TAKS

This was a rough and ridiculous day.

I think I got somewhere around 2 hours of sleep last night, even though I went to bed at 11 completely exhausted. I think I must have been nervous I was going to oversleep, because we had to be here early today to prepare for testing. I kept getting to sleep and then waking up 30 minutes later, and I finally just got up about 4:45 and went to the living room to surf the internet for a little while.

We administered the ELA portion of the TAKS test today. I shared the responsibility with another teacher, and we had a room full of freshmen. I got into the room, and we got everything set right before the kids came in. As my luck would have it, there was a little girl in our room wearing the most atrocious perfume I have ever encountered, and I almost immediately had a debilitating headache. It was miserable. The whole thing was set up so stupid. Once we finished reading off all the instructions and rules they had about 2 hours to finish the test. This was plenty of time for most of the freshmen, we only had 2 kids from our room not finish before then. After that point they take every unfinished kid and walk them down to the gym where they had chairs and tables set up for them to finish. Here's the problem with that plan-- The sophomore and junior test was designed to take 4 hours. They had a mob of unfinished test takers, and not nearly enough space for them in the gym set up. They had ordered 30 pizzas so they would be sure to get lunch, but they had probably 350 kids in the gym. We finished everything up and returned our tests to the counselors, and there were only 2 women taking everything up and making sure everything was in order. I was 10 minutes late to my own first class after the testing. Thats the other ridiculous part of this whole ordeal- we had all 8 class periods between 11:30 and 3:30. The 3 periods where kids have lunch were 35 min long, and all the others were about 20. How pointless.

On the bright side, we don't have to deal with more full school TAKS testing again until next month.

Things have been busy lately, but I've gotten a lot done at home in the last week or so. I had a couple of doctor's appointments last week, and I'm going today to get new glasses. I got a ton of stuff put away at home on wed-friday, and I plan to get more done today. Yay!