Saturday Night's All Right For.....

What?!?! I missed Friday?!?! How could that be??!

(are you buying into this?)

I know I did. After eleventeen hundred hours of a really sucky week... I was exhausted. So tired, that when I sat down last night to read my email, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. Even the Red Sox weren't enough to keep me awake. I shut my laptop and .34 seconds later I was fast asleep on the couch. I apologize. I know all four of you were chomping at the bit for a new post. I can't promise that I will do better, but I can promise that I will try. We are entering the last month of school, and it's going to be a bit crazy here. On top of that, and all that the end of the school year brings, we have MAP testing.


For those of you not in the know.. MAP testing is some brilliant moron's idea of a joke. We do testing twice a year. In the fall, and in the spring. The idea, is to see how much a child has "grown academically" over the course of the year. The kicker is, that the fall test measures what they child learned the year before. The spring test measures what the child learned over the year. Umm.. hello?!? Does anyone see that we are testing the kids on the same materials twice?? And what's even worse, is that in the fall, MAP testing is almost immediately followed by Standardized State Testing. You know that test that tells the state how much money they should send you, and if you are meeting NCLB standards. Right. So let's imagine for a minute that you just spent 6 weeks of your life doing MAP testing. (well, for me. Each child only spends a total of 3 hours.) Then after a two week break, you have to spend more hours doing State Testing. How much are you really going to care about the second test? We tried to impress upon the kids how important it was.. but they didn't care. And I can't say that I blame them. I wouldn't care either.

Anyhow, my role in MAP testing involves administering the test to the kids who's IEP's say that they can have the test read to them. All except the Reading part. (there are 3 parts, reading, language and math.) We have 32 kids who are coded with one thing or another in our school. Half of them will have their 2 parts of the test read to them. It's enough to make your eyes bleed. I'm tired just thinking about it.

So between that and trying to get my damn house spring cleaned (checked one room off the list today, hope to get another one checked tomorrow), and my gardens cleaned up (did you know that 900 inches of water equals 1.6 million weeds???).. I'm not finding a whole lot of time for "fun".

Although, thanks to my friend Carly, I did have a bit of fun tonight. I looked to see what kind of Google searches brought you all here, and in the past three weeks there was only one:

ole miss the children shall lead

What the heck?? ROFL... What can I say? I'm boring. But I don't write for other people. I write for myself. For about 6 months only one person was reading my blog (waves, Hi C..) and I didn't care. If you all left me for bigger and better blogs, I would still write.

In all that "free time."