NYC Educator: The Pressure Mounts

NYC Educator: The Pressure Mounts:

The Pressure Mounts

by Miss Eyre

If I'm counting right (and, this late in the school year, that is a very big "if"), there are 14 school days until the English Regents.  And, at this stage of the game, it's very hard to get hung up on the love of literature when the paragraphs we've been working on writing all year long are still a struggle for some of my students.

I freely admit that I'm not handling this well.  I'm taking it personally, practically as an affront to me, that my kids don't seem 100% ready this close to the test.  I'm comparing my students to the other teachers' student and blaming myself for them not measuring up.  I'm making myself sick over it, wondering what I've been doing wrong all year, talking myself down from freaking out on whatever child or colleague happens to be nearest by.  And then the talk goes in a bigger circle, expanding into indignation against the Board of Regents for making my kids take such a stupid test and eventually the universe for a long list of tangentially related sins.  I'm being hyperbolic, but you get my point.

I don't know what my deal is here.  I taught middle school ELA for three years and never got this worked up about the state exams.