Ahh, Standardized Testing. Weird schedules(waaaayyy too long periods), boring tests, and just an all around feeling of monotony. Let me paint this mental picture for you.
8:31 A.M.: Room 212…(I think) Ms. Porter is sitting there waiting for everyone to show up. She starts calling off peoples names, I’d say about a fifth of the class wasn’t there when the bell rang. So Ian and I are sitting talking about…Oh…Some darned thing and answering as our names are called off. About 10-12 minutes into class, a girl walks in. Now when certain members of my class do anything…I mean ANYTHING, all Hell breaks loose. I think it took about 5 minutes for Ms. Porter to restore order. She says in a voice that just tells you that she has no control: 
“Please, this is my first time doing STAR testing. So please be quiet.” I think it actually got louder at that point
We finally shut up and got started on the test. I gotta tell you, just reading the examples makes the whole test worthwhile. Solely from reading the language arts section I learned about Carrier Pigeons, Seeing Eye Horses, Air Force One, and The Dangers of Diving Equipment. I have to admit though, some of those examples are pretty entertaining. I especially like the inspirational stories. Like the one about how someone would rather be a weed than a flower (read: I am ugly so I’ll make the best of it). And the ones where we had to figure out whether or not “communitys” was spelled correctly.
And then there was “The Mint Snowball.” It’s the heartwarming story of a girl who’s waxing nostalgic about something she never tried. Now maybe I’m being critical, but I’m not going to cry just because I never got to try a family recipe. (Although I must say the mint snowball sounds strangely appetizing)
So I’m sittin’ there, decoding the mysteries of Air Force One, when I hear noise. Just that girl in the back with her headphones up way too loud. Then she’s sitting there braiding another girl’s hair and they’re now singing. Wonderful…
Jump ahead to when Ian and I have both finished. The class is getting pretty frickin’ antsy. I’m sitting near the door and it’s open. Rees is sitting closest to the door in the room directly across the hall. Naturally, I strike up a game of rock, paper, scissors with him. The game was going quite well until one party got beaten and during his reaction to the defeat, got a funny look from the teacher. It was about that point Ms. Porter closed the door. Big mistake. Because the test is over, people now want to “go to the bathroom.” Now I’m not questioning the morality of my classmates, but I know they sure as hell aren’t going to the bathroom. So I’m sitting there looking the other way. I’m not sure of exactly the sequence of events but here’s the sounds I heard.
“Ms Porter can I go to the bathroom? Thanks.” tap tap tap click SLAM! (from outside the hallway) “Yo dawg!” Thump! About 10 minutes farther into this way too long period, said student comes back in, leaving their companion at the door to make funny faces through the glass.
—Break-time—
Back to class, finish the test. Doodle for a while. This is when the sh** hits the fan. So Ms. Porter disappears and some guy comes to take her place. This guy’s got less control than Porter. I commented to Ian that this guy’s a total weenie but Ian swears he’s cool. So the people are eating, yelling, making a lot of noise. The eating was weird. This girl in front of me’s swigging a Sprite and dipping Flamin’ Cheetos in Cream Cheese (add that to the list of things that makes me shiver). So the music gets loud again and the Weenie man yells at us
“If you don’t turn it down, I’ll confiscate it!” He gave up eventually. Because the class sure as hell didn’t care.
God I don’t know if I can take 2 more days of this.
There've been 14 whole comments
9:54 pm on 4/26/2005 1. Sam
Well in my class during the second part of the testing this girl in the back of the class turned on her headphones really really loud, probably as loud as they would go, while she was taking the test. I noticed that other people were getting annoyed as well, so I decided to take action. I turned around in my seat and faced her and stared her in the face. After a little bit she noticed I was staring at her and quickly turned off her iPod.
This girl I didn’t know or recognize, I didn’t remember her being in our homeroom class before either, maybe she had failed English 1 and needed to visit 9th graders to take the test. I have reason to support that statement. After she had finished the test she went up to the teacher and asked him if she could “use the bathroom” he said yes and she went out leaving her two bags on her desk. Thirty seconds later she came back and grabbed her large bag and headed out again. Then another thirty seconds later she came back and grabbed her other bag. That stunned me, I thought wow she’s really stupid or she’s got something really complicated planed out that I could never figure out on my own.
That’s great you were playing rock paper scissors with Rees, he’s in my homeroom class!
9:58 pm on 4/26/2005 2. Andrew
Hey check it out. I bootlegged the answers with my cell phone and posted them for the whole world to share! Muahhaha…err, no I just found those on google. heh.
I totally agree with you. That blew. And your class sounded strangely like my class. ‘Cept I had Sean for a buddy while you had Ian.
The question that particularly got me was “What is the proper line-spacing for the final draft of this essay?”
There weren’t enough spelling questions on there though. Heh.
Oh, and I’ve gotta comment about the bathroom thing. I think its disgusting, how many kids exploit their teachers by “going to the bathroom” its the same people, day after day. I’ve probably had to go twice all year. And the teachers will let them go every time, and if they don’t, the girls will go on and on about “woman problems” until the teacher is forced into compliance. Some groups even have a whole system set up. They set a time, then they all meet up in the bathroom to chill, get away from their teachers, get drunk, etc.
And not a single teacher policy I’ve seen has every beaten this ploy. Again, it makes me sick.
Once we’re done with the tests I’ll get up the willpower to make a complete rant on the ineffectiveness of standardized tests. I’ve heard many a teacher tsguitar complain about them, and I whole-heartedly agree. Ah well.
10:22 pm on 4/26/2005 3. Nella
Dude, your “weenie man” was Mr. Pederson! Sam will vouch for me that he’s hella tight. No control, though…
You know, I was watching this movie the other day where an unusually high percentage of scenes took place in a girl’s restroom, and something occurred to me. Through the entire Lady’s room duration of the movie, I did not see a single woman going in or out of the stalls. The stalls stayed completely empty. Plenty of people were going in and out of the bathroom, but all the were doing was fixing their hair or makeup, or painting their nails, or talking to another girl, or making out with some guy they brought with them, but not a single one was actually going to the bathroom. Weird…
5:55 am on 4/27/2005 4. Sam
Haha Mr. Pederson is pretty awesome, we spent the whole period yesterday in Drivers ED watching him screw around with a new program he got that allowed him to remotely control and view our computers. So throughout most of the period, the beginning, he was randomly displaying people’s screens on the projector for everyone to see. There the person who’s screen it was would glance up and notice everyone could see what they were doing.
The end of the period consisted of him figuring out he could lock our keyboards and mice and then, 1. Display his screen on all of ours and there be nothing we could do about it, or 2. He could display one of our screens on everyone’s computers and give us no control. It was fairly amusing.
At the end of the period he had displayed a girl’s computer on everyone’s screens and locked the keyboards, she happened to be shopping for dresses, so when the next class came in all their computers had a random dress shop on them, I wonder what they thought was going on.
8:47 am on 4/27/2005 5. Jackie
I have to say that Ian’s observation is pretty close…sadly
You guys seem to have more interesting homerooms than me, but then again I have the computers, mua-ha-ha (hence the being able to comment :-))
I have to say that the math test wasn’t as bad as the English, but it was still annoying…to-many-bubbles….
3:54 pm on 4/27/2005 6. Eric
—–READ THIS—–
So today we were just about to start and these girls in the back have their food out, Ms. Porter says put it away and thn this happens:
Girl: But the periods are long!
Ian: Do you really have to eat every 90 minutes?
Me: Seriously, though. We usually go like more than 3 hours.
Ms. Porter: Settle down!
(here’s where it gets weird)
Other Girl: “Shut up! I dunno why he keeps talking about this! But you gotta take into consideration tht some of us gotta come at
7:30 in the morning and some of us can’t keep food down that early!!” (quoted exactly)
Me:(looking to Ian) Wait…what?
Yeah, so that was weird. And use some of that for a quote for the hompage Andrew.lol
4:23 pm on 4/28/2005 7. Sam
Ms. Atkinson lets us eat in class, she also gives us food in class too. Therefore we have no problems like that. Maybe a reason she does that is because she spilled coffee on our star-tests? But she normally lets us eat if we want to during homeroom. Like some of the time in previous homeroom classes she would ask us if we were hungry and let us go down to the lunch place to buy food.
3:46 pm on 5/1/2005 8. tsguitar
At my school during STAR, administration actually made sure that every day the students received a free “lunch.” It was really just a bagel, cream cheese, apple, and chocolate milk, but still…it was free. And that was after about 90 minutes of testing. We finished the STAR tests in 3 days. It was the best schedule for those tests that I’ve seen and I hope that we’ll do something similar next year. We’ve had years where it’s taken 6 days to kill those damn tests.
Get this, our assistant principal ordered the wrong science test for all 600+ of our freshmen; they all took the Earth Science test when they should have taken the Integrated Science 1 test. All those scores will be disqualified. Stellar…
3:59 pm on 5/1/2005 9. Andrew
So I’d imagine the students that cared were flipping out because they didn’t know squat about what was on the Earth Science test. Talk about a colossal waste of time and money.
We finished the tests in three days as well. But we did them in the middle of the week, so on monday and friday we accomplished nothing.
7:06 pm on 5/1/2005 10. Eric
Well Friday wasn’t actually that bad. I liked playing Team Dodgeball
7:59 pm on 5/1/2005 11. Jackie
Friday was the biggest waste of time EVER. Except maybe this morning, I spent about five hours trying to write my autobiography and didn’t get anything done…
4:48 am on 4/22/2007 12. Michael Harbin
go to fucking hell bitches
4:51 am on 4/22/2007 13. yo mom
kiss my ass too
11:59 am on 10/9/2008 14. mirc indir
Thanks for apologies and articles. I said thanks admin for all my sites
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