Testing, One, two, three Ten tests missing times four

I had heard about a student who went ballistic and started throwing desks, tearing posters off walls, and yelling that he was going to kill everyone assembled for the final tests, but I was determined to make the test-taking as much without stress for our students as possible.  I got to the assigned testing room early and greeted them.  I wrote "Good morning, we hope" on the blackboard along with other information they would need and helped the students from the other teacher's class fill out the Admissions Ticket form and detach the part they had been instructed to detach and put in their wallet.


As usual the classroom was too small to seat the students at the proper testing distance from one another, but we encourage group work.  However,  what we didn't know was that there weren't even enough desks for them to sit too close to one another.  We were 25 desks short!

         No one among our students threw desks (there weren't enough) or threatened murder.  The other teacher Stephanie and I are the ones who did that.  Actually, we were all pretty well-behaved,  and that was good, because we had major adjustments to make.  They had given us an already crowded room with 25 too few chairs, so  Stephanie scouted around and found another classroom, and  I took 25 Scantrons and my 25 students, who’d just acclimatized,  out of Science Hall 200 and around the corner.    But soon Stephanie came to me to say she didn’t have enough Scantrons, so I called our wonderful assistant Susan, who sent some over, but we didn’t realize until after we had 10 too few reading tests that they’d counted wrong and gotten 56 instead of 66 when adding 19+22+25!  We were short 10 not only in Scantrons and reading tests but also in grammar and essay prompts!  My trunk and messages on the board were still in Science 200, as was my stapler, and Stephanie and I were trying to be both proctors and runners from room to room.  When I called for a stapler as my final "let's keep in touch' call, I thought that trekking back and forth an item at a time was just their exercise for the day, but Susan told me they were setting up for the party, so I was going to let my comps run loose.  I could see that their error was starting to annoy them and we teachers calling for more testing material were as obnoxious to them as Oliver calling for more gruel…and then Jim McKinney came to our rescue.  He says he sometimes thinks we teachers should get combat pay for all the things "up with which we put."  Here's to all "up with which  we put."  May it rest in peace someday.  Afterwards, we had the May Scholarship awarding, and my student Erika, who'd just gone through that ordeal with us, won the biggest one.  She took this picture.