Did we do anything for Martin Luther King Day?

(If you are starting here, I suggest you backtrack to January 14th and read forward in time.)

I hope we did something for Martin Luther King Day. At this point, the PA system is never used for anything not directly related to instruction. It’s hardly ever used after the morning pledge. We’re not even allowed to use announcements to tell students about picture day. So official silence was deafening but not unusual. I’m not sure what language arts may have done. I didn’t see any King handouts on the hallway floor, but we may still have done something. Somewhere. I hope.

In the meantime, MAP and ACCESS testing continue, sometimes running into each other, predictably adding to an already wild make-up schedule. Time spent directly on ACCESS testing today ran 219 minutes, or 3.65 hours, not including another 20 minutes or so spent discussing MAP results. I’ll add on the MAP discussion for testing time total of 3.98 hours. I have no sub during the testing process and not all students are testing at the same time. Some students did make-up work while others tested, but I can’t test and monitor make-up work, so academic efforts on the part of non-testers were hardly heroic. Forget heroic; I’ll settle for coherent.

Tomorrow a No. 2 pencil crisis is anticipated. Not enough borrowed pencils came back. I need to quit blogging shortly and begin to scavenge more pencils.

Eduhonesty: The pencil sharpener sometimes overheats and quits for awhile, but once its motor has cooled, the sharpener again starts chewing merrily away. The day may come when the sharpener fails, but today was not that day. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.

It occurs to me that the sharpener and I have a lot in common.