mayhap | I did promise ...

My suitemates seem to be incapable of socializing without screaming at some point. Frequently at many points over the course of the evening. I do not understand. I am not sure I want to understand. I want to go to sleep, but it's a bit raucous ...

So, last year when I tutored in a third grade classroom at the Beekman Hill International School in midtown Manhattan, we spent a great deal of time in late January, February, March and early April teaching the students how to take multiple choice reading and math assessments. Put away the chapter books and the show-your-work story problems and brought out the short, bland reading passages with their trick questions and the multiple choice math. Replaced most periods intended to be occupied with handwriting, and many other periods, with this test prep material.

Well, the powers that be decided that those students were insufficiently assessed and so, in addition to those same tests which will still be given although, deo volente, I will not be there, we had this ECLAS thing dumped on us. Pretty literally, the box of test booklets just appeared in our classroom, except they didn't have enough of the boxes and explanatory materials, so we just got our booklets and some photocopies we nicked from other teachers.

There's a booklet for each student. It contains some twenty areas in which to assess each student's mastery of language, with a grid in the front to fill in the date the student demonstrated mastery. For instance, in the area of spelling, three spelling tests with twenty words each were administered to the whole class, whereupon we had to record in each student's booklet what words they spelt correctly, how they misspelt the words they misspelt ("nigth", "swiming" and "garbeg" were quite popular), and whether or not they had mastered the spelling convention that one word from each of the three lists was intended to demonstrate: so, if they at least managed the "ture" in two of "mixture", "capture" and "picture", you could conclude that they were familiar with this word ending.

However, they had to spell 45 of the 60 words entirely correct to meet the benchmark they're allegedly supposed to be at. We cannot but feel they are being set up for failure here. Either that, or we are being set up to administer these things over and over again until we can put the damn date in the front of the damn book, in which case I have no idea when we're actually going to be teaching anyone anything.

The spelling and vocabulary areas, by the bye, are the only ones that Wendy can just set the whole class and then have me grade it. All the other areas, with lovely bullshit names like 'Reading fluency', require Wendy to sit individually with each student for 15-20 minutes doing things like having them read passages while she marks what kind of reading errors they make and getting them to retell stories and make predictions. Brilliant in terms of gathering useful information instead of endlessly prepping the students on how to outwit the multiple choice, I admit. But of course, it's not just about obtaining this useful information, it's getting all the benchmark squares on these two tables that each fill an entire 11 X 17 piece of paper filled in for the Powers That Be. On top of the other tests in April. And another round of ECLAS with new benchmarks in the spring.

Uh, what are we going to leave out to make time for all this assessing? Hell if I know.

This concludes your bitching on the subject of the ECLAS assessment. To be continued if it gets worse or I discover coherency at some point.

Sadly, the years that have intervened since I knew everything there was to know about Sherlock Holmes canon¹ have robbed me of my former infallibility. Now, I just think I remember everything. I need to factcheck as I write.

¹I do believe Sherlockians were the first fans to refer to their source material as the Sacred Canon, and it amused me no end to discover people talking about Harry Potter canon online. For that matter, Sherlockians had fanfic (published fanfic, no less), BNFs, cliques, fanzines, flamewars, and all the apparati of fandom decades before Star Trek. True pioneers of fandom, yo! Even if I did read all about it years after the fact.