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When we return from the holidays, I'll be teaching "A Day's Wait"--a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The story is not particularly one of my favorites, and I'm skipping one of my favorites, "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" by Ray Bradbury. Unfortunately, the story by Bradbury doesn't focus on the tested skills that the story by Hemingway   does. I know I could make it work with the Bradbury story, but I'd have to create my own resources, and I'm busy enough like it is. So, like many things in education, I'm going to settle. I'm going to skip the story that would be more interesting and go on to the one that I can justify on my lesson plan.

This is not going to be a post about lamenting the fact that our education system has become all about the test scores and less about good teaching. If you're reading this post, then you know the predicament that education is in~I don't need to beat that horse.

This post is about making lemonade from lemons~a task at which teachers excel. I'm looking at my lesson plans now and see that I'm covering six (six!) tested items in one week with just one short story. Those students will learn vocabulary, making inferences and drawing conclusions, considering how genre affect meaning and identifying how an author reveals character (I know that's less than six; I condensed some). 

Getting all of these tested skills taught (and learned) requires that I stay on a schedule~that means no talking about your holidays or writing resolutions (although I guess I could work that in as a writing prompt). No, we've got to hit the ground running and reading. 

But the flip side of all this standards-based testing is that I've had to become more focused. I've gotten rid of a good bit of the fluff. It's all meat and potatoes, no sides. Everything that the students do in my classroom has to justified to meet a state performance indicator. 

Also, as a result of this zooming in on just the basics has caused me to become a better researcher. I've become a scout for activities and lessons that truly teach something that is beneficial to my students and not just something that looks good on paper or seems to be something that the students will enjoy.

I've begun this blog and my facebook page as I've learned more and begun writing more as a result of having to be so standards focused in my planning. I've also started creating teaching items for my online store. So many of my "firsts" are a result of my need to be more assessment-minded.

I think the title "A Day's Wait" is quite appropriate for the story that the students will be reading upon our return~it's only a few month's wait until we find out if what I've been teaching has been learned.