Stop the insanity…

During our prep today we had our first meeting with the ELA staff developer at our school. She is lovely and efficient and very knowledgeable. Seriously. No sarcasm here for once. I swear. I know it’s rare, but I actually think this woman works hard.

However, she was the bearer or some rather unbearable news…we are now testing the shit out of second graders.

Maybe this isn’t news to many of you. But as a transplant from first grade, I’m not used to such intense amounts of testing and personally think it is heinous.

Here is my checklist for testing this month:
• running record for each child to assess current reading level
• sight word fluency test
• decoding test
• phonemic awareness assessment
• sight word spelling test
• benchmark spelling test
• math pre-test
• math end of unit test
• reading fluency test (separate from the running record)
• standardized reading test complete with a bubble sheet

Is that gross or what? Pretty soon we’re going to be assessing them on how throroughly they wipe after a trip to the bathroom. Or maybe using a rubric to score their ability to open those milk cartons at lunch. Perhaps we should think about attaching a bubble sheet to their recess routine just to make sure that their free play is highly monitored and accounted for.

I keep waiting for their little turkey timers to pop…they have to be done. I am.

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5 Comments
  • Saw your blog through all of the links…had to laugh. I recently posted an entry all about Venting!!! I also teach second grade. I’m curious as to what ELA means and what state you are in.

    September 7, 2007 at 11:36 am
  • Hi Cathy…ELA means English Language Arts. Sorry, but I’m an anonymous blogger…so for now I live in a mysterious large city…

    Thanks for reading!!

    September 7, 2007 at 10:16 pm
  • This reminds me of a grad class I took once. My professor was convinced that nobody read IEP’s (especially in a high school). She made up a bogus IEP for a non-existent student that included, as one of his goals, “Student will meet 70% of the standards for fornication.”

    Needless to say, nobody noticed.

    September 8, 2007 at 10:17 pm
  • As a highly educated (read literate) mother of a 2nd grade child I was administering those tests to my daughter’s classmates.

    Yes, they’re full of meaning.

    And I am oh so qualified.

    September 12, 2007 at 5:30 am
  • Our kids.. they get tested every two weeks. And at the beginning of school, they had to take a pre-assessment, followed nearly immediately by two days of Gates-MacGinitie testing, and then immediately after that a (delayed) biweekly test that is followed directly by another biweekly test.

    I’m amazed.

    September 16, 2007 at 1:55 pm

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