It was a long week. HSA testings greatly disrupts my life as a teacher. On Monday and Wednesday, I had to teach in different rooms for half the day. On Tuesday and Thursday, the kids taking the HSAs for Biology and Algebra missed my class to take it. The problem is, those classes are semester classes, so some kids had to take it, and some kids didn't. Some classes, I would have 12 kids. Other classes, I would have 3. There were no lists and no way for me, as a teacher, to know who was supposed to be in these tests and who wasn't.
However, I expected that much. This year, it was more disorganized than usual, but there's nothing I can really do about that.
The worst part of the week occurred at about noon today. My department head came in, and told me that she had just received a citywide test from North Avenue that we had to give this coming week. The test is estimated to take ninety minutes. This is the first I've heard of this test!
The issue is, that this is my last week with my kids. The last week. I'm furiously trying to teach them about epic poetry and the Odyssey before the final exam, and I've only got two days left! Using one of them up giving a standardized test when the kids just spent a week testing for the state and when the kids need to be instructed in english is infuriating! Not only that, but it's unprofessional and educationally unsound.
As it stands, my dept head says she hates that we have to do it, but that we have to do what North Avenue says, regardless of how ludicrous it is. She wants us to give the test on Thursday and Friday, the very last day of class before finals. I have no idea what the test is even for.
We're meeting about it on Tuesday, and the union is involved. However, the attitude from the AP when I spoke with her was basically, "Yeah, North Avenue makes me do ridiculous stuff all the time at the last minute, and we just have to do it!" I hope the response on Tuesday is a little bit more with the kids in mind rather than red tape bullshit.
Grrrrr. So mad about this.
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3 comments:
It's precisely stuff like this that gets the city in trouble with MSDE all the time. They spring crap like this on us, it throws us all into confusion and it isn't fair to anybody.
Believe you me, someday when I'm the King of Special Ed we'll be spending the better part of our time preventing problems rather than solving them. Or, perhaps more accurately, creating them.
The grapevine says that there are some big changes afoot at North Avenue. Supposedly it's going to start in Special Ed and work its way outward. The interesting thing is that the City & State people are trying to structure things so that the State takes the blame for the more unpopular changes. "Hey, it's the State's idea...what could we do?"
Asshats.
It's par for the course with the city. That's why I've just signed a contract with Baltimore county. But I still work in my city school a few days a week because those city kids have my heart.
Why not take the courses you need this summer to get a pay raise. I'm gonna take some courses online so I'll have more credits past my masters and get a raise.
Ohmywerd! I can not even fathom why they would send tests down from "on high" this late in the year. It doesn't make sense at all. In GA we have state mandated tests, but we know a year in advance when the testing dates will be and what they are.
North Avenue needs to get it's head out of it's butt!
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