Long weekends are always a mix of emotions for me. I spend so much time around people that when it comes time to leave for longer periods of time, I tend to struggle. However, this time feels like it’s a bit different compared to previous weekends. It’s probably because I have quite a bit to look forward to coming up. 

Today was hilarious. I wish I had recorded some video of what happened during the mini bingo session the school hosted. One of my students got a bingo but was too afraid to go down to get a prize. She gave it to another student who screamed “yahoo” and ran out the door as fast as he could. We could hear him screaming as he flew down the stairs. It was far too funny not to record on here. Prior to this, we spent some time finishing our narratives. I did this in the hopes that we can begin the revision process on Monday. The students have not spent a lot of time doing this. In fact, while I am here today I may write up a story on the bigger poster board to give a full example of the process. 

One thing that has been on my mind recently is how much we never fully scrutinize our student data. Recently, we started the process of evaluating a student for SpED services. When asked to give comparative data, I am always faced with the same conundrum; Access scores are either extremely low and on roughly equal among students, or they are incredibly high and cannot be used. At this point, I do not think that this has anything to do with WIDA or the Access test. I think this is indicative of a far greater need for the state of MN to collect and parse the data for the benefit of all teachers. When I am selecting students for comparison, it is completely subjective. My own intuition takes over and pushes me to make selective choices that are not beneficial for data collection. It completely invalidates the process. I would ask the district to do this; however, they have asked me in previous years to accomplish this task. While I do love working with data and addressing problems like this, I am not paid enough to do this work. I started it as a spare time project, but the project fell apart after I moved to the high school.