Tag: standardized tests

In which I’m not doing it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m not, God damn it. I refuse to do it. I am not dedicating another blog post or another minute of time with my precious mind on trying to make sense of ILEARN results and how it has been several years since they have correlated in any way at all with my perception of my students’ abilities.

That way lies madness. That way also lies comparing my results to the other 8th grade Math teacher and trying to come up with reasons why our scores might be different, and that madness is even worse madness than normal madness. I’m gonna walk away from this fucking computer and go read a fucking book, and I’m not thinking about school or the internet or teaching or math or fucking test scores for one more single second tonight because it is not worth it.

Bah.

I’m so fucking tired of this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So for the last several years Indiana has had this thing called a Teacher Appreciation Grant, or TAG. We’ve gotten it before Christmas and it’s amounted to maybe an extra $300 or so. It’s generally gone to anyone who spent the previous year working for whatever their district is and didn’t get a bad rating on their yearly evaluations. It might have been slightly more for teachers rated Highly Effective than teachers rated Effective, but it wasn’t a huge difference.

The morons in the statehouse, who have never seen anything that wasn’t worth making worse, decided this year that the award needed to go to significantly fewer teachers and that it needed to be competitive, because there is no better way to feel appreciated than to have to fight everyone in your district for a check. They’re no longer allowed to give the grant to more than 20% of the teachers in any given district, and it has to be based on test scores.

I’ll spare you quoting the borderline-incoherent email we got from our district “explaining” how to apply for this thing, but apparently we do need to apply– God forbid the district figure out who deserved this thing on their own– and we need to provide our own evidence of how we’ve increased test scores over, presumably, the previous school year, although the email does not actually say that the data you send them has to be from the 2024-25 school year. This feels like an oversight and is not especially surprising.

I teach 8th grade. My students leave me and immediately go to high school.

You get one guess about whether I have access to any data about any of my previous students, at all, during the time I’ve been working for this district.

Shit’s due next Wednesday, so I suppose I ought to get to making shit up soon.

On the final

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I have crunched the numbers, or at least calculated my pass rates, and of the 139 kids who took the 8th grade Math final, 55.4% of them managed to pass it. I curved the test to 20 points instead of 25 before putting it into the actual grade book, and with that adjustment, 66.2% of them managed to pass. This from a test that upon looking at it the first time, I was fairly certain that 2/3 of my students if not 3/4 of them would fail it.

(Only one student failed the Algebra final, before or after the modest two-point curve. I’m not worried about that class right now.)

Furthermore, and I’m not going to post the graphs here because they’re vaguely incomprehensible without the information that I’d have to strip out of them, my kids did pretty respectably compared to the other 8th grade Math teachers in the district. The data I get through the dashboard is incomplete but still a little more fine-grained than just pass/fail rates, but at worst we’re tied for the best performance in the district, at least of the teachers I can see data from, and depending on how you measure, you could make an argument for first or second. I’ll take “tied.”

A couple of other things: first, my 8th graders are unused to the concept of “final exam” or “midterm” to begin with. 7th graders did not have to take either last year. They are also, and I think this might be a place where my current grade policies might be hurting me, not used to the idea of a test they can’t retake in my room. I told them over and over again that they were only getting one shot at this and a bunch of them asked me if they could retake it anyway. I think I’ve managed to create some kids who just sort of breeze through tests the first time, knowing they can redo them if they have to, and if they don’t get a good enough grade the first time, they actually try on the second attempt.

Second, I may need to rethink the way I teach my classes from the ground up, so long as the guy who is in charge of writing these tests remains in charge of writing these tests. I am a big fan of Everyone Who Tries Can Pass, which, honestly, probably shouldn’t be true no matter how much I want it to be. He is a big fan of Rigor, which I generally find to be nothing more than artificial difficulty with no particular instructional utility.

To put this in simpler terms, if the objective is “prove you can multiply,” I’ll likely ask you what 7×8 is. His questions are more likely to be 7.13 x -18.014, that is if he’s not writing something utterly demonic like -7/18 x 8.12.(*) Both are “multiplication,” of course. Mine lacks Rigor. His lacks common sense. I feel like maybe if the kids are seeing a particular mathematical concept in 8th grade, maybe we ask them some simpler questions about that concept to see if they get the idea before we jump to the Rigor shit. Not so for my compatriot; the ILEARN is gonna be Rigorous, so our assessment must be as well.

This is the point where I generally throw my hands up and point out that if you want me to fail half of my students, please have the balls to actually say that. I’d ultimately rather have them feel like they have a chance to pass, and (slightly more importantly) a chance to understand the math I’m supposed to be teaching them. If every test question is high level and Rigorous, I can point at ten kids in every class who are already done before I pass the tests out, and that’s not including the ones who just don’t give a shit one way or another. That’s a whole different conversation, and one I might have sometime during break depending on whether I get around to analyzing my ILEARN data the way I want to.

So what did I do? Detailed guided notes. Detailed guided notes. Here, take a look at them if you want:

8th Grade Final NotesDownload

Basically every question in those notes is a test question on the final that has been slightly rewritten, basically just changing the numbers. In other words, if you paid fucking attention during the four days that we spent going over that nine page document, you had the entire test in front of you. And yes, the test was open notes. 45% of my kids failed with this document in front of them; most of them because they didn’t even glance at it during the test. (You may recall the test I gave a couple of years ago where I literally wrote the answers on the board and 23% of them failed. There is nothing I can do to get some of these kids to pass.)

Anyway. If you’ve read this far, go ahead and look through those notes, and keep in mind that I didn’t exactly keep that document a secret. I shared it with my boss and I gave it to my 8th grade partner teacher. I don’t think she used it with her class; I could be wrong.

You tell me: is this cheating? Meeting the kids where they are? Something else? I don’t know. They did a lot better than I thought they were going to do initially, and there are still a bunch of questions on that test (not all of them, to be clear) that I think are manifestly unfair for 8th graders. Looking at the kids who failed anyway, honestly, I’m not sure how many of them were possible for me to get short of taking the test for them.

The question is whether I just give up on those kids next semester and leave them behind so that I can have the rest of them ready for a test like this without this degree of a crutch, or if I keep providing the crutch. I genuinely don’t know. I really don’t.

(*) To get a little bit further into the weeds, converting decimals to fractions and vice versa isn’t in 8th grade standards, and I don’t have time to teach it. So there is zero chance that I’m going to give my kids a question where that must happen in order to get the right answer. Because it introduces a source of error that is not “do the kids understand this 8th grade standard” and I’m not about that life.

In which I want to vomit forever

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I got hammered by the digestive side effects that Mounjaro is famous for so hard this morning that I had to stay home. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the morning in the bathroom and at least once seriously contemplated taking a picture of my bodily effluvia so that I could submit it to Guinness. I have never witnessed anything of the quantity that I was producing this morning. I’ll leave it at that.

Just now, I looked up my scores for the second ILEARN checkpoint, and really, there’s no reason for me to go to work tomorrow, because my kids are clearly learning not a Goddamn thing from me this year.

And tomorrow they’re going to take a test, and then I can start preparing them for the final, which 85% of them are going to fail.

So, yeah, I hate everything, how are you?

Tomorrow

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I get to spend my entire day tomorrow giving my students standardized tests, and I mean that literally– every single one of my classes, all day, except for my 30-minute lunch, which is going to be delayed a bit from its usual time because of Reasons. I will have to read several pages of instructions six times and ask over a hundred and thirty students “Do you have a cell phone?” and hope none of them are lying to me, because I get to catch all the bullshit from everybody if we have to invalidate a test.

You’ve all heard the rants before; I’m tired and I don’t wanna. I’m going to predict my sixth-hour kids have the worst test scores I’ve ever seen, though, because giving a standardized test at the end of the day is fucking professional malpractice.

And then Thursday the process will repeat, with the ELA teachers giving their half of the test, and I’ll be in my classroom instead, trying to figure out how to keep the bastards busy and quiet for class periods that are ten or so minutes longer than usual. I’m thinking color by numbers. I’m already pre-annoyed by Thursday behavior issues that haven’t even happened yet– that ten minutes don’t sound like much but they’re going to be. My current ability to tolerate bullshit, as well as the ability of the other adults in the building, is calibrated for 53-minute blocks. There will be a lot of damn referrals during the last ten minutes of class over the next couple of days.

Also, I just ate about two thousand calories of deep dish pizza, and it was a bad idea.

The end.

Today’s moment of screaming inside my brain

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.

He was an eighth grader at the time.

At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.

Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:

“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:

So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.

I did not press the child for an explanation.

In which I knew that already

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I passed my Math test, officially, with exactly the same score I had “unofficially” on July 1st. Delayed fully 40 days for no Goddamn reason at all. Remember, kids, ETS is the devil.

That’s all I’ve got for today, as we have family in town and we will have more family in town tomorrow. Must sleep.

In which it looks like I can do this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

I ended up having some spare time this afternoon, and I found a free practice test online through the same people that sold me my study guide (so I figure it’s at least reasonably reputable) so I went ahead and took it, and if I’m understanding the scoring methodology correctly … it looks like I passed, although not exactly with flying colors– I got 42/66 questions right, or 63.34%, for a final score of 163, and a 159 is a pass in Indiana. I could have gotten a 39 and still passed, so I had a three-question cushion on my first try.

Now, granted, no one is ever going to look at my Praxis score again after I’ve passed the thing, so it really doesn’t matter if I pass it by the skin of my teeth or by flying colors, but I want a little bit more of a cushion than that. I was able to go through the practice test after taking it, and I printed out two categories of questions: questions I had gotten wrong, and questions that I got right but I know good and well that I got right by being lucky. That gave me about 27-30 questions to study tomorrow; in there are a handful that I absolutely shouldn’t have gotten wrong, including one thing I’ve taught fairly recently (!!!) and one where I just flat-out calculated something incorrectly and didn’t notice it, but I figure being fully confident of over half the test is better than I expected going in. I missed nearly all of the calculus questions, of course, but I got a couple of the trigonometry ones right without guessing and there were one or two of the harder ones where I was guessing between, say, two answers instead of all four and managed to get the right one. I figure I’m going to do this twice more– I’ll study my wrong answers tomorrow and see which ones I can get comfortable with (some are a matter of just not understanding certain kinds of notation, so those will be easy points) and do another practice test on Thursday, then maybe one more over the weekend, and if my numbers move in the right direction I don’t see why I can’t move ahead with the real thing next week sometime. Which, on one hand, will wipe out one of my big plans for June, but on the other hand will let me focus more on Arabic, curricular stuff, and Spanish.

The other thing I need to make sure I understand is the actual rules for taking a Praxis from home. I know they have a proctor monitoring you but I’m not sure what the tech rules are and I suspect on at least two questions I may have broken a rule, depending on how picky they are. This organization has made me incandescently angry with them on multiple occasions so I need to make sure I’m prepared for literally anything. Hopefully things go smoothly, but I need to prepare for them not to.