Perhaps the clearest sign that I am utterly burned out as an educator is the fact that tomorrow is the last day of the first round of ISTEP testing and I haven’t even been able to muster up the energy to complain about it.  Today was impressively rough; our principal is out of town, and literally the first words the AP said to me were “Get in here, we’ve got a problem.”

We’d just gotten a call from transportation that they were going to be two hours late picking up some of our kids– kids who had already been waiting at their bus stops for up to half an hour, and some of whom had apparently called the school to tell us that they didn’t have keys to their houses and couldn’t get back in.

This is a fuck-up of astronomical proportions before you get to the part where we’re out fifty or sixty kids on a testing day.  At that point we start looking around to figure out who’s getting fired.  It’s incompetence on a staggering scale, and the worst part is that it’s not terribly surprising, because transportation has been run by morons for literally the entire time I’ve worked in Indiana.

That aside, though: based on rumblings I’ve been hearing from downstate and the insane difficulty level of the “readiness” test they made our kids take twice leading up to the ISTEP, I was concerned that the thing was going to be impossible.  There’s still plenty of time for them to make the multiple-choice portion a huge pain in the ass, but this test looked no different to me in terms of difficulty level than any other ISTEP I’ve administered.  Which is to say: the math was too difficult for most of my kids, but it’s always too difficult for most of my kids, and this particular test was not more too difficult than it has always been.

Whee?