I’m spending the entire day crunching ISTEP scores and growth numbers and all sorts of other stuff, and alternately cursing myself, the Indiana State Board of Education, my boss, Microsoft Excel, human biology and math itself for the various frauds and iniquities being perpetrated on myself/my school/the state of education in general as I try and track down enough information to make what I’m doing useful to anybody.

I have discovered that the Windows version of Excel does not actually allow you to open two Excel documents in multiple windows.  For system software that is actually called Windows this seems like somewhat of a curious oversight.  Flipping back and forth is vastly annoying and I don’t like it one bit.  I’d prefer to not have to wait until I get home to do this on my Mac– there’s a reason I’m doing it at OtherJob– but it looks as if I might have to, because it’ll take a third of the time if I can just have everything open at once on my wonderful home setup, which features two monitors, one of which is a 27-incher, and not this teensy laptop screen.

Further aggravating me is the fact that the state appears to have made slightly different decisions about who counts and who doesn’t than I did when I put my initial numbers for my own students together back when I actually got the ISTEP data in the first place.  The low-growth kid who came in halfway through the year?  For some reason, counts.  The high-growth kid who I had for all but the first six days of the school year?  Didn’t.  Which shifts my overall numbers in a way I don’t like.

This don’ make no sense, and I’m wondering how exactly they decided who counts and who doesn’t, because length of enrollment doesn’t seem to be it.  Which is a whole ‘nother column I need to worry about if I’m going to keep track of it– and right now I don’t want to.

On the plus side, most of my grading is done.  I’m gonna take a break and read for at least an hour or so to let my eyes recover (from backlit tiny type to tiny type on paper, which… well, hopefully that’s a meaningful difference) and then I’ll see what else I can get done today.

What do people who don’t work two jobs on Saturday do on Saturday?