Sunday, March 07, 2010

Problem Not Solved

Packemin has trouble with giving kids extended time to ISS kids on exams. The problem is logistics, we are just too big. I've bitched about this in the past, things were changed but things are still not running smoothly.

The new process has the teacher bringing exams to the ISS office where the exams are placed in the mailboxes of the resource room teacher. The teacher supposedly picks the exams up, gives them to the student and then returns them to the teacher's letter box in the main office on the first floor. The exams are supposed to be in sealed envelopes with all pertinent information (names of teachers and students, periods, etc on the front.)

Now, if your head is spinning trying to figure this all out, you are not alone. There are at least six different resource teachers, plus the inclusion kids whose school base is in another part of the building. Bringing exams for both groups of kids has the teacher running in circles. Trying to get all this done before 7:00 AM makes for a bad start to the day.

Some students start the exams in resource room and then finish them in their regular class while others reverse the procedure, depending upon their schedule. A child who has resource room say sixth period and class eighth period leaves the resource room teacher and the gen ed teacher no time to exchange papers. Occasionally students have been allowed to transport their own exams in sealed envelopes but there have been too many incidents of cheating along the way with this method for my comfort. Oh you might suggest that the child just finish the exam in resource room but the teacher that was in the room period 6 might be in a gym class or an English class period 8 and not available to proctor again.

A different bandage was put on the wound, but the wound is not healing. I don't have an answer. I only see a problem and I see kids not getting what they need.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would be real easy if the teacher emailed the test directly to the resource teacher. The resource teacher would then print our the exam, adminster it and return to the teacher's mailbox.

Would that work?

Pissedoffteacher said...

Not every exam is written with a word processor. Some are cut and paste and some are doen with programs the resource room teacher doesn't have access to.

The problem of getting it back to the gen ed teacher would still exist.

NYC Educator said...

Sometimes when you think a problem is serious but not impossible, the people who created the problem figure it's impossible but not serious.