4/5/07

State testing happens this week, so there isn't much of anything going on in my classroom. As the teacher, I find it both calming and nerve-racking to sit there and watch students take this test. It's calming because, to a certain extent, I feel confident about my students' ability to do math and succeed on tests. It also makes me feel good that one test is given in the morning and one test is given in the afternoon — that allows students to focus more on each test. Students also get a chance to relax for a while between the two tests.

But in some ways I find state testing to be just as nerve-racking for me as it is for my students. Once the tests have been passed out, there is nothing more that I can do. Hopefully all of the information we covered has sunk in and students will be able to recall it for the test. The pressure is on this year, since EVERY SINGLE ONE of our students passed the math ISAT test last year. I just hope we prepared our students well enough so that they can achieve at that same level again this year.

3/29/07

Next week is ISAT testing. This is a big week for our school. Last year we made only adequate yearly progress in all of our subgroups. This year we've continued on with the programs we put in place, and have improved some of them, as well. However, ISATs put a lot of pressure on our students and teachers.

We spent the first two days of this week rushing through the wrap-ups of Investigation 3 for Moving Straight Ahead. We'll spend the rest of the week with ISAT prep. Yvette and I are wondering whether practicing for the test is worth it — is it more stressful than helpful for students? Does spending three to five days stressing over the skills for the test really help students achieve more? Maybe I should interview one or two students to see how they feel about all this test prep. I worry that we're teaching our students to hate testing by forcing them to prepare in ways that they normally wouldn't.

Today we took a sample ISAT test that had 20 questions on it. My students did really well overall, but they had some trouble with the probability questions. The toughest question for them was this one:

3/15/07

We've decided to put it into the hands of our lovely school and reorder parts of Moving Straight Ahead. ISATs are approaching, and we need to make sure that we cover as much of the relevant material as humanly possible. I'm feeling a lot of pressure to cover all of the material.

We've decided to do all of Investigation 1 and Investigation 3 before ISATs, and then move on to the rest of the book after the testing. I believe it's important to introduce our students to solving equations before they take the ISATs. However, I'm having a really hard time with rushing through Investigation 1. This book is the most difficult book for a majority of our students. The information covered in Investigation 1 is really what the rest of the book hinges on. Students need to understand y-intercept, steepness of a line, how to graph, and how graphs, equations, and tables relate to each other. I think that it will be useless for students to rush through this investigation and just briefly touch on the information. Yes, they will have been exposed to it all, but they will not have a full understanding of it.