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	<title>Teaching The Outsiders (and more) &#187; testing</title>
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	<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com</link>
	<description>Middle school teaching: Five shows a day, 180 days a year.</description>
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		<title>Blogging the Scoring Session (Part I)</title>
		<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/blogging-the-scoring-session-part-i/</link>
		<comments>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/blogging-the-scoring-session-part-i/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:32:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>mrC</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Grading papers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Teaching]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/?p=2717</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sounds vaguely obscene, doesn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s pretty convoluted logic, but it&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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 [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>Stop the Madness</title>
		<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/stop-the-madness/</link>
		<comments>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/stop-the-madness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>mrC</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Guest artist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marion Brady]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/?p=2696</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Day Three&#8230; And I already wasted a whole weekend without posting. D&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;ma gonna do it again. Go join up. People with problems/questions like our MrM&#8217;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&#8217;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 &#8220;Race to the Top&#8221; 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&#8217;t be tested for. But there&#8217;s a lot of money to be made in the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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		<title>Three Weeks</title>
		<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/this-n-that/</link>
		<comments>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/this-n-that/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 May 2011 03:18:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>mrC</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/?p=2468</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I know. You thought I was done with this whole blog thing. My seventh grade attention span finally got the best of me. It&#8217;s just testing. It&#8217;s just so&#8230; what&#8217;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&#8217;s (remember those color levels?), SAT&#8217;s, state testing, spelling bees (we were old school at St. Mel&#8217;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&#8230;work, yeah, that&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s more than two week&#8217;s worth of my regular prep time. Of course, we were instructed to walk around every now and then, but it&#8217;s not exactly an [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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		<title>Walk Around</title>
		<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/walk-around/</link>
		<comments>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/walk-around/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 May 2011 04:47:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>mrC</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tips]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/?p=2459</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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&#8217;re lucky the damage wasn&#8217;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&#8217;t really wised up much, so that doesn&#8217;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&#8211;students I also had last year&#8211;is doing pretty well, academically anyway.  They&#8217;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&#8217;t have one at home. Anyway, this time our vp was all, &#8220;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), [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Buy Better Erasers</title>
		<link>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/buy-better-erasers/</link>
		<comments>http://teachingtheoutsiders.com/buy-better-erasers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 05:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>mrC</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Advice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[(I&#8217;m posting this from my Nookcolor&#8230;How cool is that?) We had a meeting yesterday morning&#8211;the first day back&#8230;after two weeks off&#8230;a meeting&#8230;in the morning&#8230;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&#8217;t just bubbling shapes&#8230;but nobody talked about whether calling those kids on that would actually make them do any better. There was talk of incentives. I&#8217;m not a fan. It was suggested that we offer extra time at break for a week as a &#8220;reward.&#8221; Ugh. That&#8217;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&#8217;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 [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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