left no note at all and broke the arm of my spinny chair by leaning back in it so far that he fell in the floor. The kids all said he was the best sub ever. I politely asked the school secretary to never have him sub in
  • mrC commented on The Future of Space Travel@Heather: Gawd I hate that. I think I even posted about it awhile back. @Kelli: This reminds me of high school. I went to a Jesuit high school (all boys) and for our Friday football rallies, we would import cheerleaders from other schools to be a part of the rally. And the girls would always begin
  • Heather commented on The Future of Space TravelMy eighth graders just have the habit of prefacing every question with, "I have a question." And announcing "I'm done" when they complete an assignment.
  • Kelli commented on The Future of Space TravelIs it bad that I sometimes start my stories with "Okay, so...."...? I guess the kids have rubbed off on me. Sigh.
  • Kelli commented on Blogging the Scoring Session (Part I)Ugh! Been there. I have been to those "Scoring and Rubric" type meetings in two different states now... Not fun, and not entirely informative, either.
  • Meg commented on No Groove Yet (Also: The Giver and No Homework Returns)There was a district I student taught in that hand the no fail policy. I child could not be held back a grade, even if they did absolutely nothing the whole year, until they were in high school. It took most of the middle schoolers about 3 seconds to realize they didn't have
  • Kelli commented on No Groove Yet (Also: The Giver and No Homework Returns)You know, that whole "no-zero" policy goes hand-in-hand with the "no-failure" or "no-retention" policy, and my school district is a definite contributor to this madness. I can understand the desire to stop giving zeros and MAKE the kids do the work (giving countless opportunities until successful), but I have been in a situation where
  • commented on Obligatory Santa VideoWe have an unofficial "no zero" policy. It takes a little extra effort on the teacher's part to get all of the students to complete their assignments but we have made it work. The thing that was most helpful was instituting a "homework detention" that is separate from discipline detention. If a

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