So, my kids bombed the Applied Skills, and I don’t care.  I’m not legally allowed to discuss individual test items, and that’s not an issue that I care to challenge the state on, so I’m not going to.  I can say the rest of this, though: I had maybe six or seven kids who didn’t even finish, which for my students is incredibly rare.  (By comparison, I had only two kids out of all my current students who didn’t finish it last year, and at least three times that many in one class this year.)  Every other seventh-grade teacher who I talked to, in more than one building, reported the same phenomenon: much higher than normal numbers of kids not finishing the test.

This tells me that the state way overshot the difficulty level, and they’ll adjust for that when they score.  Plus, as I said a couple of days ago, I have kids who got zero points on the Applied Skills in sixth grade and still passed the test.  I learned after my first year teaching sixth grade; this test always looks horrifying and tries to destroy both my own confidence in my ability to do my job and their own confidence in their ability to do their jobs (as a bonus, the hardest question was the first one again this year) and it is manifestly not worth stressing out about.  They came in confident, no one gave up, and I felt like they did their best on the LA test that came second today despite getting beaten down by the math test.  That’s really all I can ask for.  I’m not wasting time worrying about it.

Something I am going to spend my time worrying about:  remember Raymond?  Unfortunately, his seizure during class a couple of weeks ago was only the first in a series of them.  He’s not been in class very much lately as his parents have struggled to find the cause of the problem and adjust medications, but they sent him in today because of ISTEP testing.

He apparently had at least one seizure during the test today.  He didn’t test with me because of his disabilities; he gets extra time and he has difficulty with fine motor skills like writing so he’s got a scribe with him for the test.  His para told me that there was no point anywhere during the test where Raymond had any idea what the hell was going on around him or what he was supposed to be doing on the test.

I can’t get mad at his parents; they were trying to do what they thought they were supposed to do.  But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to raise hell to get that test invalidated, and I hope to hell his parents keep him home for the next couple of days.  This is true for obvious humanitarian reasons– this test is not important enough for a kid to jeopardize his damn health to take– and slightly-more-selfish reasons, such as the fact that current ed reform theory is that there is nothing more important to student test scores than the skill of the teacher (and I’m certainly the only one who’s going to get blamed) and I suspect that fuckin’ epilepsy might have a bit to do with his scores here.  I didn’t find out about all this until late in the day so I didn’t have time to talk to his parents; I’m sure as hell going to be meeting with administration tomorrow to see what we can do about invaliding the test.

I suspect that meeting is going to be fun.