Honestly, folks, I spend at least seconds coming up with these post titles!
First of all, I think there’s mold or something in the cooler pads/air filters in the combined AC/heater units in my classroom. I am basically fine at home, and then go to school and feel awful. Virgil said this morning that he’d get Elizabeth (who cleans my room) to check out my filters. He said this as he came to my portable to verify that it wasn’t on fire. Normally, he doesn’t show much interest in whether or not my portable is on fire, I’ll admit. But today, he seemed to think it was a worthy thing to do. That’s probably because I put the heater on high heat instead of low heat, thus setting off the fire alarms. As soon as the alarms went off, I knew it was my fault, since I go through this once a year. Nice to get it over with, I guess!
For the past three days, the head SFA person in my school brought new teachers into my class (among others) to show how I do SFA. Yesterday at the staff meeting they said that we need to have the children read silently the first ten minutes of the class (in addition to the regular reading time built in) because they aren’t doing their 20 minutes at night. I asked if this was to start today. Geez, you should have seen that! I simply asked if we should make sure our students go to SFA with a book in their hands. Some complained that the kids would lose the books. (You walk into your SFA room with a book and you leave again with the same book. How can you lose it?) Others complained that the kids don’t have books (although we have library every other week, and they all just got a free book from RIF). It got worse when one stared at me like I sprouted three heads when I asked her if she had books in her classroom. Since I have a ton of books in my classroom, those who didn’t bring one borrowed one of mine. After reading, we went over how to do the reading homework, so we went over time for that part of the class. I explained when she came in, though, why we weren’t on the next thing, and she was fine with that. You do have to explain this stuff a lot, though. You have to guess what people expect to see when they come in and then either tell them where/when it is or why they don’t see it.
We got this dumb email from the assistant principal who looks at our math test scores. I was rather pleased with mine, but she wasn’t. She said we should ask Karen what she does that works. Nonsense. I want to instead ask Karen how many of her students flunked the AIMS last year. Of the nine students who flunked the math test, seven flunked the AIMS test last year and the other two only didn’t flunk it because they weren’t in Arizona to take it. Otherwise, they would have failed it as well. They did make a lot of progress (as evidenced by the difference between their pretest and posttest scores), but that doesn’t count. So tell me how you got kids who failed the AIMS to suddenly catch up. Otherwise, bite me.
It’s been that kind of week. At the staff meeting, we went over the scores last quarter’s students got on the 4Sight test (a test that I firmly believe is invalid). The big push was on expository text and associated skills. I saw my scores and was devastated at how poorly they did, especially listening to this lecture on how we had to focus on this. So I raised my hand and pointed out that I spent nearly the entire quarter on this. Yet, when I looked at the test the night before I administered it, I knew my kids were screwed. Here’s the best analogy I can give: You’re told that the test is going to be about the parts of a newspaper. You go over the different newspaper conventions in the local newspaper, such as how want ads are worded differently from news articles, what the masthead is, Dear Abby, etc. Then your test questions are “Compare and contrast the Wall Street Journal and Morse Code,” “How do they decide which letters to the editor to publish,” “If a train leaves New York at 6:30 …”
The highlight of the week was the announcement over the PA system this morning about another staff member getting her Master’s degree and how hard she worked. Um, yeah. Thanks for that. I certainly don’t need it blasted over the intercom that I got my degree, but it does feel a bit like a slap in the face to only mention one person and ignore everyone else with the same accomplishment. So it’s been a bit of a cranky day.
On the plus side, I have a plot idea finally for NaNoWriMo, so I’m excited about starting to write on November first!
