Greetings, from TAKS Hell

Happy TAKS day everyone. Give your publicly educated children a break tonight. They've had to endure a day of silence, testing, and grumpy teachers. Please understand, no real teaching occurs today, if you live in Texas anyway. So don't ask them what they learned today. I promise, if they learned anything, it was from "Jim" in the bathroom, and you really don't want to know.

As a teacher, I feel a little like a felon even writing on my blog during the school day, but today especially. This is the day that teachers get treated like imbeciles. No cell phones, no computers, no contact with the outside world. Must protect test confidentiality, ya know. Make sure to actively monitor. And no, that's not code for "sit at the front of the room with a magazine" anymore. No siree, we must walk around the room, ad nauseum, to make sure no one cheats. Now, we can't look at the tests. And we can't answer any questions. So I'm not sure how to know if they are cheating or not, but that's what we are told to do. And we do it. Well, those who give the test do it.

As a 2nd grade teacher, I don't have to give the test. My students won't be initiated into that club until next year. No, Instead I get to keep 20 smart and curious kids quiet for 6 hours. It's one of the days it sucks to have the GT class. See, they will find ways to talk. And you can't keep them busy enough. Packets are for pansies and are finished quickly and correctly. These are the kids that love packets. Free writing works well for a while, but they all want to share what they wrote, or they are figuring out how to make major owweee pokey things out of the spiral metal thing on their notebooks. So I am driven to free draw time and threats of parental e-mails by lunch. Man, I love my job!

And I haven't even mentioned the rain yet. If you are under a rock, Houston is flooded. The whole west side is virtually under water. We are fine up north, but it hasn't really stopped raining since about 4 pm yesterday. So, all outside activities are not possible.

Well, that's my day... Gonna write a happy post soon.

I promise! :)