Is This a "This too shall pass" Moment?

(Breathe, Jay....take nice long breaths to ease the tension and anxiety and frustration....)

I found myself with that type of self-talk a lot yesterday, as the roll-out of our MAP (Measured Academic Progress) screener didn't exactly feature a smooth execution.  Okay, I'll cut the crap and just say that yesterday was, at times, excruciatingly frustrating.

The situation wasn't helped by my preconceived disgruntledness towards the whole idea to begin with.  With that crumbly foundation already in place, the glitches and bugs and uncertainties that made up the day didn't exactly construct much positive.

I will say this, though.  I appreciated the students' efforts.  The majority of students appeared to give a good effort, and so I will hold on to that circumstance to help me get through today.  Because while we were told that most students would finish in a class period, and while I've been told that this testing would only compliment my efforts to prepare students for the PSAT NMSQT, my guess is that around 70-80% of the students did not finish.  I'm hopeful that most of those only have a few questions remaining.  WHAT I'M REALLY HOPEFUL for is that when the students resume their tests today, they won't have to start over at question #1. 

The view I have as proctor of the test just isn't very user friendly, so I really don't know how many are suspended, how many are completed, and how many haven't started.

Today, though, I at least know how to find the right class to test, which was a mystery for the first part of testing yesterday.  Today, though, I also think I know how to correct the situations when students seem to get knocked out of testing.  Today, though, I fear the "unknown".  What could possibly go wrong next?

I hope all of this frustration and money and time spent on this system of screening and detecting students that are lagging behind in their reading and math skills pays off sometime.  For now, I'm just going to try to get through today.

Homecoming Week? A Good Week To Set Up "The Wall"

So this is the south wall of Room NE10.  It's not pretty, actually.  The blue painter's tape to post all of that stuff isn't really attractive.  On the other hand, it's very functional.  It's sticky, yet it's not hard to remove at the end of the year.  And the information on simple copy paper also isn't exactly picturesque. And finally, my guess is that students hardly pay attention to any of it, if at all.

No, the south wall isn't for them; it's for me.

All the information within the ugly blue painter's tape and simple white copy paper is a compilation of anything and everything I know about the SAT.  And here it is if you would like it.  Just click on the link and feel free to copy anything and everything you would like.  Use all of it or some of it, change it how you would like, and no special reference or credit is needed.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bw_Emy4D6vuwb1FmUXZKMjAxQ3c

Honestly, putting this wall is sort of like decorating a Christmas tree.  While I admit that in my family, it's my primary role to simply assemble our tree and get the lights on, the ornaments are like memories right?  Each ornament helps you to remember something about someone or sometime in your life.  Well, the south SAT wall is like that for me.

I send the information to the copier, print off all the simple copy sheets, and with each piece of painter's tape, I organize all the information into the three main testing areas that I work with - reading, writing and language, and the essay.  And as the copy sheets and painter tape goes up, I refresh my brain on the information on each sheet, reminding myself of the skills I need to focus on with the English III students. 

At the end of the year, I'll take the tape and copy sheets and information all down.  Admittedly, they don't go in a special tote box like our Christmas ornaments; in fact, it all makes it's way to the trash.  But the little "ornaments" will lay in wait in my Google drive folder in May through August while my brain and body refresh and recharge with a little summer vacation mixed in.  Come September, though, I'll break them out and refresh the memories all over again.

And if you would like to stop in sometime and visit the wall and talk about the SAT, let me know.  I'll get you a cup of coffee and we'll chat.  Maybe you can add some information for me, help me create another "ornament" to go on the wall next time.

Reasons Why I Like Khan Academy So Far

I use Khan Academy for a variety of reasons, and I thought I would share a few of them in this post.

1) Because it's online, students can complete exercises during class or outside of class.  For my purposes currently, I'm assigning students review parts of speech exercises.  Most of the students will breeze through quickly, while other students may occasionally need a hint or watch a video.  The students, though, can pace themselves.

2) Students in college are taking more and more online courses, and I think Khan Academy is a basic activity that is similar to an online course.  Students have to manage their time and efforts to make sure that exercises, quizzes, and tests get completed by a certain due date.  This process challenges students to keep some type of planner - either using their student planners, some digital planner like Google Keep, or something else of their choosing.  If they forget to complete what's been assigned by the deadline, there are penalties.  And that is something they need to figure out now.

3) The program is always improving, and it's becoming more and more user friendly for teachers to post assignments and record performances.  I can now view scores and post scores in my online grading management system fairly easy.

4) Through reports that I can generate, I can determine trends of difficulty.  It's not hard at all for me to see if a particular skill seems to be a struggle area for students.  That's nice because I can keep breezing through stuff they know, and slow down and instruct and support skills that are unfamiliar.

5) Did I mention hits and videos?  (Yes, I know I did.)  Through the hints and videos, students get real time assistance as it's needed.  They don't have to send me an email or wait until our next class period.  They get help as they are working.

Starting Off A Four-Day Week!

For starters, I wish Karrigan's dog Sophie could physically share some of the energy she wakes up with each morning.  Of course, some of her energy is her youth, and some of her energy is the anticipation that there just may be rabbits in the yard to go chase.  But when it's time to WAKE UP, that girl has shaking and quaking and wiggling and licking going on big time!  Usually, she waits for the alarm (generally at 5 a.m.), but sometimes if she thinks it should be time to get up and either Amber or I have appeared to stir, she quietly climbs the stairs to the bed, walks on the bed gingerly, and analyzes the situation - looking for open eyes or some type of signal indicating that she is welcome.  If those things don't occur after about thirty seconds, she quietly exits.

I learned a little more about the school year this weekend.

1) MAP testing stands for Measured Academic Progress testing.  And now that I understand the acronym and a little more about the process after our 1:30 early dismissal professional development session on Friday, I'm even more frustrated.  I'm pretty sure that what the juniors don't need is additional testing in a different format than the SAT.  And I'm no more closer to figuring out how our school is going to complete this testing than I was before 1:30 p.m. last Friday.  We generated questions, though, for our administrator, so hopefully answers and progress will arrive soon.

2) We - the English III students and I - have a long road to climb towards better being able to effectively complete and SAT style essay question.  I scored the pre-assessments that I had recently distributed to the students, and the results were frustrating.  I anticipate that the analysis scores are going to be low because this type of essay response is new to the students.  I did hope, though, that the reading and writing scores would be higher.  I'd like to believe the low reading scores are more about a lack of thoughtful effort more than weakness in reading.  At least, that premise is what I'm going to go with.  Unfortunately, the writing scores were really, really bad.  And how difficult is it to write an essay with an effective introduction, body paragraphs that discuss what was previewed in the introduction, and a closing that reviews the major points that were previewed in the introduction and discussed in the body?  And how challenging is it to understand that a creative attention-getting lead is needed to begin the essay, and strong wrap-up clincher statement is needed to end the essay?  Shouldn't those things be a given at this point of the students' education.  Should 80% of the 11th grade students be able to write at least somewhat of an effective and efficient five paragraph essay?  Apparently, this is not the case with the Class of 2020, as we currently stand at about 10% of the students.

3) The honeymoon is officially over.  Students that have not completed work or have figured that just slopping something together and calling it effort will soon be realizing that those things are damaging to a student's grade.  And the really unfortunate students will be the ones that don't bother to monitor their emails and their grades to discover their situation, nor are they fortunate enough to have a parent or guardian that assists them with this endeavor.  With any luck at all, I will be receiving email requests from students (or parents/guardians) informing me that they have revised their ENVISIONME sites or completed their Khan Academy assignments and would like me to score those items again for additional credit instead of the current grade or zero in Lumen.

And the learning is not quite over.  Today the students will complete an SAT style reading assessment - two fiction/narrative passage, twenty questions, in twenty-six minutes.  If these scores reflect the number of "readers" in the class, these will be low as well.  A "good score" to shoot for is 13-14 out of 20, and it would be great if at least 50% of the students achieved that level.

But hey, I had a great 3-day Labor Day Weekend, and it's already Tuesday.  Now where is that dog who I know is ready to go on her morning walk before school!