Tuesday, May 18, 2004
The Atlanta trip was awesome and I will post about that soon. I realized that it wasn't nice to make a big production about my test scores and then not share the results. So here goes...

On average, my kids language arts scores went UP over 3 points! Yippee! Ninty-two percent of my students passed on the first try! The few that didn't are going to retest tomorrow and I am hoping that they pass. It would be super cool if they all passed. Unfortunately, they didn't do nearly so well in math. So that is going to hold a couple back, probably. I hate that, but I am trying to let go a bit of my control freak tendencies. I know that I couldn't do anything about their math scores...that was the job of the math teacher, who didn't do his job very well.

I feel like the universe is conspiring to keep me a teacher. I feel really good about it right now. I am certainly not a big advocate of these tests, but I can't help but feel good about my kids passing it. They worked so hard and they were so cute and proud of themselves when I told them their scores.

I also had my students write letters telling the students I will have in the fall about me and my class. I am going to try to have a pen-pal exchange between these guys and my new ones. Their letters were funny-- they were giving advice to my new students. One of my kids wrote, "Ms. is nice when you are nice. When you are mean she freak. She hate mean more than bad. She hate words like fag and retard. It hard not to say them but you figure it out right quick and she happy and you too."

Again, while I wish I had been more sucessful at teaching them plurals and puctuation, I can be happy that they just learned to stop saying mean things. ¶ 4:19 AM