At least they did not split PARCC into two separate testing sessions this year. But my current school has been shutting down the library for testing regularly since… let me look. Hmmm. I’m not sure. There’s a closure notice for April 11th but there may have been earlier notices. My email trash starts on the 11th. I’ll just say the library has been shutting regularly for weeks. The hallways have been on super-secret silent running at odd times during these weeks, as adults shush twelve to fourteen year-old kids who are moving between classes. Sometimes doors are sealed to keep in the silence and kids rove around in odd, multi-floor circuits to get to classes that can no longer be reached by the usual routes.

The whole silence thing got old by the third or fourth day and after that I was shush, shush, shushing kids who were no longer taking the whole testing extravaganza terribly seriously. Sigh. But I got a laugh this morning.

One of my students had been on the make-up list twice. Both times he had been supposed to go for testing at 8:30 but had apparently skipped. He turned up in my second period class a little after 9:00 A.M. on those days. Today, I got the notice that he was to report for make-up testing at 9:30, during the middle of my class. I sent him off, and he finally gave up and went and actually took the test. He was back about ten minutes later. A friend asked him about the test and he answered that the test had been easy. In his own words:

“I finished in three minutes. Every response was an “I don’t know” question.”

They should have let him skip. Hunting the kid down definitely did not help school scores. I have to admit I laughed when he described the test, and then I wrote down his exact words immediately. But a very fine school with a dedicated administration is about to be judged on my student’s test scores.

Eduhonesty:  Gallows humor fed my laughter this morning, but PARCC’s honestly about as funny as the average cholera epidemic.