MEAP testing has come and gone. For those of you not in the know, it is the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, mandated by the Michigan Department of Education. Yes I know this has nothing to do with RTI but it's my blog and I am going to vent my frustrations with this test.
For the past 2 weeks, 3rd and 4th graders accross Michigan have been "MEAPING". One of the subjeccts the 4th graders were tested on was writing. We tested children from 10:30 - 11:30 and again from 1:30 to 2:45. Seriously. Since I work with children with emotional impairments this can be problematic. Some of them have not developed the stamina to sit still and write for that length of time. Actually I think it's a huge amount of time to ask any 4th grader to sustain in a testing situation but then the state officials obviously know better. Like they knew better when they designed the first writing prompt...."Write about your special friend". I read that and thought oh no seriously? This is the writing prompt? Oh yes....and you know what my EI children promptly said don't you? I don't have any friends. And it wasn't said sweetly or quietly either. Now I have an angry kid yelling at me saying more than once I DO NOT HAVE ANY SPECIAL FRIENDS! I DO NOT HAVE FRIENDS! If you've ever worked with children who have EI you know that you can not reason with the child when they are in this mode so I said quietly, "I know you don't." That is a tough thing to say to a child, but in this case he calmed down and I was able to talk to him about special people in his life and who he might write about. All of this took quite a bit of time and I knew that we were most likely disturbing the other studtents but there was no help for it. I was the proctor of the test and could not leave the room with this child and leave the rest alonne. And all along running through my mind were the "rules" of MEAP say "No talking" during MEAP. Hmmm.
This is a good measure of what our children know... how?
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