The first section of the test is 42 vocabulary questions. Students are presented with sentence fragments that include underlined words. After glancing through the words, I immediately know my kids will be totally clueless on every question. This is confirmed when even my best students look 100% confused and say, "This is too hard." By the tone of their voices, I know they feel defeated. I only say in response, "Do your best, finish every question and make a guess if you have to." The 129 ESL and resource students sitting in the auditorium will do terribly on this test. Good thing someone decided to have them take it - otherwise we wouldn't know that these kids have trouble reading and don't have expansive vocabularies.
The following words were on the vocabulary section of the test:
abide
bedraggled
trek
ruptured
hostile
reluctant
moody
irritation
bewilder
dilapidated
gale
capacity
signify
provoke
impish
devise
forked
luster
cropped
crest adequate
Two days later most of my kids took their final exam for my class (writing a 5 PG essay). While some really showed improvement and made me feel like they'd learned something, others wrote in exactly the same manner they did at the beginning of the year. It hurt to watch kids continue to write in one giant block rather than paragraphs. It also hurt when one kid just flat out refused to write anything. Called his mom, sat down with the asst. principal and he's still resisting writing it. Lots of different emotions at the end of the year. I'm in a slightly happier place than a couple weeks ago and that whole mess with my car; though I have to drop another $200-$250 to get 2 of my tires replaced before my journey home to Philly.
14 years ago