100%

The weeks are moving quickly for us now. Tomorrow is parent-teacher conferences and in two weeks we will bask in the glory of a week of no school. None. Zero. No students. No lesson plans. We will be leaving Gallup (destination unknown) for a few days to get the crazies out of our heads. It will be grand.

I am not here to brag. That is not my intention. So before going any further, know that this is not the Scott Show. I do not want people ooh-ing and ahh-ing us. All I want to do is tell stories from our lives.

That being said, I have gotten a lot of 100%s on tests and quizzes in my life. Erin too. Truth be told, Erin has probably has gotten more than I have since she was a spectacular Summa Cum Laude in college while I squeaked by with merely a Magma Cum Laude. But alas, this is also not the Erin Extravaganza. After all the years of schooling and all the tests and quizzes and all the assignments, we've gotten quite a few 100%s. When asked how many exactly, Erin said, "probably a gigajillion" (the majority of these 100% were not in math for Ms. Farver). I would say more in the range of a googlepahihodillion, but we're really just splitting hairs. Suffice to say, we've gotten a lot.

With that being said, allow me to introduce you to one of my students. Her name is Beatrice (which isn't her real name. I don't even think there were any 'Beatrice's' born after 1922..). Beatrice is a struggling student in my class and is having a number of difficulties with fourth grade subject matter right now. Her reading level is about that of a first grader. Her writing, about the same. But Beatrice is a smiler. Regardless of how poor she does on an assignment, she is always smiling.

I set up a meeting with her mom and the Student Support Team (SST) the other day, and we tried as a group to come up with ways to help Beatrice be successful in the classroom. We came up with some ideas, and in doing so, found out she had received inclusion Special Education services at her previous school (one would think such information would be somewhat beneficial to receive before the start of school 7 weeks ago... ) so we started getting our paperwork around in order to develop a new Plan for Beatrice involving Special Education Services. Good news for sure. Bad news, however, is Beatrice cannot benefit from Special Education Services until we hold a special meeting with tons more paperwork, lawyers, parents, principals, teachers, psychologists, and probably partridges in pear trees. That will take place this week. She will get the services, albeit a bit later than what would have been best. But, I digress.

Beatrice participates, as do all my students, in the Accelerated Reader (AR) program at our school. In AR, students choose books at their individual reading levels, read them and then take a quiz about the content to see how well they understood the book. Our goal in my class is for everyone to get at least an 85% on each quiz. Most are at that level, with a handful higher and a few a little lower. However, Beatrice has taken 5 quizzes over the books she read so far this year and has gotten a grand total of 4 questions right. Since there were 5 questions on each quiz, 5 quizzes makes it a 4/25 or 16%, somewhat under our goal of 85%. However, Beatrice keeps smiling, apparently oblivious to her inability to understand what she has read. Until last week. Her smile got bigger, her eyes got brighter and though she was too shy to give me a celebratory 'Farver High-Five,' I could tell she was proud.

While Erin and I look for our gigajillion- or googlepahihodillion-th 100% sometime in the near future, Beatrice will be quietly looking for her 3rd. You see, last week, totally out of the blue, Beatrice's big smiling, bright eyed, no high-fiving self got back to back 100%s on her reading quizzes. 2 in a row. I was so proud of her. It did not matter that I had helped her read the quiz questions, because Beatrice answered the questions totally on her own. It also did not matter the books she had read were at a first grade level. Looking at all the hoops we have to get through in our first year as teachers is daunting. Seeing the performance of our students on state tests can be distressing. Watching the paper pile up higher each week can be down right depressing. But seeing Beatrice's face after those 100%s, well, for a moment I forgot about all the rest. I was happy. Even if she wouldn't get me a high five. It didn't necessarily erase all the doubt and anxiety I've felt these first few weeks, but it reminded me of why I wanted to do this, to be a teacher.
Congratulations Beatrice!