We are not actually past PARCC but we have finished the first round. Round two will come at us this spring. The school has not yet finished, but my grade wrapped up PARCC for now. Today was the return to “normalcy.”

We had a rocky landing. Students wanted to continue coloring. They had been allowed to color for hours the week before since no talking was allowed until all students were done with a test section. Coloring had continued after sections’ ends since no academics were planned on test days, the rationale being that we want students at their most rested and alert. Everyone wanted to finish decorating pages they had started or wanted a turn coloring like other, faster test-takers.

While last week was intense, students also had a lot of time off. They came back to bell-to-bell instruction and they did not go into the stockyard chute quietly. They roamed the room. They threw paperwads at the waste basket. They asked for “free” time. They took forever to settle into their seats and begin work. I had to start three sets of disciplinary paperwork, a rarity in my life.

Eduhonesty: I can’t count this in my tally of testing days, but I don’t want to ignore today’s rambunctious behavior either. The day was damaged, a fair amount of instructional time compromised, and I blame today’s loss of learning on the disruption to our routine created by the PARCC test. I’m sure other factors are in play. We are near spring break. It’s a short week. Some students have low grades and have just realized that it’s too late to pull out of any academic nosedive.

But I believe today would have been far calmer and more productive if not for the break in our routine created by this latest bout of standardized testing. Students often end tests like PARCC feeling lost, sad, depressed, angry or simply edgy, the last a result of sitting for hours at a desk, churning out flight-or-fight hormones in response to the threat that test represents. These students are not receptive to learning new material. Like their teachers, I’m pretty sure some of them just want to crawl under the covers and hide. One of my students signed his paper “Lil Davy” today and I looked that “Lil” that he’d stuck in front of his name and hurt for him a bit. I’ve never seen him call himself that before. I’m sure he wants to retreat into the past, a past where tests didn’t attack all the time and sometimes you got to pick up your crayons and coloring book.

I am genuinely sorry that tomorrow I am supposed to give Davy and his classmates another required bubble test for which I know they are not ready. I have to give the test. All the math teachers in my grade are supposed to give an identical test, including the special education teacher. Damn, I hate these tests.

The assignment involved creating an animal and its habitat. Here’s an exact quote: “They live in the Southern Asia of Africa in the Middle East.”

Ummm… I’ll say this much for the habitat: You could put any climatic conditions you wanted in this mythical land. The climate chosen was fine. The location made me laugh, at least.

Eduhonesty: Geography is disappearing from the curriculum, in part because it conveys no benefit on standardized tests. We still teach the state’s capitols, but that’s about it. We need to realize, though, that Americans who grow up with this little understanding of the world are going to look unbelievably foolish when and if they exit America’s borders. Our best bet will be to hope they stay home.

I spent a few, confused days in Portugal once. As I was watching my bilingual students take the PARCC test, my thoughts flitted back to that driving tour of the Iberian Peninsula. As I toured the classroom, proctoring, I thought of my experience with the Portuguese language. Written Portuguese saved me; I had studied French and Spanish. Portuguese is an amalgam of these two languages with quirky accents and a few other Latin irregularities. I can mostly figure out written Portuguese. On the other hand, when people talked at me, I immediately became lost. The idea that struck me, though, was that I was probably more competent in written Portuguese than a number of my bilingual students — maybe even most of my bilingual students — are in English. They blasted through sections of that test simply because they could not read the test. When I asked “Micky,” one of my students, about the PARCC test during a later tutoring session, he said: “I didn’t know any of the answers so I just wrote things.”

He laughed. That laugh had the sound of resilience. Some students get clobbered by these standardized tests, tests that are pitched years above their learning levels. Others detach, like Micky.

Eduhonesty: I’m glad I don’t have to grade the PARCC. I can’t even imagine what some of those graders think. I wish I did not have to give the PARCC, at least not to everyone in my classes. For some students, that test makes no sense at all — either for them or to them. We need a better testing system, one that takes into account a student’s academic mastery. We will learn much more from data from questions that our students actually attempt to answer. Micky’s data is useless; I guarantee it.

I am about to recover some earlier posts on an evaluation. Apparently, all is now well. What does that mean exactly? It means the math mistake that put my colleague in remediation with the possibility of being fired has now been corrected. She no longer needs remediation. I suggest reading the earlier posts from March 3rd and 5th on this topic.

Eduhonesty: Teachers, has your evaluation been determined by a mathematical formula using multiple inputs? Are you unhappy with your final average? Check the math. The people who screwed up my paycheck at least twice this year and my days off at least once may well be the same people who determined my final average for my evaluation. I have not checked my average. I surely would not bet my future on this number, though.

I know at least one teacher whose number was not merely wrong — it was frighteningly wrong. If my colleague had not squawked, that number would still be wrong. She would be in needless remediation.

To any undervalued teachers out there: Check the math. In Illinois, at least some evaluations from the Charlotte Danielson rubric are running over twenty pages. That’s a lot of room to slip a digit somewhere. That’s a lot of mathematics that can be undone by one or more simple typos. Santa may check his list twice, but I would not trust my school district to check anything twice. Or to check anything at all.

I have been killing time, watching my students backs as they stare at the tiny print on Chromebook screens. That print looks very small. In the economically disadvantaged area where I work, the size of the print may be a problem. I had to read my “seal code” numbers aloud as I wrote them on the board. “Seal codes” are special sets of digits that unlock a section of the new PARCC test, a coded version of those paper strips that students had to break to enter new sections on the old paper tests. Not all of my students could read my seal codes, despite the fact I wrote them in bright, red ink in something like font size 395.

Poor students can get an annual pair of glasses but girls, in particular, may choose not to wear these. Could all my students read those little letters? Not easily or not well, I am sure. I am the mom of a bat-blind girl who got contacts at an early age, as well as frequent eye exams, but these students are not so lucky. I have been fighting the need to adapt the seating chart for students who can’t see since the start of the year. Despite multiple calls home to suggest glasses, a number of my students must sit in front to see.

Will vision affect the PARCC test? That’s my question. We may know more when test results trickle back in a few months, but then again, if that test proves to be as hard it looked from my proctoring glances, I don’t think we are going to learn much about what my students actually know. I think they are going to get annihilated. Sadly, I believe a small part of the damage done may result from teensy letters on teensy screens in a techno-challenged environment.

Eduhonesty: How we could sort out losses from poor eyesight, as opposed to lack of academic understanding, I have no clue. The effort would be monumental and the benefit slight. We don’t have the resources to check, any more than some of our parents have the resources to provide those contact lenses that their daughters might be willing to wear.

We will do two full days of PARCC. That half day a couple of days ago might as well count as a full day due to the general absence of cohesive instruction throughout the school. Three divided by 180 amounts to a little less that 2% of the school year. Of course, that number does not include practice PARCC tests, PARCC discussions and specific class preparation for the test. Nor does include the second part of the PARCC test, coming at us later this spring. The actual number will be more than double that 2%, but it’s hard to breakdown that number. For example, my tutoring period has worked almost exclusively on keyboarding for the last month and half. That’s over 20 hours of possible instruction time spent getting ready for the PARCC test in one class alone: However, keyboarding is an extremely useful skill regardless, so all that typing to prepare for our first computerized test I personally count as a win-win. The testing numbers can be hard to break out, but they are nonetheless huge and of varying value. We still have multiple standardized tests to give later this year, too.

Report from yesterday: We survived again. I ditzed and handed out wrong tickets at one point, resulting in an influx of administrators that will be sending me straight to the massage parlor when this day is over, but all went essentially well. The kids managed to stay quiet. I managed to stare at them all day. Teachers are not allowed to clean, plan, use the computer or do anything else while testing is occurring for fear of missing some reportable “irregularity.” Students can at least color or read a book when they are done. I have to stare at testees and wander the room. I stare. I circle. I circle again. I reverse my circle. I sit on a table. I circle. I sit on another table. At first, boredom pushes in on me. Then I relax. I am in the now. Screens shine. Students move. A few pencils rise and fall on scratch paper. I stare. They glance at me. I give them the benign smile. I pat random shoulders. You are loved, I want to say. We are all trapped in this garbage compactor together. That’s O.K. Just do your best. We will all do our best. We will get our lives back. Some students are done. They color, skilled careful strokes that flesh out Dora the Explorer, minions and geometric patterns. I circle, waiting for the last students to finish in the profound quiet that is testing. This is not a time of hushed classrooms. Even when students are quiet, I am usually playing music. But we are silent. We are silence. We are the testing beast swooping noiselessly across Illinois and other states.

We lost the whole day even though we only tested for the last half the day. That loss had been expected. Some teachers did run the regular morning schedule, but most of them conducted a light morning. Colleagues asked me if I had any movies to share. The rationale for the light morning was simple: We wanted students to be rested and in a good mood when testing time arrived. My guys watched semi-educational YouTube videos with subtitles in English and Spanish. The stress level was high, but not stratospheric, at least until I misplaced the tickets with the student names and passwords (they had fallen behind the drawer where I had placed them) and I started to tear up my room. After a few minutes of crazy, though, I went back to basics. The tickets went into the pink drawer. Therefore the tickets must be in or near that drawer. I looked behind the drawer. Then it remained to use every relaxation technique known to humankind (or me, anyway) to climb down from my personal cliff, especially after two students found they could not log in. I plunged into the hallway in search of a roving rescuer and found two of them. More or less on time, we limped out of the gate.

I’d say my kids were not unduly stressed. They weren’t working very hard, but that lack of effort was understandable. One girl could not even begin to interpret a question on the test. I read the question to myself, but I couldn’t help. I’m not allowed to provide any help. I patted her shoulder. “Do your best,” I said, resuming my circles around the room. Her best was a couple of incoherent lines. A fair number of “essays” written as I walked around ended around the second or third sentence. Some addressed the topic. We’re not going to win this one. The whole class was done at least one half hour early. Some were done nearly an hour early on a test that only runs a little over an hour. The literary analysis in my students’ answers might best be termed “pithy.” Other adjectives that come to mind include inchoate, unfinished and avant-garde. Some essays were stronger than others. Some students efforted, correcting and rewriting as they went. Others used a stream-of-unconsciousness approach that should give the test’s graders a few desperate laughs anyway.

Eduhonesty: The truth is that I’m more fried than the kids. They seemed perfectly peaceful as they left, pieces of candy in hand. I just want to hide under the covers, which is honestly silly. Nothing went wrong. But the stress comes naturally enough. Administrators haunted the hallway during the test, making sure rule infractions were not occurring. After the test, administrators counted my scrap paper, page by page, all signed by students on top. They counted the empty sheets of unused scrap paper. Everything used in the test was inventoried before I signed off on the bin I will pick up again tomorrow morning. This procedure is normal enough for standardized testing and I am not complaining. I think the tension comes from the newness and uncertainty associated with this computerized test, as well as from my sense that student answers were often seriously lacking. I had too many students who were done too quickly.

A slow reader who finishes a literary analysis test in less than 15 minutes has not done anything even close to a mediocre job. But even when encouraged to go over answers, some students will enter their own versions of the Twilight Zone, smiling at the teacher and then staring at screens while hardly ever tapping the keyboard again.

For readers who do not understand this post: The test in question was full years beyond the English-language learning level of most of this student group. But it was obligatory nonetheless, one more wasted hour.

Last night, the news covered Chicago Public Schools’ students opting out of the PARCC test. Parents were complaining because students who opted out were not going to be receiving instruction. I want to clarify why that is the case, and it’s not because the schools are punishing those children.

When we give this test today, there won’t BE any teachers left to teach. I will be fully occupied. So will all my colleagues in my grade.

If someone opted out, we could possibly send them to another grade, but that would disrupt a class that is giving instruction. The sixth grade curriculum is not the eighth grade curriculum. That teacher in the other grade will not be teaching what my students are supposed to be learning. In the meantime, my opted-out students could prevent students in other grades from learning. A few specials teachers might conceivably be free but they are probably proctoring around the school. For that matter, the band teachers are not allowing students to use any instruments because that might make noise and disrupt testing. We are a poor district. We certainly don’t have soundproof rooms.

Eduhonesty: During a testing period, we don’t have teachers sitting around free. We never have teachers sitting around free. So those CPS students who opt out will have to spend the day reading or keeping quiet. No good alternative exists, especially in these heavily legislated times. If paraprofessionals could be in a classroom alone, we might be able to continue instruction, but the law says a fully certified teacher must be in a classroom at all times. All those teachers are busy freaking out about the test at the moment.

PARCC or “The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers” represents an attempt to create a national set of K-12 assessments in English and math. The PARCC test is aligned to the new Common Core standards. For any readers unfamiliar with the Common Core and PARCC, I recommend scouring the internet on both topics. PARCC is around the corner from me now, less than twenty-four hours away.

So what happened today?

My students spent over half their day preparing for a genuine, end-of-quarter science test. I stole some time from other subjects to make this happen. A colleague and I have been swapping kids back and forth so they can get all their subject matter tests finished. We are about there, except for make-ups. I intend to make myself available for five or six hours on Saturday so we can finish the make-ups. As the quarter draws to a close, we are shoving subject matter at the kids as fast as practicably possible.

That said, PARCC is going to suck up the next three days directly. We have already lost time and internet connectivity to this test. More time will be lost next week, even before we factor in PARCC make-ups. I am going to begin tracking test time again, focusing on standardized-testing time. I ought to include subject-matter tests, but I’ll leave that can of worms for the fishes. Let’s just note that about 1/5 of my week goes to subject-matter tests in one subject, and more like 1/10 of the week goes to the other subject, unless standardized tests hijack my week, as often happens. I don’t write these subject matter tests, but I am required to give them just as all teachers are required to give these identical tests — whether they teach regular, bilingual or special education classes. (I spend a fair amount of time buoying up one frazzled special education teacher whose students have had a pretty confusing year.)

Eduhonesty: Estimated time lost to PARCC, including time spent discussing PARCC in meetings, over the last four school days: Seven hours or slightly more than one full day’s instruction. This includes time spent reading the PARCC manual since that time was taken away from grading and planning instruction. This does not include time I had intended to spend going over PARCC with students yesterday, since internet problems forced me to deviate from my plan. Otherwise, the total would be more like ten hours.

Tomorrow we finally start the test. Stay tuned for the gory details, the ones I am allowed to disclose. I signed away any right to reveal top-secret test details. Student reactions to PARCC’s questions matter more than the nuts-and-bolts questions in any case. Let’s see how my guys manage.

I am supposed to prepare students for tests in two subjects, returning other tests and doing reviews. I am supposed to do PARCC testing for almost 3 full days this week. I am supposed to give tests that are not PARCC. I am supposed to do a fun activity to teach a new math concept. I’m afraid to even start that math activity because there’s no way to make a kid use Playdoh quickly and everything we do will have to be done at near light-speed to make this work.

Eduhonesty: This ship is not even going to try to make the Kessel run in however many parsecs. (Yes, I know a parsec is a unit of distance.) The unfortunate truth is that students don’t work well at light-speed. On the way to work, I will figure out what to jettison. Obviously, the quarter’s final instruction will be what I stuff in the airlock, since I can’t jettison PARCC. Federal tests are not optional.