Dreaded Test Day

My class has been counting down to the ISTEP test since I started working with them in December. As with anything, it seemed so far off then. So many other important things to take care of and consider before the test arrived. Now, the day is here. Yikes!

This class has come so far. Yet I'm concerned. Is it far enough? Have we accomplished enough in this time span?

They've been through a lot this year. The entire school has. We started the year with a new to the school principal and assistant principal. Because we knew who was coming last year, much of the staff bailed to other schools in the district. We lost a lot of good teachers. The principal decided to hire a bunch of new teachers, many of whom were Teach For America teachers. Good thought, I guess. But the reality of teaching in an urban school is not the stuff of TV movies and fairy tails. Most of those teachers simply couldn't hack it and left. The only TFA teachers that now remain are teachers that were trained in the education discipline in college and decided to go with TFA for the perks, etc. The ones that left did damage of trust and lost instructional time to the classes they influenced while here.

Count my class as one of those. The woman who originally had my class just couldn't take it. The students sensed her fear of controlling a classroom. She thought she could reach them by being a friend. Or something. She simply walked out - middle of the day - with certain expletives, just not able to stand another minute. Another teacher took the class sometime in October. From the get-go she was wishy washy about classroom management. I remember going into her class one day, simply because the noise was so loud as I was passing by that I couldn't believe it. I just walked in, said, "Give me five," and the class immediately quieted, shamed to have been caught by me. Many of the students have known me from going into their classes in first & second grade or at least seeing me in the halls and such. Anyway, that woman would call in sick more than she would be present. She walked out sometime in November, again middle of the day with expletives.

Thankfully, the bad first principal of the year left sometime in September. Speculation is all we have, but one Monday afternoon at dismissal time we got an email from him wishing us well, but that he wouldn't be back. No love lost on anyone's part, in my opinion. Thankfully the first thing the next morning our new principal was introduced. Her first assignment as a principal after being an assistant for several years in the district.

Toward the end of November, following a morning staff meeting, the principal said she couldn't keep a sub in the room, no one was picking up the job, and there wasn't a viable candidate for the position in the HR pool. By this point the kiddos had been split into other classes throughout the building for at least a week. She wasn't sure what the result for the class would be. I'd been thinking about them. Remembering, the way they immediately turned off their nonsence when I went into their classroom. So I went to the principal and told her she'd have to find a sped teacher to replace me, but that I would take the class for her. She grabbed me in a hug, said, "Are you sure? You're an answer to a prayer!" So I switched from sped with first & second to being a gen ed teacher in third. Haven't regretted that move for a minute of the year. Even though it has been tremendous work to prepare for them each day.

Pre-data results show an increase in their work from the time I started working with them. Still, this is the real deal today. Hope they got me sleep than me last night!