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Baby, it's cold outside!

Arctic cold front moves in, Western Washingtonians freeze in their tracks!

Ok, it's really not that cold. Yesterday, I kept saying "does it hurt to breathe? then it ain't that cold!" and "cold is standing outside in Maspeth, Queens waiting for a bus for 45 minutes (!) in the middle of a blizzard. Shoot! the looks from others standing in line if you dare to step out of your designated spot will freeze your nose hair right off!" It's cold enough to be annoying, but on the plus side, it isn't raining!!!!

Yesterday we had the big "ohmigod our scores are really bad" meeting (aka "come-to-Jesus-get-with-the-program" meeting). This is the meeting where we look at last year's scores and try to figure out how we went from being up to going down. Some how we ended up with a lot of O's because tests weren't taken by a significant number of students. Who are these students? No one knows... personally I think someone does, but doesn't want to admit to a colossal fuck-up.

It's beginning to feel a bit like TX around here. The Seattle Times just printed an article detailing Seattle's plan to reclassify chronological sophomores back into credit freshman in order to lessen the number of failing test-takers. My school was already doing that. Now we have to get even more creative... how do we get those that are scraping by to pass with flying colors? Pep talks? Prizes? Special recognition for full passers? Go over last year's test? No one has crunched all the numbers (other than to compare with other local schools... "hey! we all suck together! to bad we suck the worst!), so we don't know about individual skills that are lacking. And, does that even apply to this group? (Maybe we should make up a fake mini-WASL for the 9th graders and look at that data for next year?) To be honest, I'm not even worried about skill level, I'm more worried about convincing the students to actually complete the test. Too many have the attitude of "if I don't try, then I haven't really failed." How do you change that in 3 weeks?

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