The month of February is gone! Good.

Well, it's been a crazy month. :)

We had writing TAKS on February 20, so everything until then was trying to make sure the kids were ready for it. Then there was Stanford all of this last week. The kids are tired and I'm tired of tests; it's ridiculous. We've given, as a grade level, four full-day writing benchmarks plus one each of reading and math, and that's just getting started, because we have two more each of reading and math coming up--that'll make 10 days of the year just giving full-day tests, plus the Stanford tests, plus whatever they do in class.

I had an assignment for my UST class--I had to interview a student. First question: "What do you do in school?" Answer: "We take big tests." Ridiculous. They're 10. Stanford is cruel. It's ridiculously long--it has something like 14 different sections. Horrible. It took until lunch Tuesday through Friday this week.

Otherwise, things are getting better as far as "teaching" goes. Unfortunately, I can't really teach enough since I have to be measuring the kids all the time. May as well just have daily standardized tests to assess what they learned in the hour they had left over the previous day. In meeting with my TFA director for Round 2 we decided that I had to emphasize teaching a clear sequence of steps to my kids. I tried it in math and it seemed to work--they got a 78 on the write-out-the-answer lines and angles test, as opposed to an average 79 on the multiple-choice decimals test. Then the next day, we explored the relationship between their "effort" on the in class assignments and their "achievement" on the test, which not surprisingly were correlated.

So for Round 3 we have decided that, frankly, I still have zero idea what I'm doing as far as reading is concerned. Their comprehension isn't getting that much better (most of them, anyway), according to the STAR measurement, which is basically a fill-in-the-blanks test with increasing difficulty of passages. Grrr. Apparently this is because I (1) am not knowing what to teach kids because (2) I can't assess them correctly because (3) I don't know how and therefore (4) I can't teach them effectively. So the goal is to fix that.

Things are looking OK for the field trip to San Antonio, except that I don't have too many kids going (only seven or eight total). That's too bad, but at least we were able to cancel the second bus which will mean we have a little bit of a cushion and I may even be able to carry over a couple hundred dollars to next year--when I will demand a commitment from parents at a BOY meeting, and try to have a trip that's shorter than three days (two days better!). Spring carnival is coming up and I have zero idea what the class is doing, though. I should figure that out!!

The class is, I'm sure, looking forward to our Wednesday and Thursday benchmarks. As am I. Sigh. Oh well, spring break is in a week!