Reflections on Teaching

Photo Credit: Monopoly Justice on flickr photosharing
In my first part, I discussed how students could under-perform on a high stakes test, like the California High School Exit Exam, in a way that has nothing to do with their true ability or knowledge.
That’s students, it was an article on excessive bonuses that caught my eye with [...]

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Photo Credit: Rorschach Test 1 on flickr photosharing
As I’ve shared already, it’s testing season. This is the second year I’ve been a prep teacher, and therefore not had a specific group of students whose scores I was “tied” to. I’ve also noted that I’m not feeling as angry, stressed, annoyed this testing season, and I [...]

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Testing
And so testing week has started. I’m not too wound up about the whole thing. I think I’m loosing my edge due to the fact that I don’t have a set of student scores to worry about. I remember being more agitated and angry during past testing years. Lesson: You really can’t appreciate how humiliating [...]

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Read this sentence about paragraph 4 of the story.
As Yoshiko gazed up at the stars, she was filled with hope and excitement about her life.
As expressed in this sentence and in many other stories, stars are a symbol of
A) family closeness.
B) terror in the night.
C) limitless possibilities.
D) sacrifice to benefit others.
Leave a comment with your [...]

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DONE FOREVER from mr. nightshades photostream
Testing, it is the only objective criteria for assessment isn’t it? How can you be sure that students have “gotten” it if they can spit it back up on a test three months later? How can a test be fair if kids use aids like a calculator, how do we [...]

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Blog has been pretty slow recently so I didn’t get a chance to share the bad news from my staff retreat/in-service. The figures on state testing showed that my school site had missed AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) under NCLB (No Child Left Behind) , and we were going into Year 3 of PI (Program Improvement). [...]

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From my friend Carrie, a Web site designer at UC Berekley:
A Brief Message: No Child Left Behind Is Leaving Designers Behind

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmizmercer.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F02%2F19%2Fhey-maybe-employers-dont-want-test-monkeys%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Hey%2C+maybe+employers+don%26%238217%3Bt+want+test+monkeys%3F’;
addthis_pub = ”;

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2¢ Worth » Comments Ketchup… David Warlick shares some comments he’s heard recently…
Then I run across a comment that I was mostly impressed with. But the author, a network filter administrator, said,
When I go through the process of adding a new Universal Resource Locator (URL) to the filter database I actually personally evaluate [...]

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