Proctoring the ELA's

Oh New York State testing, how we love thee. Um, NOT! With the new regulations in place, teachers are not allowed to be in the room with their own students giving them the standardized test. In my school, the teachers swapped grades to make it easy. We then had to have a second person in the room to make sure no funny business is going on. It only takes one teacher breaking the rules in previous years to change the way we do things. Both adults in the room have to walk around to make sure everything is fine. I think it just distracts the students when two people are hovering over them. I'm in a 5th grade classroom with a 6th grade teacher. He reads the prompts and I stand there and take up  a lot of space. My job today was to walk around with a box of tissues and hand them out every 5 seconds to students that needed to blow their nose. I can't believe how many tissues the kids went through! I know, it was a thrilling job, but somebody's gotta do it. Next week, we will be doing the same thing for math. The kids get tested too much. Unfortunately, there's really nothing we can do about it but accept it and move on.