Happy July!
Greetings to everyone out there in livejournal-land. I hope everyone's summer is going well. Mine's going well so far, although as expected, I haven't worked as much as I'd thought I would for school. But the move to Marianna went really well and we're finally settling in to the house. (By the way, if you want the address e-mail me. I'll send it as quickly as I can.)
Our six-month anniversary is tomorrow! It's hard to believe that we've been together for six months, but it's been awesome. I feel like we've been together so much longer than that. I feel totally comfortable with him, and we've been really good about being honest with each other. Perhaps it's still the "honeymoon" phase, but even when we've had disagreements about something, we've done a really good job of not making it personal and being hurtful. It's really nice finally living together too. Everyone I know asked me if I was nervous about moving in with Bill, but it's seemed totally natural. It's nice to feel like we both belong somewhere together; when we didn't live together I always felt like one of us was out of place. But it feels right now, that we both belong here.
School starts in mid-August, and I'm feeling much, much better about how things will go. I just got the results from the End-of-Course test in Geometry, and the students did extrememly well. The four different categories the students can score in are Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic, with Advanced being the highest. It isn't an even 25% per category; to score Proficient the student needs to get approximately 60% correct. It isn't a particularly good system, but it's what the Arkansas Dept. of Ed. decided on. The chart below shows the scores from the year before and the results from last year.
Advanced
Proficient
Basic
Below Basic
1%
16%
42%
41%
04-05 School Year
3%
36%
47%
14%
05-06 School Year
Even though half of my students still haven't made the goal of the state (to make Proficient), the improvement from Below Basic to Proficient is amazing. It make me very proud but also very excited to start again and improve the Basic numbers. It also makes me less nervous to go in to faculty meetings where before we've been scolded and shamed about how the students had done the previous year. There's still a ton of room for improvement, but it's more encouraging than it's been before. Yay!
Our six-month anniversary is tomorrow! It's hard to believe that we've been together for six months, but it's been awesome. I feel like we've been together so much longer than that. I feel totally comfortable with him, and we've been really good about being honest with each other. Perhaps it's still the "honeymoon" phase, but even when we've had disagreements about something, we've done a really good job of not making it personal and being hurtful. It's really nice finally living together too. Everyone I know asked me if I was nervous about moving in with Bill, but it's seemed totally natural. It's nice to feel like we both belong somewhere together; when we didn't live together I always felt like one of us was out of place. But it feels right now, that we both belong here.
School starts in mid-August, and I'm feeling much, much better about how things will go. I just got the results from the End-of-Course test in Geometry, and the students did extrememly well. The four different categories the students can score in are Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic, with Advanced being the highest. It isn't an even 25% per category; to score Proficient the student needs to get approximately 60% correct. It isn't a particularly good system, but it's what the Arkansas Dept. of Ed. decided on. The chart below shows the scores from the year before and the results from last year.
Advanced
Proficient
Basic
Below Basic
1%
16%
42%
41%
04-05 School Year
3%
36%
47%
14%
05-06 School Year
Even though half of my students still haven't made the goal of the state (to make Proficient), the improvement from Below Basic to Proficient is amazing. It make me very proud but also very excited to start again and improve the Basic numbers. It also makes me less nervous to go in to faculty meetings where before we've been scolded and shamed about how the students had done the previous year. There's still a ton of room for improvement, but it's more encouraging than it's been before. Yay!