Efficiency

This week, we start our dreaded standardized testing. I hate standardized testing. I almost feel like, in the 5 weeks we have been in school, all we have done is test, test and test! It's beyond ridiculous. Along with our standardized testing this week, we are supposed to progress monitor our kiddos in DIBELs and the new DAZE part of the DIBELs. I was seriously wondering how the heck I was going to get all of that done with the testing going on this week.

Thank goodness for Mrs. Resource. She offered to help me Progress Monitor my kiddos this week so it would get done. She started pulling them around 9 this morning and I helped for a bit after recess (we borrowed a neighboring student teaching to babysit my class for a little while). We got my entire 30 student class done before 11:30. It was quite wonderful actually. I spent a few minutes at lunch inputting that data. We have a shared drive at our school that we upload our data to which is kind of nice. All but one of my students went UP on their fluency (the one who went down a bit is my lowest ELL student so this wasn't surprising or discouraging)...and many of the children made great gains with their retell. It made me feel good since I often feel like I just can't do it all for 30 kids and do it well.

As I took my children down to lunch today, I was going to turn in the DAZE test that I gave this morning. I did it with my class and the 4 fifth graders that I take from the split for math. I knew it would be a pain for him to do it with those kids separately so since I was doing it today anyway, I just decided to do it while they were there with me. Mrs. Reading Teacher was coming up the stairs as we were going down, so she turned around and walked with us and asked me if I needed any help with my progress monitoring. She seemed really surprised when I told her I was done. I said that Mrs. Resource offered to help me since I don't have a student teacher and would've had to do it all myself. Mrs. Reading Teacher was so happy that Mrs. Resource stepped up to help me. Then she asked me about the DAZE and I said "oh, I have them here, done and ready to turn in".

She was so funny about it. She said "Oh my goodness, Mrs. Sunny, you are just SO efficient!" I laughed and said it was more like get it out of my hair so I can concentrate on our testing this week!

I really hate proctoring our standardized testing. I hate how it makes the kiddos feel nervous and such. Plus I just don't like the pressure I feel is on ME even though I've barely had 4-5 weeks to get these kids ready. I am confident that most of my kiddos will do okay though. I think the science part will be the worst....but their reading and math scores should (hopefully) be okay. I will cross my fingers. We usually don't get the results until March/April, which is way too late to do anything with the information anyway. I heard today that last year the results were in by mid-November but the state didn't release them until March and our district then held on to them another month. How stupid is that?? Instead of giving us the data so we could, oh I dunno, use it and help these children where they are weak, they just held on to them for months and months. (And do we really have to wonder then why education seems to be on a downward spiral?!)

Probably the only really good thing about the testing this week is that tomorrow will be the easiest teaching day of my life. I am proctoring the test all morning with our recess break in the middle of the two sessions. After lunch I will teach a 40 minute working with words session, then we'll have read aloud/SSR and the kiddos will go to art. It'll be a real hard day for sure! *wink*