Remember my epiphany about being able to access the school scantron last year? I have since become dependent on it for my system of grading tests and tracking student mastery of individual standards – each set of five questions covers one standard, so I can quickly look at each kid’s scantron and see their percent mastery of each standard by counting the red dots in each group of five questions. I can also easily get their overall grade, because the machine prints the total number correct at the bottom of each scantron.
So I had a huge tragedy today when I ran the scantrons from yesterday’s unit test through the machine, picked them up to do my data tracking, and saw – nothing! The scantron machine is out of ink! The machine is hooked up to a computer, which creates an spreadsheet of each kid’s answers and whether they were correct or not, so I spent all my preps trying to figure out if there was some way to easily manipulate that data into the form I wanted. I eventually gave up trying to fight with the very non-user-friendly scantron software, and resorted to grading the scantrons by hand with a red pen. It took two hours, and now I am very grumpy.
The 7+ Program of Amazingness hasn’t premiered yet, but it also hasn’t been cancelled. In fact, today they released the tentative new schedule that incorporates the program – the 7+ class will even be housed on a different floor and eat lunch on a different shift than the rest of the middle school! It seems too good to be true, so I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that this isn’t an elaborate and cruel practical joke the administration is playing on us.
