It was a good day.

My district conducts "benchmarks" during the year. It's supposed to be a check to make sure that teachers are teaching what they're supposed to, and to give teachers an idea of what needs to be retaught. In actuality, it's a way for the district to compare schools that don't really compare and to put pressure on principals and teachers to step up instruction and make the district Exemplary. Plus, the tests are usually harder than the actual state's test (almost ridiculously harder). I knew my kids would do okay, but I was worried. Turns out they did just fine. I only had one fail in one class (although that one student would have passed the state's test), and I had 4 fail in the other class (although only one student would have failed the state's test). So 5 out of 42 not passing was just fine. Turns out, I found out today, that my kids scored better than the other schools in my cluster. Again, not bad. I was really proud of them. I encouraged them to use scratch paper since there wasn't enough room to show their work and many of them took me up on the offer. The ones that didn't were the ones that didn't need it.

Then, I found out how my son did. He was really worried because he doesn't have much confidence in his abilities as a student. His homework and classwork grades haven't been good, and he's struggled with reading. So Jason and I sweated the benchmarks, because we knew how our district conducts their benchmarks. Friday Jack came home in tears because he found out that his class average was a 73 - which meant that several students didn't score well. He just knew he was one of them. He ended up making a 70 on his math test, which is passing. We were thrilled. Then he got his Reading benchmark back today. Turns out he made an 81. He was so excited. He told his Reading Specialist who worked with him in first and second grade how he did.

So, it ended up being a good day.