This week, I am drowning in Testing Hell.

[nenena]

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of administering a high-stakes nationally-mandated standardized test to a classroom full of rebellious-because-they're-smart-enough-to-know-that-this-is-bullshit eighth-graders over a hellish two-week period, I envy you.

For the rest of you, here, have some testing humor, courtesy of my school's mailing list:

Protocol for Testing during Severe Weather

1. Should a severe weather situation occur during testing, please remain calm. To display any kind of anxiety would be a testing irregularity and must be reported.

2. Please do not look out the window to watch for approaching tornadoes. You must monitor the students at all times. To do otherwise would be a testing irregularity and must be reported.

3. Should students notice an approaching tornado and begin to cry, please make every effort to protect their testing materials from the flow of tears and sinus drainage.

4. Should a flying object come through your window during testing, please make every effort to ensure that it does not land on a testing booklet or an answer sheet. Please make sure to soften the landing of the flying object so that it will not disturb the students while testing.

5. Should shards of glass from a broken window come flying into the room, have the students use their bodies to shield their testing materials so that they will not be damaged. Have plenty of gauze on hand to ensure that no one accidentally bleeds on the answer documents. Damaged answer sheets will not scan properly.

6. Should gale force winds ensue, please have everyone stuff their test booklets and answer sheets into their shirts, being very careful not to bend them. Bent answer documents will not scan properly.

7. If any student gets sucked into the vortex of the funnel cloud, please make sure they mark at least one answer before departing. Make sure they leave their answer sheets and test booklets behind. You will have to account for those.

8. Should a funnel cloud pick up you, the test administrator, and take you flying over the rainbow, you will still be required to account for all of your testing materials when you land. Please take extra precautions. Remember, once you have checked them out, test materials should never leave your supervision.

9. When rescue workers arrive to dig you out of the rubble, please make sure that they do not, at any time, look at or handle the testing materials. Once you have been treated for your injuries, you will still be responsible for checking your materials back in. Search dogs will not be allowed to sift through the rubble for lost tests unless they have been through standardized test training.

Comments

[chiikaboom.livejournal.com]

LOL when i read the list I totally didnt read above about it being a joke. When I got to #7 I was like UM.

[aiwatan.livejournal.com]

We don't even have nationally-mandated standardized test on here, but even so this made me laugh a couple of times.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

To be honest, when I first read it I didn't realize that it was a joke either. I absolutely would not be surprised if any of this were intended to be real.

To put that in context: About two weeks ago my school administration audited my gradebooks and I ended up having to explain to the school principal why I allowed a student make up the final exam that he missed last January because his grandmother died suddenly and he had to go to Korea for her funeral.

You see, "family outings" (including weddings AND FUNERALS) are not accepted as valid excuses for absences in my school district. So the days that this student missed for his grandmother's funeral are officially recorded in our computer system as Unexcused Absences. I am forbidden from allowing any students to submit make-up work on days when they have unexcused absences, whether it's a tiny daily assignment that only counts for 5 points or a gigantic final exam that accounts for nearly 15% of the students' final grade in the course.

I ended up having to give this student a zero for his final exam, which retroactively dropped his grade for his first semester of Japanese an entire letter grade. And then *I* had to be the one to call the student's parents and explain what had happened to his grade and why.

Meanwhile, other students who skipped out on this final days of the semester got away with it because their parents were savvy enough to submit forged doctor's notes to the school in order to officially excuse their kids and allow for them to make up their final exams up to a week later.

FML.

[chiikaboom.livejournal.com]

Wow, thats messed up :\ and not letting them make up work either? Its like, hey, a family member died and its a really horrible time for everyone and everything, but we're gonna make this more difficult for you and constantly lower your grade until you get your ass back to class, cause school is obviously more important than family.

FML indeed.

[dragonmage87.livejournal.com]

Heh, wow, you know, I wouldn't have been too surprised if this HADN'T been intended for a joke. Granted I would be outraged and disgusted, but I wouldn't be surprised. I was so happy in my senior year of high school when we didn't have to take those stupid tests anymore. I wanted to beat someone forcefully upside the head in my seventh grade year, we had so many different standardized tests to take that year....and all mine proved was that my reading level was 12th grade, quite a bit higher than the rest of my class. Otherwise I found them to be an enormous waste of time...

Testing starts in a few weeks for my school too. (Technically it's not 'my' school. I'm not a teacher, I'm an aid that runs their copy machines so the rest of the staff doesn't risk breaking them) I've been printing practice tests and reviews for the past two weeks or so. That doesn't bother me, what bothers me is the stuff the teachers drop in my tray that is supposed to 'kill time' when the students are done with their current section of testing. Sorry, but I don't count Spongebob coloring sheets as acceptable busy work. Make your students read a friggin' book.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

Er, I let my students color or do origami when they're done with real and/or practice tests.

The reason is that taking tests - especially several weeks' worth of utterly grueling standardized tests nonstop - is MENTALLY EXHAUSTING for students. They can't have their brains "on" for seven hours nonstop. They need a break! Some students can relax just fine by reading a book, and those are the students who have likely already brought their own books to class and will happily crack them open and start reading as soon as they're done with their test, without you having to tell them to do so. (That, or they'll ask you for a pass to the library or to their locker to get a book, which is also fine.) But for many students, especially in seventh grade, reading isn't relaxing - it's not something they can do with their brain turned "off" to the degree that fluent readers can. Those are the students that need to either color, draw, or do something constructive with their hands if they finish their tests early. Or else they will go completely insane from brain overload.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

(*envies your country*)

[primi-chan.livejournal.com]

XDDD These were great.

Fortunately, out here, we don't have to worry about tornados. Nope, we get 5-6 feet of snow that could possibly cave in houses, send cars spiraling off the road from the ice sheets left behind by snow plows and losing power for a week at most.

Final exams are coming up fast, and as a graduating senior, I'm terrified.

[kyrafawxe.livejournal.com]

This is really funny. I should send them to my father, who's a Spanish teacher. It's a shame he doesn't supervise the SATs at school though.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

I envy your father. ^^;; I'm a Japanese teacher, which means that I technically shouldn't be administering any core content standardized tests. And yet I am. Hooray for staff shortages?

[kyrafawxe.livejournal.com]

Not at all. Staff shortages suck. ;(

[sostrangechild.livejournal.com]

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the actual handbooks instructions for my high school. Granted I've now graduated, but - I'm not kidding - in the final exams, if the school went under a terrorist threat, we'd have to remain completely silent, get under our desks, not look at one another, and continue to do our exams until the threat was cleared. Then we'd be put back at our desks and finish the exam. Not go into a safety formation. YOUR EDUCATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR LIFE.

I also find it highly amusing that one of the other reasons the school would go into lockdown is loose cattle threat. We're in the middle of a city, surrounded by urban development and hills (completely impractical for transporting cattle through), and to top it all off, the school is a sealed off, seven-storey, office-style building. They're either crazy overprepared, paranoid, or both.

[nenena.livejournal.com]

loose cattle threat

That's... kind of awesome.

[popcorn42.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry I can't come up with anything to say to this, it's just so ridiculonk that my witty meter's broke.

So, I'm just gonna put this:
(　´Д｀)ﾉ(´･ω･`)　ﾅﾃﾞﾅﾃﾞ

[dragonmage87.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suppose that's true. I've never had a problem separating my mind from testing work to pleasure reading after a test, even in seventh grade when we were being tested every few months. Those were the CAT 5 and CAT 7 tests (I think), plus the yearly standardized testing. I was lucky and was taught to read at a very early age, so I've never found it difficult.

I think I also see it as a bit more annoying, not for an age appropriate thing or for after testing purposes, but it's just more of my printing work going into the trash at the end of the day. My school does try to recycle a lot of my scrap paper (we have two duplicators that go through 4-6 sheets of paper to get the ink proper spread on the plate). They'll reuse the blank sides in their printers or hand it out to their students as scratch paper, but I know that at the end of the day, probably around 50%-75% my work winds up i the trash. Personal pet peeve, sorry XD

[wanderingdreamr.livejournal.com]

I actually can't see that happening at my old middle/high schools thankfully, although I do remember one day at the end of school a tornado had been sighted in the area so they weren't letting anyone leave unless their parents came to the office to pick them up and then had to call out everyone's names (this was in high school so some kids couldn't even drive themselves home, thankfully they let people leave before the buses were supposed to go). Heck, they didn't even let us out of the classrooms, well, technically, when they made that announcement everyone in my class just looked at our teacher and she told us to be quick and not tell anyone that she was the one who let us out. XD

BRB, laughing my ass off at sostrangechild's "loose cattle threat," I desperately want to work that into a story now.

[torapandorapgs.livejournal.com]

At first I didn't know this was a joke O.O. It honestly sounds like something my high school that I go to would do. We just got done doing our FCAT Reading, Math, and Science and they were like on everyone's asses saying stuff like basically if someone's cellphone that was in their bag in the front of the class away from their reach went off, that everyone in the entire room would have their tests invalidated. But of course my school also accused my friend and her sister of skipping school to go behind Walmart (which is right next to my school) to smoke pot just because her grandpa who's a different race than her dropped them off to school late because they missed the bus. -_-

[(Anonymous)]

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