TAKs - or - the standardized test that means everything to the school but can't ever really accurately measure someone's intelligence

This week was far less stressful than I would have imagined. I had been drilling the kids on TAKs skills and giving them practice stories and short answer questions for about a week and a half because I really, really want the kids to pass. It's almost ridiculous how influential this one test is on a kid's school education. They need to pass the test to graduate, but I have had a good amount of my students fail one or all of their TAKs tests. And when you fail "the big test" it's easy to get distressed, depressed, and not try anymore. I won't get the scores back for several weeks, but news from all of the other proctors is that my kids looked to be practicing reading and test taking strategies (namely summarizing and previewing) that we had been working on all year and I stressed this last week. The proctors couldn't actually tell me what the kids wrote, and I couldn't either, as we're not supposed to look at their tests unless the kids asks us to read a question for them out loud so they can clarify what the question is asking. It seems ridiculous, but it's just one more way to keep test proctors from unknowingly (or knowingly) give students answers to test questions.

The feeling I got was superb when my students came in the next day and said they had summarized all the stories and did everything we were practicing in class. The confidence they showed after taking the test was something literally out of this world. Here's to hoping that the confidence was well-founded and I really did teach them something this year.

As for next week, our English department is going to be having a "Poetry Gallery" for all of the students. We're going to post all of the poems around each of the classrooms and all the kids will get to visit the other rooms in the department and read each other's poems. Some of my kids are really ecstatic about the gallery, while others... not so much. Personally, I just don't want to rush their poems, but I know that they will be since I spent more time preparing them for the test (and since I was gone for two days due to True/False). I might not have the best poems, but if I have a greatly improved test passing rate, I'll consider it more than a fair trade.

The last week of February

The last week of February went by incredibly fast, except for Thursday, which happened to be the same day I left for Columbia, MO and the True/False Film Festival. I really only had three days of actual teaching, as Thursday was the math benchmark test that I helped administer. I don't know why they scheduled the math benchmark less than a week before the English TAKs, seeing as the TAKs scores are a huge deal for the school and the benchmark is, well, just a test to see how well the kids *might* do on the actual TAKs.

I made a big push on TAKs skills this week and got these big 15 page packets for the kids to do in class and for homework. Gambling, I made the packet worth 35% of their grade so that even the kids who had done next to nothing could potentially pass the six weeks by trying their best on the packet. On the flipside, any kid who had an A could potentially NOT pass if they didn't turn in their work. Really, I just wanted to make sure that everyone, and I mean everyone, did their assignments for once. You couldn't believe how happy I was to see that work taken home actually made it back into my class and students were actually taking their work seriously.