Matching Tracksuits

In a tragic first since I’ve been teaching in the Greenville County school district, a young man was shot and killed in a middle school less than five miles from the school where I teach. A twelve-year-old named Jamari Jackson was shot in the hallway during class change, from what I’ve pieced together from various news outlets. The suspect is also twelve years old, and he is now charged with “murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, possession of a firearm on school property and unlawful possession of a weapon by a person under the age of 18.”

There’s nothing more I can say than that. Twelve-year-olds killing twelve-year-olds. America 2022.

We had today our third benchmark test, this time for ELA. Tomorrow we’ll have the math benchmark. Science will be Friday. Three days of testing. And this is not testing for the whole year — this is just testing to cover the third quarter. For English and math benchmarks, we run a special testing schedule. Students test with their first academic period, and that testing session runs from 8:30 to 10:30, though it usually goes in fact to 11:00. That’s over two hours of the day dedicated to testing. THe rest of the day follows a normal sequence of classes, but each class period is reduced to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes with tired kids (those tests are awful — 50-70 questions that, in the case of English, cover 5-10 texts of varying interest and complexity) is hardly conducive effective learning. The day is not quite a wash, but it’s close. The thing is, though, we did this at the end of first quarter, at the end of second quarter, and now again at the end of third quarter. At the end of the fourth quarter we do it a final time, but it’s not district-mandated tests like the benchmarks but rather state-mandated tests. It amounts to the same: three days of testing four times. That’s twelve days of testing. That’s almost thee full school weeks. That’s not all the testing, though: we also have two TDA (text-dependent analysis) tests that the district mandates, running the same extended testing schedule.

And this year, the state requires us to do another, third TDA before the fourth and final TDA which actually counts. Those three TDAs plus the final actual state TDA means we’re up to 16 days of testing. That’s 8.8% of the year doing testing. Nearly ten percent of the year we’re doing testing.

English 8 students began a new unit today on the Diary of Anne Frank, our final major reading selection for the year. We began with an anticipation lesson designed to get students empathetic to Anne Frank's situation and the dangers she faced as the Nazis took over Europe and began their unimaginable efforts to commit genocide.

English I Honors students worked on a brief review of phrases (see notes above) before heading out into the wild world of clauses. We looked at the definition of independent clauses and examined several examples, touching additionally (and briefly) on subordinate clauses.

A good start to the final quarter.