We are just wrapping up state exams. As our tests were online we are able to see the results. All of us have been poring over the results and are heaping praise for those who did well and Monday-morning-quarterbacking for those who didn’t (“If only she would’ve focused more”; “He raced through the test”). Having been through the morass of state testing over the years, I tend to stay a little bit detached as there are so many reasons not to make life-impacting judgements of teachers and kids based on these results.
As a special education teacher it can be easy to write off the whole shebang and assume that my kids are so far away from mastery of their grade-level standards that it won’t matter. This year, I was reminded of some things that I hope to carry with me.
First, try to be open to the fact that some kids can make tremendous strides. The important qualifier is “…if they’ve been working hard all year.” While it can happen, the odds that a kid who did little work all year can be Hail Mary-ed into scoring Proficient are high. In my case, I had a kid who has been receiving special ed services in Math all year attain a 5 (on a 5-point scale where 3 is considered Proficient). All of us who have been working with him over the last few years are super-proud of him and are wondering if he needs to continue to receive services for math. He’s grown a lot from the days of throwing chairs in his first grade classroom.
While it would be fantastic for all kids to show that growth, that’s not how it works. One can look at this and declare that the year has been a failure because only one kid had stellar results. Alternatively, one can look at the bigger picture. In my case, I had a kid who entered 5th grade at a kindergarten level move up a few grade levels in reading over the course of the year. A few other kids who didn’t get that 3 score still showed steady growth over the course of the year. Other kids started the year doing addition and subtraction using tick marks and are now able to do math with far greater automaticity. My hope is that these results inspire these kids to keep working hard.
I’d love to tell you that working with these kids was a cakewalk all year. A peek at the day-to-day would include: heads on desks when frustration levels were reached; giving breaks to kids during work time for their sake and mine; gentle coaxing to get kids to pick up pencils; asking kids who are too old to lie on the floor to get up. There have been days where I thought I should join the exodus of teachers who are becoming instructional designers and beaming proudly on social media about their massive pay raises and the ability to pee whenever they want. (One of these days I’ll go into this). For now, I feel like my mission in being an educator is still worthwhile.