Friday, June 16, 2006

Woohoo! NOW the end feels near.

We still have a week and a half, but ooh, damn! is it gonna go fast.

Miracle of miracles, on THURSDAY we got information about schedules for next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The first two will be practically half days for my grade. Hurrah!

The rest of the classes/time will be spent writing and typing and hopefully performing plays.

All this week I gave tests. That's FOUR DAYS! Bwahaha, I am so evil. The first two days were the gradewide reading tests--sort of a pre-baseline. My kids took the practice 7th state test. I was actually surprised that they did fairly well on the high-level multiple choice questions. The writing was another story, and the editing...whew, what a disaster.

Yesterday and today I gave my kids a final testing the major things we have covered this year. I'm going to post the questions so you, dear readers, can challenge yourself to middle school academic standards. Heh.

The bad thing about all the testing is the large piles of tests which must be "graded." But happily for us all but most especially my sanity and good teacher standing, I multitasked. While the kids took tests, I graded others. I'm finished with all the first set. And, because I'm a big fat NERD, I made a spreadsheet with a breakdown of those scores, to see which things they did poorly on. I still need to input a few things, and then I'll print it out and give it next year's teacher. Fun for him/her; he/she will probably toss it. But at least I did my part proactively!

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In personal news, today marks the two-year anniversary of my move to New York City. Twenty-four months ago today, I lumbered around the Brooklyn subway system--three trains? and all their attendant stairs--with two bags, one of which was large and awkward. I think it took me two or three hours to get to my sublet apartment, and I was extremely sweaty and irritable and tired. It was the first of my Herculean efforts of living in this damn city.

Two years! In one place! AND as a teacher! Holy shit.

**

Last night immediately after getting home from class, I did three of the six sections of math homework. Yay me! It was fairly easy stuff like prime factorization and exponents and integers and fractions. Some of it I didn't even need to check the book. That was a relief, to know that I had at least some basic skills.

Sadly, this afternoon the internet was out, so I had to wait and hope. I had dinner with my friend N whom I've hardly seen lately, which was fun. Then when I got home, the internet was back and I got to work on that math. Finally, I completed the other three sections and then took my quiz. Ladies and gentlemen, I got 19 out of 20, which is a 95%. Yay me! I really thought I'd gotten 100, but hey, I'm still happy. I think it's the highest quiz score yet.

1 comment:

Chance said...

Just found your blog off Carnival of Ed. There are so many teacher blogs, it's hard to separate the good reads from the dross, but I've been reading your past entires with some interest. I hope you keep it up through the next year!