Cheri's ISAT Nightmare

This is the time of year when all schools and their students are subjected to the infamous state tests knows as the ISATs. This is always a tense time for students and their teachers. For my fifth graders, these tests will determine whether or not they will be granted their electives in the sixth grade OR whether they will be taking remedial core classes instead. As a teacher, my entire worth rides on the results of how well my students perform.

Small wonder that we all face these tests with some trepidation! My worth and my students' future will all be decided by about 60 random questions (drawn from a bank of thousands of questions) administered over a 90 to 120 minute period. As teachers, we are not allowed to know the questions which will be asked on the test. We are just told to teach the state standards ... and hope that we have covered everything that might crop up on the test.

Last week my students took their first test in Reading. As a class, 96% of my students were proficient or advanced. Only one child did not pass the test. Today we took the Language Arts test. I was nervous, as this is usually the most difficult test, and I was not terribly thrilled with taking it on a Monday morning. The urchins came in either rowdy or dragging. Oh well, you hope for the best.

We had three students absent today, so I won't have my final results until they return to school, but the preliminary results were not good. Right now only 76% of my students scored at the proficient or advanced level. Pretty disappointing. I feel quite discouraged, but will pick myself up and go over the District's Language Arts curriculum (again) and see if I can't fine tune it in some way. Most of the children said that the majority of their questions were about proofreading. (Find the sentence written correctly. Find the sentence NOT written correctly.) I feel bad, but I really ache for those five students who will probably lose an elective. I'm hoping that those who only missed the target by one or two points won't be penalized ... but in this BRAVE NEW WORLD, that isn't likely to happen.

I guess, according to many legislators and the owner of Melaleuca this makes me a failure as a teacher. Funny. You shouldn't have to work so hard or care so much to be a failure.

Regardless of our struggle today, we'll all lick our wounds and return to the testing lab on Wednesday for our Math Test. On Friday we will take a swing at Science. God help us all.