Times up, please put down your pencils

I had to proctor the Math TAKs on Thursday, followed by a Science benchmark on Friday. As a student, I was indifferent towards testing days. There was always the anxiety and the pressure of knowing that you had a big test coming up, but once I actually started taking the test, all that pressure just went away. I'd finish the test and read a book while I waited for everyone else in the room to finish, and then maybe read some more until time was called and we'd go to the next class.

Things are different with the TAKs. These students have ALL DAY to test if they need it. From 8 AM until 2:15, students were testing solely for math. There's not really an obscene amount of problems either (less than 100). I think Texas really just wants to make sure test anxiety is not an issue for their students and that they can "truly" gauge a student's learning. I appreciate the thought, and I'm sure the kids enjoy the extra time as well. But geez... if they finish early and double check their answers and still have 4 hours to go... that's a LONG day. I feel for the kids, and I know exactly what they're going through, because I had to actively monitor the rooms (walk around and stand, no sitting) for the entire testing period. I thankfully got a half-hour lunch in which the school provided sandwiches and snacks, but I usually get 45 minutes to eat and two planning periods during the day. I'm not complaining about the amount of planning time that I lost, because it's a test and those things happen. I was just dying on test day because I'm not talking, I can't read, draw, or really do anything other than look at the kids and make sure they aren't cheating. I felt like a prison guard. Did I mention I also got to monitor on Friday as well for the Science Benchmark? At least that one was only until 11:30

Migrants
Since the TAKs test is all done and there are only 4 weeks of school left, a lot of my migrant kids are starting to head out for the summer to work. It's really sad because I'm losing a lot of the kids that I've grown attached to and had really seen improvement with over the year. I had a few leave on Friday after the tests were done, and most of those didn't tell me they were leaving until that day. I think that they've gotten used to telling their teachers that they are leaving early and have had too many teachers give them a disappointed look or just get plain emotional on them. I'll be honest - I got a little emotional too. It's just going to get worse as the month goes on. Too bad they're leaving right as we're getting into our Media Unit that I've been looking forward to teaching.

Murphy's Law
So scant more than a day after I posted how awesome my kids were, they decided to go bat crazy on me. Monday was littered with students who were not prepared, unwilling to do work, and being genuinely disruptive. I felt like I taught for a total of 5 minutes, then spent the rest of the day repeating those 5 minutes of teaching so the students who were "behind" could get caught up. It was easily the most frustrating day of teaching I've had so far. Needless to say, I took Tuesday off for a much deserved personal day, which I spent doing work for school as well as playing video games to de-stress. I find it funny that I can handle what other people would call "big problems" like gang-related violence with no trouble at all, but when it comes to the little things piling up, that's where I surrender. It's always the little things.

It felt good sticking it to my students on Tuesday though (I'm not saying this if I get off yelling at teenagers... but I've given my students lots of chances to show their responsibility and individuality, and they took advantage of my good graces). It's the first time I've really shown any real anger in class, but I was honest with them, told them why I was absent, what was wrong, and what they need to do to make things right. The rest of the week went swimmingly.

Monologues
The end of the week was actually really, really fun. The students have been working on monologues for several weeks, and I performed a short monologue on Thursday to give them an example of what a performance might look like. My performance was about a 20-something who lost his job and was forced to move in with his parents. Depressed, he spent his time playing video games. Let's just say that I didn't stretch too much on this character, but I need a good example as a teacher so all my kids can connect with it. The kids loved it, and started performing on Friday. I was quite impressed with several performances, and proud of ALL my students. They were all SO nervous to stand up in front of the class and perform. It's really odd, because these kids seem so much different than what my friends and I were like as teenagers, but they really are very much the same. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the performances at the start of this week.

Oh yeah - Math TAKs is Thursday. I really hope my students do well. At least we're almost done with it all, and I'll be able to get back the English TAKs grades in a few weeks.

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.

"We're waiting..." aka Awkward Stares and Power Struggles

This weekend is crazy, and I don't know how I blogged this. Time continues to go by faster than it should as I'm currently in the process of making a TAKs packet for my kids so that hopefully they all can pass with the added help. Who knows if what I'm doing will help, but I'd sure like to think so. 7 school days left until TAKs - 4 until I leave for True/False.

I had a long week this week, especially since I picked up a bacterial infection on Tuesday and was out on Wednesday. I sent 30 kids to the nurses office on Monday and Tuesday, half of them having to go home because of fevers. When I came back on Thursday, I was doped up on so many medications that I had to ask my kids to bear with me and realize that I'm not 100%, but I would do my best and hope that they would to. This worked out WONDERFULLY, except in one of my classes where I blew up at a student. I blame the medicine, myself, and actually, I blame the student quite a bit. I should have written him up and kicked him out of class, but instead I addressed the problem in the middle of the class.

You see, I had just started class and told the students I was sorry for having been absent the day before, when this kid interrupts me with "YEAH! You SHOULD BE SORRY!" which I let slide, continuing with my short introduction of how I'm still sick and working through the cold, asking the students to be considerate. I took attendance, then started the lesson by putting notes on the board. I give the class a certain amount of time to copy the notes, and go around the class making sure everyone is on task. This certain student was not, so I reminded him to copy the notes, which he started doing, but at a very leisurely pace. When it was time to go to the next slide, everyone else in the class was done except for him, and he screams "WAIT! I didn't FINISH" so I told him I'd give him an extra 30 seconds, which I did. He was still not done, so I told him he would need to look at a friend's notes or stay after class to finish. He complained about that too, but finished writing his notes. He pulled the same stunt on the next slide, so I didn't give him the extra 30 seconds to finish writing (I have slow writers in the class too, and they had all finished).

I was midway through the lesson on Tone and Mood and had directed my students to a vocab list of good Tone/Mood words. I told the class, like all my others, to spend 30 seconds and circle any words they don't know, as it was higher level vocabulary for the most part. After circling these words, I was taking 6 words from the class to use as vocabulary words that they would write down in their notebooks and use during the class. When the class was told to volunteer words, some students were raising hands and calling out words like "Nostalgic" and "Reminiscent" that I wrote on the board, but this one student felt the urge to scream out the words "ANGRY!" and "SAD!"

At first, I ignored the child's outbursts, as he neglected yet again to follow classroom procedure in order to be "funny" though no one else laughed. He screamed out "ANGRY" again, to which I said "Do you really not know what angry is?" (He had a big smile on his face at this time). "It means that you're mad. I know you know this though [student]. I want you to focus on words that you don't know, because we're doing this as a class to help you." I asked the class for more words, and he screamed out "SAD!" with a huge smile on his face.

I stopped the class and just nailed this kid because I had addressed his behavior more than once and he thought it was a joke. "[student] I am NOT going to call on you or listen to you without your hand raised. You are wasting our time in class and disrespecting me and your fellow students." (At this point a classmate said "Quit being a jerk [student]," which I let slide, because this seemed like a good time for negative peer comments.) I continued with my tirade for about a minute, and finished with "When you're ready to act like you can learn, I'll get this class started again. We're waiting... and we'll wait until after the bell if we have to." I sat for the next 30 seconds, (which seemed like an eternity), staring directly at this kid while his peers made chide remarks about him needing to "stop being a jerk" and "do your work. You're making us all suffer." He realized that he was not going to win his little power-struggle, and with a blank stare of "did Mr. Johnson just tell me off?" picked up his pencil, and started writing down the definitions we were discussing as a class. I immediately continued the lesson, but was forced to keep kids afterwards to finish their assignment, and told the class I would not write passes to their following class. I apologized to the on-task students at the door for their classmate's behavior, but they reciprocated the apology. It was a great thing to know that I wasn't the only person annoyed by the student's raucous outbursts.

I still felt dirty about yelling at the kid, but it was effective, and it was my last resort for a day where I was already on a short rope. Nevertheless, he came in the next day with a smile and didn't act up. Crazy teenagers.