So... Friday was kind of a down day for me. I hadn't cried yet at school this year (major achievement!) until yesterday. I graded all my Reading Strategies tests on Thursday night (65 of them). So I was super tired. Added to that, I'm really extremely bad at math, so adding and multiplying for about 3 hours made my brain hurt even more. Upon arriving at school at 7 on Friday morning, I realized that I had graded them wrong. Uh. There was no way I was going to get all of them re graded and entered in the gradebook again before classes started for me at 9:40. Thankfully, Shawn and another math teacher offered to help. Thank God! It was embarrassing to admit that I made that easy mistake, but at least they didn't laugh at me about it. Everyone has their strong points, and math is not mine.
To add to that, it was a Friday which must automatically mean in the middle school brain: FREAK OUT!!! I don't know if that is a middle school rule, but they sure do all freak out on a Friday.
After posting my test data breakdown (ugh, more math) I realized that I had 23 kids out of 65 fail. That's about one third (I think). Boo. I think I need to change things up a little, both in my classroom and the layout of the tests. I figured they could do open ended questions, but I guess not.
It just makes me feel really unsuccessfull when they score like that. I know it's my first test, but I gave them a review, they highlighted notes that they took in class, and some of them still didn't study (even after I harped on it for about a week prior to the test), and a lot of them failed. The amount of "not caring" is astounding. How can I make it real to them? They think college and jobs are so far away, but they're really not.
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