In today's episode of "It's Summer!" I've spent the last hour finding and formatting the texts my students will read for their 2nd quarter benchmark exam in Senior Seminar. The standards they are being tested on have to do with being able to integrate information from multiple types of informational texts to answer questions and solve problems, the creation of questions to guide inquiry and research, and the ability to identify key information in texts.
In order to test whether these are skills my students have, I can't ask them questions about texts we've already studied in class; I'm striving to avoid "parrot syndrome". So, instead of asking them about the content we'll have been reading and writing about for ten weeks, I had to find a completely new set of texts on a completely new topic. They have to be complex enough to make the test challenging, but not so complex that students won't be able to understand the issue at hand. I have four texts right now, one of which is a graph, and the other three are semi-scientific articles. I still have to come up with all the questions and finish formatting the entire thing. Then I'll have to develop a rubric for the open-ended questions and determine how I'm going to assign points to the multiple-choice questions.
However, since it -is- summer, I'm going to give myself the rest of the day off to have lunch, go to the gym, and spend the evening at my martial arts class, something I don't get to do ten months out of the year because the class ends too late for me to get enough sleep. (Please note that the class ends at 9:30pm, which is not "too late" in most people's minds, but they don't have to be ready to deal with teenagers for a minimum of 7.5 hours, starting at 8am.)
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