Tales from the Test 3

How sad is it that the astronomical number of standardized tests is providing me with so much blog fodder?

So today, with my third proctoring job, there was ... An Incident.

It was U.S. History day, and I was co-proctoring with a math teacher. Because, I guess math and English people don't know anything about history? (Psych! I am totally certified to teach history!)

Our testing room belongs to this man, Mr. A, who is about one hundred and thirty-five years old and has the oddest comb-over you are likely to see in your lifetime. No, seriously, weirder than Trump's. It defies explanation. Plus, Mr. A was my social studies teacher in the eighth grade. (True story: My first day at Randomville High, Mr. A says to me, "You had so much potential. And you wound up here.")

I guess Mr. A likes to keep his room at a temperature at which frostbite sets in, because when people are dying of hypothermia at least they aren't talking. By now, our second week of testing, the kids are familiar with the procedure, so they settled right in and got to work on their tests.

I think The Incident could best be summed up in the report I wrote for the testing coordinator:

At approximately 8:30 a.m., the air conditioner (in the ceiling in the middle of the room) began to spit ice cubes and water from the vent. We moved the students away from the vent and they got back to work relatively quickly (after about a minute).
We notified an administrator immediately.
A maintenance man came in to turn off the air conditioner at approximately 8:35 a.m.
He did not speak to the students.

Okay, so, our testing coordinator? Might be a little anal retentive. This is a woman who, in our training session (which we all have to attend, even though some people have been proctoring tests for nigh unto twenty-five years), opened by saying, "Y'all are adults so I'm not going to read this manual to you," and then PROCEEDED TO READ THE ENTIRE MANUAL TO US. Also, she was my twelfth grade English teacher, so I totally knew that the details would be important to her (True story: She assigned us a four-page paper one time about some aspect of British culture, but since I was on the Academic Decathlon team [NERD!] she let me do it on one of the subjects we were studying, so I wrote a twelve-page paper about Eva Peron. During the Super Bowl). (I got a 99).

When I turned all our stuff in, she read the paper and said, "Wow, this is really thorough." She said it probably wasn't anything to worry about, but we had to get the right papers signed and whatnot. Look, I will sign one THOUSAND reports, if it means no one's going to implicate me in some Testing Scandal.

It was kind of exciting, actually; that's the first time I even had An Incident during testing. You know I was totally figuring out my defense for when I got dragged in front of the state Dept. of Ed., and if it comes to that (which: please), I will be winning that debate.

When you spend eight hours a day with teenagers, one thing you better know how to do is win an argument.