my school at the moment, as described by an eighth grade teacher...
This week is PSSA testing... my favorite! I've been pulling my four part-time kids from my class, plus Cyrus who I actually had moved out of part time and into resource and is technically not on my caseload (although I'm not sure he's on anyone else's either) mostly because he's not perfect for me but is at least way better than he is for everyone else, plus five of my six resource kids (two seventh, three eighth). Let me tell you, reading three sets of standardized test instructions at the same time is about as much fun as a root canal. I mean, I'm bored and I'm not even doing anything. Especially when someone's been absent and they're all on different sections.
I'm only even just now meeting one of my resource kids... he's chronically truant, and I had probably checked six times to see if he had come to school to pull him prior to the PSSAs (unsuccessfully). His teacher swore he wasn't going to come. So of course, the first two days he decides to show (in a row!) are the first two days of the PSSA. First he swore he wasn't going to come down to my classroom. Then he swore he wasn't going to take the test there. Then that he wasn't going to stay in that room, or take the test. Finally he started one section of it and then pulled out his cell phone and put it on walkie-talkie mode and started chatting it up. I walked over to him.
"Naw miss, naw. You ain't taking my phone. Y'all must be trippin. I'm not givin my phone to y'all. Naw." And he got up and walked out, directly into the principal who happened to be outside patrolling the halls. Not that he would have been hard to miss anyway; his "uniform" is jeans, a non-uniform hoodie (today it was baby-blue) and a huge black puffy jacket. He also is about twice my size and looks my age, walking around the sixth grade floor. Today he actually came, sat down, and finished the whole thing... He evidently told Ms. Sel that he came today because "that lady" was coming for him now. I'm kind of at a loss for how to handle him... One of my other resource kids who has so far been an angel for me turns into a wannabe gansta thug whenever the first kid is around. So I decide to pull him (my eighth grader) after testing as his IEP is coming due pretty soon and I have virtually no information on him from this year at all since he just hasn't been coming to school. (He claims he comes, but then he just wanders the halls. "And my teachers just say I'm cutting!" "Well, the definition of cutting is coming to school and then not going to class, right?" "Yeah." "So what they're saying is actually correct?" "Well, yeah. But I'm in school!") And who walks in, but my other boy, who walked out of class to avoid a fight and came to me.
Now, a bit of background on these kids... My eighth grader, Jay, came to my school to avoid a 21 at his last school (I'm not clear what on... one of the other 6th grade teachers thought it had to do with him throwing a fire extinguisher through a teacher's window). His mom claimed he was developing behavior problems due to academic frustration, and he was placed in special ed. He did behaviorally well when he was transferred to my school ("I was like a nerd in Ms. Champion's class... I got like, Ds and Cs. I didn't even fail!") so they dropped the 21. He then became a chronic truancy problem, started cutting and wandering the halls, and according to rampant teacher speculation (and occasional actual observation) is likely one of the biggest drug-dealers in the school, drives a car-- he showed me the car keys on his keychain today--, and has been caught by a teacher smoking outside the school (as a joke one of them asked him if he had an extra cigarette one day, to see if it was true. "Yeah, sure, you want one, Miss?"). One of the teachers who actually had him in sixth grade thinks his truancy may have actually been do to an arrest, and the consensus seems to be that the administration doesn't do anything to him mostly because everyone's a bit afraid of him.
I haven't gotten the file on my seventh grader yet, but I do know he also came to my school to escape a 21, and that it had something to do with him sexually assaulting a girl in the bathroom of his old school (he told me today she wanted it, although he was more trying to prove consent to me than justify it... I didn't want to go more in depth than that just yet.).
Needless to say, these two boys in a room together... especially when my seventh grader looks up to the eighth grader cause he looks (and actually, in this case, probably is) more gangsta, is a bit of a situation. S. recommended I either work with them in her office or take one of my kids into the room whenever I'm working with them as a preventative measure for any kind of weird situation that could come up, to back up my word on anything that could happen (for all his behavior problems, I know Cyrus would try to defend me with his life against pretty much anyone that even pointed a bad thought in my direction). But Jay actually came with me to do resource today, although protesting now that he wanted to be in class, probably the first time those words have ever left his mouth- there's a "shorty" that he wants to get with in there now- and even made it two thirds of the way through the reading diagnostic I have to give him for his IEP. I had actually redesigned my schedule to account for him not coming to resource, since he hasn't been here in weeks. Guess I'm going to be re-doing that. Again.
And I got a memo today for not turning in a reading level tracking form based on a (standardized) multiple choice test that they could score fourth grade levels just based on probability. Whoops. Guess I should re-prioritize... I mean, those tracking forms that have nothing to do with the curriculum or specific skills and don't actually diagnose any problems (and are a pain in the butt as we have to mark them by hand) or provide a means to guide, inform, or improve teaching... just vital to the success of the kids.
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