TeachersCollective

State Exams

2008-05-08T07:16:00.001-07:00

Today for the first 2 hours of school (usually periods 1,2, and 3) the time was used to give the annual New York State Science Exam. It seemed to be harder than the past 2 years, and there were quite a few "tricky" questions. The readability seemed to be quite high this year.

At this point, writing this feels very cliche, but our 8th graders in NYS are tested to death. In 5 subjects (Math, English, History, Science and Foregin Language) they take state exams that take a total of 4 hours each, 2 hours on back to back days, to administer. Students are taking over 40 hours of testing.

It is a major disruption to our schedule. I missed 3 out of 5 sections today and yesterday. On top of the math exam in march, and the english (ELA) exam in January. The exams always seem to fall in the middle of the week, which slices 2 days out of the middle of a unit breaking up any kind of day to day cohesion.

How can we expect the students to achieve at higher rates when they are taken out of the classroom? Students need more instructional time, not less.

Isn't there a better way to administer these exams?

Classroom management

2008-05-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

After year 1 I felt like I wasn't a solid classroom manager. This is in part to what I consider a total lack of preparation in my teaching program that was more focused on teaching theory than actual teaching practice. That summer I bought a ton of books (used, on amazon.com for cheap) the top 2 were:

1. Setting Limits in the classroom. By Robert McKenzie

2. Lee Canter Classroom Management for Academic Success (Spiral-bound)

APUS

2008-05-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Anyone else teaching an AP Course? I'm in my first year of teaching AP US history. The exam is on Friday, and I am pretty stressed out about it.

Overall with AP.
1. I never have enough class time.
2. Students have to be motivated and do the work on their own.
3. I have been constantly behind (see #1).
4. There is a wealth of knowledge and tons of teaching material online.

Teacher WebPage

2008-05-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

www.mrcochran.com

This is a teacher webpage I set up for my eighth graders....its quite rough but it does the job for what I want at the moment....

I set up this blog last year and didn't really think much of it at the time, but lately I have been finding and subscribing to so many teacher sites, it is very exciting.

Also it's great to see the future possibilities in using student driven blogs and wiki's as others have done. Next year in the fall the first order of business will be for students to set up accounts in Google docs so we can more freely access and save materials for class.

It feels like we are at the beggining of a wave of technology in the classroom. An entire universe of possibility is opening up and we can all be a part of it.

Teachers Collective Blog

2006-09-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Hello-
I am a grade 8 social studies teacher beggining my second year. I wanted to start a teachers blog where teachers could discuss best practices, share ideas about what works for them and commiserate about their profession.