Living in the Midwest United States it is not an unusual occurrence for students or teachers to "pray for snow days." The thought of getting a day or two out of school when we are supposed to be in school is exciting. Whenever local forecasts include the words freezing rain, sleet, or snow the whole school buzzes in excitement, not me. I love being at school. I am "one of those".
We had been out of school all last week because of the icy road conditions on our back roads. It had been much too dangerous for buses to travel down them, so we sat at home. Yesterday I had a conversation at church with another teacher about the chances of having school today. I explained to her that I thought we would have school because we were already behind 4 days and our state's high stakes test wouldn't be postponed because of missed school days.
Did you catch that? The more snow days we have the fewer days we have to prepare for our tests, but also the more days we have available to teach after the test is over! You know, the days reserved for doing the fun and interesting projects where teachers and students are excited to come to school again. For example, I used to do the Biome Project with my class after the testing and the students were very engaged with it up to the last week of school. This is why you will see me praying for snow days!
3 comments:
The frustrations of standardised testing are global I think! Way too much emphasis put on the results. I don't think we'll ever have the 'pleasure' of a snow day here in Adelaide.
Nor will we have the pleasure of snowy days in this part of New Zealand. Its a balmy mid to late twenties (degrees centigrade) at the moment, dropping to a chilly 10 degrees or so at Winter, so most of the students in my class have never seen snow. I have once but it was slushy.
I'll offer a prayer that goes directly to the matter: I pray that we can evaluate students on what they can do and do do and for the disappearance of all tests of burp back information that can more easily (and less messily) be found in the clouds.
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