You can...

read my post...

I really wanted to title this TVAAS-topic post after a timely and oft-repeated phrase of mine...but I refrained. (alliteration)  It took a lot of effort, and, now, I’m tired. Exhausted. Wiped out. My feet are barking like dogs at me. (simile) 

Maybe it was the inhuman amount of energy it took to make my fingers type what I wanted them to type and not what they wanted to type. (hyperbole, personification)

Can you tell I have EOC stuff on the brain? We’ve been reviewing like little lost monkeys all week long. We have another week to go. I hate EOC. I hate the stress it puts on me and the students. I hate how mindnumbingly awful it is. I hate that it puts me in a foul mood. I hate that I can’t fake happiness about this damn test. I hate that individuals I don’t know grade me on one test given on one day of one year instead of what I do every single day. It’s insane, but it’s the system. And I’m just a little cog lost in the belly of the whale. There may be a Matrix allusion in here somewhere...idk, I’m tired. And repetitive apparently.

But there’s no use whining about the system. Because you can ask any of the chickies in my pen/They'll tell you I'm the biggest Mutha. . . .Hen/ I love them all and all of them love me - because the system works; the system called GRIND YOU INTO THE GROUND AND THEN TEST TEST TEST!

Doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? Oh well...

Anyways, last year’s TVAAS said that I’m a three. Out of five. Average. My students gained exactly one year’s progress with me last year. No more, no less. That’s not a bad thing, really. Now, TVAAS measures annual growth. So if a student comes to your class with a low score they have lots of room to improve. If a student comes to your class with a high score they have less room to improve. That makes sense. I taught only honors students last year. There are lots of perks to teaching honors students, and, trust me, I would not want to go back to the mess that was my first year of teaching, but it’s so hard to bring students up from a 99. They have so little room to improve. And if they miss one more question this year than they did last year, I must not have done my job very well. It’s frustrating. Very. Very. Frustrating.

But enough whining. Next year, we’re going to kick this thing in the ass. We being me and my students. They just don’t know yet how INVESTED they are in doing well. I want a four or a five. Less than that simply isn’t good enough for me. I’m mean enough that I don’t want to be average (did you see what I did there?). Anyways, I have a plan- a plan that involves lots of extra summer work for me. But that’s what it takes to get better.

And about this time next year- I’ll be chanting FIVE, FIVE, FIVE! Scratch that, I’ll be giving out high fives! What up!