To Pass

Jacques came over on Saturday and we had a very productive mixing session. For the first time in a while we got two songs mixed: "Death Blow" and "Battle Chant," two songs we thought would be hard, but ended up being not bad at all. It was our second time trying "Death Blow" (I think the first was the very first thing we'd tried to mix and we had to wrestle with the samples). This time we mixed all five sample channels down to one and it was much more manageable (although that was pretty easy on its own, once we focused on it alone). Later in the evening Mary Beth and I ordered some pizza and tried to watch the first episode of Tanner '88. Well, she succeeded but I passed right out. Sunday morning I got up and went over to my parents' to help them move stuff into storage. The whole custody situation is a huge mess, but my parents are going to sue for custody (they actually had to sue my sister, which she is in agreement with, as a measure to keep the kids temporarily until she can regain custody). The big obstacle is passing an inspection of the house. They got a storage unit to load all the stuff that my mom won't throw away and that's what I was helping to do: move stuff from the house into storage. My mom's out of town to help with her dying brother. So I was moving stuff for a good bit of the day. I was in the library for all but one of my classes at work administering the last Discovery test. I was looking at the data (the Algebra 2 data, don't care that much about Geometry since there's no test that counts for anything) as they were taking it and afterwards. A bit of improvement, I'm seeing. Still not all the way there. Much better than the "mock" test results (maybe the test is just easier? maybe they just took it more seriously since I'm counting it as a grade?). Five kids got a score that's projected as "passing" the EOC. I need eleven to pass. Three were one point away from "passing" and three were two points away. That'll be my eleven there if I can push 'em up to speed. Overall I think I see growth from the last tests, but a few kids, at least, plummeted. I know I've got some work to do, but hopefully I can teach that test enough to get them there. Not education, I know, but it's something. Oh, I was pretty proud of 'em too, 'cuz during that period there were a bunch of classes testing in the library (during my other two periods, we were alone). Well, the other classes were freshmen (mine is mostly sophomores) at least a couple of the classes got pretty noisy, but my kids were models of behavior and quiet as could be. One of the other teachers even came by and complimented them on their behavior! Definitely made me feel better after my third period had gotten off to a rough start earlier in the day. They calmed down, but it took 'em a while. But, man, third period. Anyway. I guess that's it for now.