Testing, testing...

Last week and this week I am working full school days doing testing.  We go from school to school doing benchmark testing in resource as well as mainstream classrooms.  You think those last two sentences I wrote were boring, you should try listening to kids read the same passages over and over every week day for two weeks and then coming back 3 months later and doing it all again. 

It’s the fictional passages that are really dull because I don’t really care if Kim and Anna are entering a jump rope contest or that Mother Kangaroo keeps loosing her baby.  But the non-fiction passages aren’t too bad because at least I’m learning something.  For instance, I now know that Big Ben has four faces so that it can be seen from every direction and that those faces are 20 feet wide and, the numbers are 2 feet tall, and the minute hand is long as a car.  I also know that Carl Gauss grew up in a poor family in Germany and could work math problems in his head by the time he was three.  When he was seven, his school teacher asked the kids to add up all the numbers from one to 100, and he figured out the answer almost instantly.  Kind of interesting, right? 

 Non fiction stories have their frustrations, too, however, since no one ever gets farther than half way through the information.  The passage about Big Ben begins with people climbing up it’s face.  It took me 5 days of testing before I got a kid who read far enough to find out that the climbers were actually cleaners.  What happens next?  Do the climbers fall?  Do they ever finish cleaning London’s clock?  I may never know.  I also may never know what amazing things Carl Gauss did after the age of seven.  I keep telling myself that I’ll go back and finish the good ones, but when I’m off work, I come to my senses.  Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately.