Feels strange, and I don’t even know this guy.

Between the couch cushions, beneath the credenza, buried in a comment page at Joanne Jacob’s.

An excerpt of TMAO’s patient evisceration of a commenter who suggests education would improve if only we’d remove entry barriers to a creature described as “the non-certified hotshot”:

For the last three years, I’ve worked for an organization that recruits, trains, and employs those non-certified hot-shots, streamlining the process to get them into classrooms. I worked with hundreds of them, and to think that these folks, who possess tremendous knowledge in their field, would do anything other than crash and burn at a fantastic rate, absent basic training in classroom management and instructional design and delivery, is, in my experience, absurd.

Good stuff in there, and particularly heartening is his assessment of the generation gap between teachers.

Monday is our last instructional day and kind of a problem child.  For reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, more final review seems out of the question.  I know we’ll discuss the weighting of their final grade and why, at 10%, they shouldn’t stress about this dumb show-to-us-all-over-ag’in test.  So what do I do with the hour?  If I hadn’t already blown the activity Rich pitched me it’d be perfect here: tactile, fun, self-contained, age inclusive.

Got anything like that to share?

Just sitting around, planning, readying myself for the largest anticlimax of my life.

Many of you right now are in the middle of the annual string of testing that takes nearly six weeks out of the last two months of the traditional school year. There’s test prep, test drills, bubbling exercises for younger students and finally the testing itself. This testing mania, driven by federal mandates, is the biggest challenge to finding the joy of teaching and learning in our classrooms.

Barbara Kerr, California Educator, April 2007

A few weeks ago we took the CSTs, our year-end standardized extravaganza. Judging by the released questions and the rubric, the Geometry CST was an extremely fair measure of what my students learned. Students also came back and claimed they felt well-prepared, which may or may not mean anything come next fall when we get our scores and I find out exactly what kind of teacher I was this year.

I take this thing seriously, a fact which left alone would lead the anti-NCLB coalition to believe my classroom is something it’s not. So, in order to set the record straight:

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