We began FCAT testing on Monday and I thought that day was bad. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and frustrated by how ridiculous my homeroom students (the students I am responsible for testing) really are. During the actual testing time, my students are fine. However, when our testing session is over and we are having to wait for the other classes on our hall to finish testing before we can all go to lunch, all hell breaks loose. My students seem to think that because they were just calm and quiet for 70 minutes that they need to make up for lost time in their ridiculous antics. Here's a good visual for how my students act immediately after testing time is called...imagine that you go to the zoo and there is a small cage with 27 irritable lions in it. Next, someone sets off a series of fireworks inside the lions' cage and then throws a helpless human being (me) into the cage to try and calm the lions down.
Yesterday was even more frustrating and exhausting than Monday. However, nothing takes the cake like today. The only word I can think of to describe today is hellacious. First of all, we had to do two 70 minute sessions of testing today. The past two days we have been doing one session per day, so it has been manageable. Today, we did one session of testing, went to lunch, and then came back to do another session of testing, and everything was way behind schedule. By the time I got rid of my homeroom students it was after 2:30. Needless to say, I was sooooo ready to be rid of them. I'm sure that they were ready to be rid of me as well. At this point, I had morphed into something even more ferocious than the actual FCAT...see picture below...you might as well erase "FCAT" and put my name on that beast.
Being the young-in that I am, I do distinctly remember taking the FCAT in school. Additionally, I also remember that once the test was over we still managed to go about the rest of our day functioning as human beings. For some reason, my students think that taking the FCAT gives them an excuse to not do work and act like circus monkeys for the rest of the day.
Thankfully, I managed to survive this week of FCAT testing without doing anything irrational...minus drinking large glasses of wine every day when I got home.
I can't wait till tomorrow when I get to hear my next favorite comment of pure stupidity that is fostered by the FCAT..."are we going to do anything important for the rest of the year, since FCAT is over?" If one of my students dares to ask me this question, I think I might actually say, "nope, so you can just stay home for the rest of the year, see you in August." According to my students, it is so unfair that we make them go to school once FCAT is over because there is no point...awesome, love the positive attitude.
Ultimately, I am very happy that FCAT is over. I don't have to hear about it or talk about it or deal with people being in a pissy mood (myself included) because of it. So I will forget about it for now, until our scores come out over the summer and I can start worrying about job security, yay!
So until next April, goodbye FCAT and good riddance. Best of luck to all those teachers and parents who are still in the midst of testing! Hang in there and treat yourself to a magnum bottle of wine :)
Due to your last sentence I am opening a bottle as we speak. You are so right. Besides, I have a two and a half hours with one class tomorrow.. God help me.
ReplyDelete-Emily