I'm so proud of my students today. It was the first day of testing (high stakes, state standardized tests) and for the first time, i had a class that actually tried. I am pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with me, but I'm proud anyways. =)

Most of the students in the school are at the 10th percentile. At least, that's what the paperwork says about our school. They don't take into consideration that we have the largest special ed and non-English speaking populations of any of the schools around us (and no one is exempt from taking the tests). But yes, our students rank really really low. But I'm convinced that most of that is because they just don't try. The tests ARE really hard for them, but they score even lower when they take 30 min to do a 75 min section. It's frustrating to see them give up so soon.

But this year, they were great. Most of them took the entire time alloted to carefully choose their answers. Hopefully, this trend will last the entire 3 days of testing. It'd be so encouraging for the staff to see test scores going up a little - so much depends on them.