Glennalicious: Testing problems?

March 16, 2006

Testing problems?

With my head down in the trenches, I had no idea that the state was having troubles too.

My school was chock full of fun during the test. It is so sad to see kids absolutely break down because of test anxiety. So many kids fear math and are too immature to have a coping mechanism, so they deal with it by trashing the room, attacking other kids, or snapping calculators in half. We had to suspend so many kids during the test. The saddest/funniest was a kid who had to be removed from the room for screaming obscenities at the teacher and one other student. Once outside the room, they ran away from the security guards and spent the rest of the day running around the building, screaming and cursing. Middle school kids can be really tiny and really fast.

For the next few weeks, I'm one of the 8 people training everyone else in our region. We have over 42,000 tests to grade. I see lots of coffee during the day, beer at night.

Posted by G at March 16, 2006 07:28 AM

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Comments

as a former member of the teaching community, i'd love to observe you in the classroom one day. i think it'd be quite inspiring.

Posted by: myke at March 16, 2006 08:24 AM

In defense of 'really tiny and really fast,' I hated math tests too.

You wouldn't believe how utterly shocked I was when in my early twenties I realized that my entire job was math-based. I was managing a database of International phone rates. In the US we sell phone time by the minute, period. In Europe they sell it in 'pulses,' and a pulse can be a measure of distance or time.

My job was to convert all these rates into cost-per-second and then stuff all the results into a database for sales reps to use.

My whole job. Math. Holy shit my math teacher WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!

;-)

Posted by: goblinbox at March 16, 2006 12:19 PM

Funny that you never hear those stories from the Bush ("No Child Left Standing") Administration.

Posted by: alan at March 16, 2006 12:40 PM

You must not have those old-fashioned pull-down fire alarms in your school... We had two false alarms that day.

Posted by: Mr. HK at March 19, 2006 05:33 PM

Over 5000 papers each?! Yikes. Us Noozlelanders could teach you guys a lesson (pardon the pun):

"Despite assurances from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority that there would not be a repeat of the 2004 scholarship debacle, 227 students out of the 970 who sat the calculus exam scored zero, while a further 195 students scored between 1 and 5 per cent."

Easy! :)

Posted by: Dave at March 21, 2006 07:13 AM