The Test

The actual test is: Will we all survive the next three weeks? You see, our principal received an e-mail on Tuesday morning that pointed out there had been an "error" in the testing calendar. By state law, the BIG OLD TEST is to be taken by the students after 120 days of instruction. But, the people who printed off the testing calendar for the building administrators (given to them last May, and used to schedule EVERYTHING for this school year) were off by a month. Instead of April 25th being the date we needed to return the completed tests, it is really March 25. And the e-mail ended, "We hope this doesn't cause any undue inconvenience."

What a laugh line!! It resulted in complete hyteria in my building, and many other schools I'm sure. We're all one gigantic dysfunctional family here in Southern Nevada and for 10 months we've all been planning our curriculum and pacing around this calendar that--suddenly--just shrunk by an entire month. And...Spring Break is one of the weeks of that month. There's really nothing to be done, either, because my principal would have done it. She called everyone right up through the state superintendent's office. We will be testing the first two weeks of March. There is no appeal.

So every special event has been cancelled. We're sneaking in a little Valentine's Day for 30 minutes at the end of the day, but I expect to be reprimanded for it. We have an unusual situation in that our school is under extreme scrutiny. The school is operating in an experimental capacity as an "empowerment" school and so we get to choose how and what to teach (according to the state standards, of course). But we are not under the strict guidelines of the rest of the county for which reading series, math text, etc. There are about 6 schools like this, and data is being gathered for a study to see if this is a viable and superior model. Therefore, the school gets looked at more strigently than others. They performed well last year, but that just makes the bar higher this year. It's easy to move from the bottom to the middle. It is a lot harder to go from "pretty good" to "really good".

So, we're all dumping our plans for the next three weeks and implementing the new, hysterical, "focused" plan for test run-up. Many platitudes have been mouthed about how "it's just another test, we take many tests, we don't need to put undo pressure on the students--they can do it" but the actions belie those sentiments.