Late

This week went by in kind of a blur. Tutored Thursday. Then there was a PTSA meeting with the superintendant so we had to go. The orchestra played and one of my students is in it so afterwards I told her what a great job they did. That led to one of the nice things about yesterday. When she came to class Friday she thanked me and said it was like I was proud. And I could tell she was really thrilled by the compliment and that was really nice. The other thing, from another student in the same period. Well, this girl I'm now believing may be mildly autistic. Anyway, she seems pretty smart and is very nerdy. I guess she kind of has midly robotic mannerisms in her speech. Well, she'd seemed frustrated by having some trouble understanding some things in class. I was thinking she really wasn't liking me. The last two days we were giving a common "pre-test" for each of the EOC classes (which really is ridiculous because the test that we're giving is for the END of the course and the kids shouldn't know much of the material anyway). Well, before class yesterday, before we started our second day of testing, she came up to me and said she really didn't understand a lot of the questions. I told her it was okay, because the test was covering things she really shouldn't know anyway, it's really for the end of the year. Anyway, she was the last to leave and as she was leaving she started walking towards me, I thought she needed to get past so I kind of stepped back and to the side and she said "what are you doing?" and then hugged me. It was a little touching. Okay, now I'm gonna complain about that pre-test. Well, someone in the department said they would email it to us the night before. No email. Photocopies were finally made during first period that morning (and least I had until seventh period). Okay, there's that. Then yesterday while the kids were taking the test, I was looking over the questions seeing what I could do in my head and noticed one that didn't even have the correct answer listed as a choice. So, this whole thing is really fucking pointless. I mean, a pre-test COULD be useful. I did give my own the first week. But we had to have data for a common assessment. And I'm annoyed I have to spend time grading this shit that's useless partially because it's just a shitty test and partially because it won't tell us a fucking thing because much of the material is not something any of the kids should have remotely even seen before anyway. So now we know they don't know it, yeah, I alreayd fucking knew that. I know someone was being lazy in just grabbing a convenient test, and I'm not faulting that. They could have at least picked a better test. Anyway. I'm being too bitchy right now. Some numbers came in yesterday that may determine some major stuff next week. We'll see. Yesterday Mary Beth and I visited my grandmother in the nursing home. At night we went over to Josh and Molly's. Paul had brought over the Awkward Family Photos game and we played that. Jacques and Wilson were there as well. Good times. I fell asleep sitting on the couch at the very end.