Oh my God, some of you people are off the hook. Let's get this straight about the next school year. My part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse is not going to tell you. You can bug my 9Patch sister all you want but she has no idea what I'm going to do. You can drive all the way down from Michigan to attend a baptism and bug me all you want about my plans for next year but you will get nothing.
"Mr. Schultz, if you are still in the building please stop by the office," was the announcement on the overhead public address system. Crap! I had everything I needed and was heading to door #4 with the intent of calling it another day when I heard the announcement. "Must be a bus incident," I said to myself and headed to the front office. The BigB speaking, "don't say a word, don't read anything, just take this ink pen and when I point with my finger, you sign." Without any expression at all on my face I took the ink pen from the BigB and signed my name. When I finished, I handed her back her pen, looked her in the eye and said "thanks," shook her hand and walked out of her office. Pretty simple except for one thing. On the paper I signed there were three boxes with text next to each box. Box #1 stated, I accept this school assignment. Box #2 stated, I resign my position with IPS. My last day will be...... Box#3 stated I am retiring. My last day will be ..... Guess what box I checked.
Earlier in the school year, each of our third grade scholars were required to take the IREAD3 reading test. As I mentioned earlier, Un-Uh-Uh passed, Knapper did not, and MiniJ was real close but did not pass. This past Monday was the retest day. Knapper did not come to school that day. MiniJ was in attendance so he went to take the retest and I attended as a proctor. After logging in MiniJ looked at me and said, "Mr. Schultz, there are only fifteen questions." I looked back at him and said, "piece of cake," and thought to myself he can do this without losing his focus. As MiniJ began reading the text, I silently read along. When he finished, he read the first question, turned to me and said, "it's B Mr. Schultz." As the proctor, plus his instructional assistant, I'm not allowed to give him even the slightest hint that he answered the question correctly or incorrectly. If I do so, I jeopardize the whole testing process and if caught "helping," I'm unemployed. That's a tough position to be in. If MiniJ fails this IREAD3 test he is supposed to be retained in the third grade. If MiniJ fails this test Gnu's teaching ability comes into questions. Knowing this, I looked at MiniJ and said to him, "read each question carefully and choose what you think is the best answer." MiniJ turned back to the computer screen, clicked on the "next question" icon and I knew that he got the first question right. One down and fourteen more to go.
When MiniJ finished the IREAD3 test he raised his hand and the adult in charge of the testing process walked over to him and asked him if he was finished. MiniJ responded, "yes." The adult then said to him, "if you want, you can reread all the questions to check your answers." MiniJ indicated that he did not want to do that so the adult said to him, "click on the submit button and you can return to your classroom." When MiniJ clicked on the submit button I thought I would see his score but I didn't. As we were leaving I approached the adult and asked what score MiniJ needed to pass the test. I was told he needed to get nine correct which is sixty percent. When the adult said nine I thought to myself it was going to be close and we continued back to the classroom.
You need a percentage score of sixty to pass a government mandated reading test in order to be promoted to the fourth grade. Sixty percent? What the hell is that? I'm sorry, maybe it's a generational thing, but a score of sixty percent on any test is a failure score. Later in the day I was sitting at the dinner table with my part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse when I brought up the sixty percent score. "That's correct," she said to me. "All you need is to get a sixty percent score or higher and you get promoted, welcome to the dumbing down of a nation." As she said this, I thought back to what a teacher told me a couple years ago, "from kindergarten through second grade you learn how to read and from third grade on you read to learn." I'm sorry, but a scored of sixty percent says to me you can't read so your ability to learn is limited and I know exactly where to put the blame. Dear lowest life form (the politician) and all of the pointy headed intellectuals who made the IREAD3 test mandatory for all third grade scholars and established a passing grade of sixty percent. You are a bunch of wrong headed, bone headed, fools who don't want to hurt anyone's feeling, who don't want to hurt anyone self esteem, and who are slowly destroying the education system in our country. A sixty percent passing score is doing nothing but setting up our young scholars for failure and you idiots need to be held accountable for this massive failure and not the school teachers.
Getting our scholars to focus on academics continues to be a challenge as the school year winds down. Hell, it's an equal challenge for Gnu and I to stay focused on academics. In an attempt to keep the scholars focused, Gnu chose a number of books that we will be reading daily. The book of choice for the day is Martina the Beautiful Cockroach, which is a Cuban folktale. Before Gnu begins to read she gets the scholars attention and says, "Who can tell me what a folktale is?" Hands immediately go up, "it's a story that gets passed on from one generation to the next," is one response. "It's a story that can change depending on who is telling the story," is the next response. Both scholars were correct. As a reminder, Gnu and I work with scholars with anger control issues and not intelligence issues. As a second reminder, I'm working with an absolutely wonderful teacher.
Here is the abridged version of the book. Martina is a cockroach that just reached the ripe old age of twenty-one days and she is looking to get married. As Gnu begins to read, she has everyone's attention as it's not every day that they get to read a story about a cockroach. Like she always does, at a critical point in the story, she will stop and ask the scholars to predict what is going to happen. On this particular day Knapper is on top of his game. Every time Gnu stopped to ask a question, Knapper had a response. At one point Gnu was so impressed with Knapper's response to a question she left the front of the room, walked up to him, gave him a high five, and said "that is the best response to a question you ever made." Knapper had this huge smile on his face as Gnu turned and walked back to the front of the classroom.
It was right at 2:30pm when Gnu finished our reading block when she told the scholars we were going to do some math and if everyone stayed on task they could go outside for a second recess. That got all of the scholars excited and as Gnu handed each one of them their worksheet they immediately got started. The last scholar to get a worksheet was Knapper. When Gnu reached is desk, Knapper had his forehead on his desk and his arms were hanging limply at his sides. Gnu and I made eye contact, I shrugged my shoulders to indicate I wasn't sure what was going on, but inside my head I knew the demons had struck Knapper. Gnu reached down, place a worksheet next to Knapper's head and told him to get started so he could go outside for the second recess. Knapper raised his head, saw the worksheet, and immediately swept it off his desk onto the floor and put his forehead back on his desk. That is definitely not a good sign and my radar is up and I'm closely watching Knapper. When the scholars finished their worksheet, Gnu quietly directed them out of the room and I told her I'd stay behind. With the scholars gone I walked over to Knapper, tapped him on the shoulder and said to him, "what's wrong?" Knapper raised up his head and said to me, "just leave me the f... alone." He then stood up, walked over to Gnu desk, crawled under it, raised his head up three times and banged it on the bottom of Gnu's desk. A few minutes later Gnu returned to the classroom, got the scholars packed up and directed them to the buses so they could go home. I then inform Gnu about what had happened and rather than try and get Knapper on his bus she decides to call his parental units to come and get him. They agree to do so but don't arrived at school until approximately 4:30pm. When they arrived both parental units tried to get him to get out from under the desk. Finally, at 4:50pm Knapper crawls out from under Gnu's desk and calmly walked out of the classroom with his parental units and our day is finally over. So what demon entered his head? He kept talking about a choking incident that happened a couple years ago.
It's now two days later and the classroom phone rings. "Please have Knapper ready to go home as his parental unit is here," the voice on the other end tells me. I get Gnu's attention, tell her Knapper needs to go, and she says to me "I know," he has an appointment to get his hearing tested and out the door Knapper goes. It's now the next morning and Knapper is not at school. Gnu quietly informed me that he will not be at school the rest of the school year. I look at her and say, "what?" She told me that when he was getting his hearing tested he had an anger eruption to the point that the police were called and they took him to a behavior health hospital. Just like that, Knapper is gone.
Yes, I know, that is not a good way to end the blog so I'm going to do my best to cheer your up. You know that paper I signed, I checked box #1. Early in the school year Gnu and I came to an agreement, we'll both felt we could tolerate each other for one more year. Bye!
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