Fools in the administration continue to astound me. Today, with one day's notice, we got midterms to give to our kids in math and reading. Not only did they totally fail to notify us about them at all (and giving kids 2 hours of pop quiz is a recipe for stress, even when you tell them it doesn't really count), but they were so half-assed. As my roomate said, it seemed like they were put together by some day-late, dollar-short administrator at 3 in the morning. My class got question books that didn't match answer sheets (mark A, B, C, or D in the question book for #3, but #3 in the answer sheet only had E, F, G, or H). Not only that, the test had the kids referring to maps on pages where no maps were, and telling them to answer "questions 13-25 using this passage" when the whole test only had 20 questions. When you're trying to reassure kids who've become terrified of high-stakes standardized tests that they're going to do OK, this is not reassuring. Frankly, if this is the quality of the final tests these kids get, no wonder so many of them fail. This shit is not happening in Westchester.