Today is the last day of the state English test for my
students. It was supposed to end Friday,
but we had that nasty snow storm on Tuesday that threw a frozen monkey wrench
into everything. The long composition
happens today, and we are ready.
The first thing my class does is supply themselves with
pencils. I am amazed at how the kids can
chew through pencils on this test. Of
course, it doesn't help that I have a graphite-eating, old-style, hand-crank
sharpener bolted to the wall. I have one
student who writes pages and pages of a first draft and then a final draft, and
she never once sharpens her pencil. When
she turns it in to me along with her test materials, the pencil's graphite tip
is flat across, flush with the wood encasing it. Another girl turns in a pencil so small I
can't believe she could hold it in her hand to write. It's not like I didn't grab a dozen extra
pencils for her and her classmates to use.
Perhaps she wants to finish the test using the same pencil with which
she started. That's perseverance.
The composition writing prompt is reasonably
straightforward, something about character traits and picking one from the list
that relates to them. I don't know for
sure; technically I'm not supposed to read the question, so I don't. Actually, I don't really care what the
question is because the kids are ready for anything the state throws at them,
and I trust them to do what needs to be done.
I have been telling them all year to trust me; it's my turn to return
the favor. However, I cannot help but
wonder how many of them are writing about feeling proud, which is the writing
prompt we used as a common assessment just two weeks ago, the same prompt that
we stole off the 2011 test. (They really
should recycle these topics a little more thoroughly.)
The students work away and work away. Technically, the state believes this is a
ninety minute test: forty-five minutes to write a first draft, and forty-five
minutes to write a final draft. The
problem is kids this age rarely do what is expected of them, and the first
session drags on for one hundred and thirty-five minutes. By the time the kids get a break, they are
mostly toast from waiting for the stragglers to catch up. I pre-warned them that this endless waiting
would be the hardest part. I can see it
in their faces as they look at me with sad eyes. "Oh,
man, the teacher was riiiiiiiiiiight."
The only thing that sucks worse than this realization is the one when
you suddenly figure out in your twenties that your parents really were right
all along. Sucks, sucks, sucks. I understand the class's collective sense
that this, too, sucks. Big time.
After a fifteen minute break, in which we guzzle miniature
bottles of water and chow down Nutri-Grain fruit bars (which are only fruit in
the processed food kind of way and taste remarkably like sawdust and tree moss,
but we are all so damn hungry that we would eat dirt off the floor at this
point), the kids are back to work. They
are only writing for ten minutes when the construction machinery that has been
operating outside gets too close to the building. Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne are moving the
giamundo boulders outside of my room.
Email #4 of the testing cycle: Please
ask the construction workers to stop moving the boulders outside my window at
least until we've got the writing mojo back.
Once again my email bites me in the ass. I figure I'm safe from more machinery running
directly against the outer wall to my room because outside of my window is a
pile of rebar. Wrong, again. Turns out the workers really can squeeze by the mess to stand up
against my window and press against the screen and talk … and talk … and
talk.
As I begin
typing Perturbed Email #5, they move away from the building again, perhaps
being reminded by the administration not to piss me off unless they have a
basket full of chocolate to offer me in exchange. For the next hour, the workers are simply
running a truck out at the other end of the acres-large dig site. I abandon my email and sit back at my desk to
relax, do some more filing, and think mostly happy, nonjudgmental, bipartisan
thoughts.
But then it happens. With thirty minutes left until we have to go
to lunch (we put lunch off until the last possible slot plus an extra ten
minutes, so if we don't go to the café by 12:20, there will be no lunch), the
workers assume we certainly must be done.
The problem is, we're not. Not
completely, anyway. I still have four
kids writing when it starts up. It is
right outside my window. It is no longer near the boulder; it is the boulder. At 11:50 a.m., the earsplitting sound emits
from Mike Mulligan's modernized version of his steam shovel with a loud
clanging.
CHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKA…
The crew is
breaking up the giant boulder that separates me from the port-a-potty. Unable to contain themselves for one more
second, the nineteen students who have finished the test and handed in their
materials all rush to the windows in unison.
They don't speak because they know they cannot make a sound, and they
silently find perches from where they can watch this fascinating rock breaking
occur.
CHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKACHUNKA…
I can tell
when the worst of it is over. First of
all, the deafening noise recedes momentarily while Mary Anne shifts her giant
tracks to the next enormous rock.
Secondly, the students start shuffling back to their desks. Lastly, I look out for myself and see a huge
pile of rock chunks.
And the
port-a-potty.
The day
we've been waiting for has finally arrived.
We now can easily and straight-on see the workers going into and coming
out of the rectangular waterless toilet facility. We can smell it, too. Yahoo.
My
stragglers finish their tests, turn them in, and I email the office again, this
time to let them know my room is all done.
Good thing, too, with seven minutes to spare until lunch. The vice principal comes along to collect the
box of secured testing materials, and he is barely audible over the noise Mike
Mulligan and His Steam Shovel are making.
I tell him he should've heard it while they were actually busting rocks
just a few minutes prior. Yes, sir,
these are the conditions under which my students test and quiz and talk and
work and listen.
"But
that's not the worst of it," I say.
Together the VP and I walk over to the windows and I point to the port-a-potty,
now a mere twenty feet from where we are standing, separated only by concrete
and a cheap piece of clouded plexiglass.
"That," I implore,
"must find a new home."
Boulders
and outhouses and teeny water bottles and pencils and snow and late lunch and
Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne the "steam" shovel will not deter us
today, though. Our state testing for
English is done, and I don't know or care what the kids' scores are, they
kicked it and they did it for themselves; not for me, not for the team, not for
the school, not for the district, not for their parents. Totally and completely, they kicked that test's ass.
