Worlds Collide

It’s not an official meltdown, but – I’m going to rant anyway. ::le sigh::

It’s about work. I work for a Public School system. For the most part, it’s fine. But – there are certain things, directives as it were, that come from the county board which really make me unhappy.

Last year, the county mandated that reassessments be available for students who received a ‘D’ or an ‘E’ on an assessment. It was very vague and we had to try and figure it out on our own. To be honest, the teachers hated it. To tell us we had to allow our students a chance to reassess ANYTHING they failed was – well – it was hard to accept due to the fact that it was going to be an enormous amount of extra work. Because not only did we have to allow them a reassessment, we had to re-teach them the material beforehand. More work. Great.

Don’t get me wrong. The policy is not a bad policy – on paper. The idea was to help out students who failed just one test out of a quarter due to a bad day, illness, just not grasping that one concept right away. It was for trying to balance out the grades for students who had strange outliers – and to help those who were not doing well at all, giving them a chance to do better, and perhaps pass. And it was pretty much something the majority of teachers were doing. A professional judgement could be used to allow a student a chance to rectify something that was out of the ordinary for him/her.

However. The students soon learned how to ‘work the policy.’ They started failing things on purpose so they could be ‘re-taught’ and then re-take the assessment and get an ‘A’, rather than the ‘B’ (or ‘C’) they would have gotten before. Now, teachers were getting students fighting to have MORE points taken off their assessments so they might reassess them. Great. Wonderful. Because, in the fall of last year, anyone who took a reassessment could receive full credit on something they utterly failed the first time. Which, to me, seems unfair. If you receive a 58% on something, why should you be able to have the 95% you later? It seems to me that an accurate depictation of your grade would be to average the two grades. But what do I know, mmm?
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So, the Italian Angel was up to mischief last week. Silly boy.

Since the weather has turned so cold once the sun goes down – and I’ve been a whiny ‘you-know-what’ about it to anyone that asks – that silly boy sent me a package.

It contained the following things:
A blanket
Marshmallows
A candle

Now, apparently, I am to wrap up in said blanket (which has Nemo on it and is so fuzzy it’s down right pettable), light the candle, and then toast marshmallows over the candle flame.

If he’d included graham crackers and chocolate, it’d be a party in a box! ::giggles::

But – I am much warmer. What a silly boy, eh? (;