Testing Week......not gonna be fun.....

At my school, we have our testing next week. We are attempting to do it in four days. They will be four long, trying days for our students. And us teachers. Especially us Grade 7 teachers.

It was decided that everyone would test the same four days, two days for each of the two sets of tests. To me, a big problem is that there is such an unbalance in the testing for Grades 7 and 8. As currently scheduled by our school administration, our 7th Graders will have about 40 minutes of "down time" between tests on the first two days of testing. Then, later in the week, when they are tired of testing and being stuck in their advisory classes (homeroom), get this, they will be spending over 90 minutes each day after they finished their tests, before they can be released. It is up to us individual teachers to deal with them. On those days, the 8th Graders also take their tests in Science and Social Studies.

Our school advisory classes have no real curriculum, other than "read your AR books and clean out your backpacks." I have students in my advisory class whom I do not have in my history classes. In my advisory class, several students rarely bring an AR book to read, or any sort of book. I have one student who meets their AR goal. The rest just don't want to do it, don't care or just know that it does not matter if they do it or not because after two years at our facility of learning, they will probably be sent to high school regardless of what they do or don't do. I have in past times, tried to do things with this group, discussions about all kinds of life stuff, reading and taking about articles, providing them with books to read, digging through the old advisory class curriculum that was tossed and trying to get them to do something. Oh, I have even tried providing make up work for those in my advisory who are in my history classes. They won't do it or even make an attempt to do it, nor do they have any appreciation for the second and third attempts they were offered to improve their grade in my class. ( yep, as you can probably guess, my advisory class' gpas are on the low side. Several of them have less than a 1.0 gpa.)
They are not interested in any video/dvd that we can show at school. They won't play games such as checkers, chess, go, parchesi......They do like to graffiti on my chalkboards, desks......

I am not looking forward to this. IF we do not do well on these tests, we will be a year five failing school.

How goes your Spring testing ?

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