April 7, 2014

Is it only Monday? It feels like it should be later in the week already.

Today was exhausting. I went all over the building multiple times, either looking for the principal or helping teachers or talking to teachers or grabbing laptops or whatever else. My knees are killing me at the moment.

We started state assessments again this morning and they went pretty much perfectly. During the first test one kid had one question that was missing the answers and they didn't show up after I restarted the test, but they did after I hit the Clear button. I can't explain it but it worked so I don't care. The second test of the morning also went well. I don't know if it is because they fixed the servers or if it is because only a few schools volunteered to try testing again today. It will probably all go to crap tomorrow. I was so quick to think highly of the test last Monday after testing went so well, and then it showed its true colors.

There was another test in the afternoon that the principal scheduled at 12:30PM but it worked better for almost everyone to have take it at 2:30PM during the teacher's regular lab time. This did end up throwing a somewhat major wrench in the works because the resource teacher that was supposed to test with three of the kids leaves at 2:00PM so there was a bit of an issue trying to figure out the logistics of that. But it all worked out. Minus the one laptop that started to die near the end of the test. At the end we were down to two kids in the lab still testing and the teacher took the rest back to the room. By the time it was down to one kid, all the Boy & Girls Club staff were in the lab and they were loud as always, regardless of all the signs on the door saying we were testing. At one point there were a couple guys in the middle of the lab (the kid was in the back row) talking loudly about hunting, and I had to ask them several times to whisper, which they couldn't hear because they were too loud, so I had to get up and go over to them and tell them to be quiet. The kid testing said he didn't care but he was already not doing well with his attention span and I think he just wanted to look cooler in front of the staff guys. I wasn't having it. Thankfully most of the state testing happens in the morning but noise has been an issue in the past during MAP testing. I really have no power to kick them out of the lab but the principal does and they have one or two more warnings before they're gone. They are there to help the kids at the school yet very few of them have any respect for kids trying to take tests which have much larger implications than just one-off grade. MAP scores follow them throughout school and state assessment scores determine school accreditation and are often, if not always, published in a public forum. So they're both kind of a big deal. I could not care less about either one because I think all of that testing time should be spent actually teaching kids, but it is still a big deal.

In the very little downtime I had today, when I wasn't testing or running around the building, I worked on the slides for the slideshow. Progress was made.

Tonight I watched DVRed stuff and practiced the piano. One of the shows I watched was this weekend's SNL with Anna Kendrick and it was really good. I didn't realize how good of a singing voice she had but she really showed it off. And her parody singing was also really funny. As for the piano, I got pretty good at the first half of the third page, and played up to that point over and over and over again. Next time I will try and push through the rest of the third page.

I've had a headache off and on all day so now I'm going to take some Ibuprofen and go to bed. I probably should have gone to bed at 8:00PM tonight. Ten o'clock feels way too late.