Day 137: Active Monitoring

State Testing: Day 2 of 14

There are few things that teachers find more tedious than "Active Monitoring" during a standardized test.

Active Monitoring means that test administrators are actively engaged while students are working on the test, moving about the room so they can be aware of student's actions!

Active Monitoring IS NOT: 

Catching up on e-mail

Grading papers

Surfing the net

Taking a nap 

                                                                -STAAR Test Training

So no grading, no reading, no spacing out for the duration of test administration, which can be 3-4 hours at a time.

Teachers who manage to avoid this duty often feel as though they've won the lottery.

This is such an issue that multiple lists have been written that detail the things you can do while actively monitoring test administration.  These lists often include things such as: memorize the first, middle and last names of all student in the room, find items around the room that rhyme, practice reciting the alphabet backwards and time yourself.

Yesterday, I counted the ceiling tiles and arranged different ways of counting them, including chunking them into Tetris pieces and Dr. Mario pills.  I color coded them in my mind.

Today, I decided to take a more health-conscious approach.

I have been attempting to eat healthier and be more active.  I have fallen off of my running routine lately and with my schedule, having to pick my daughter up from school and my wife going to roller derby, going to the gym has not been as regular as I would like.

My phone logs my steps for me, so I marked down how many were recorded before testing started.  I also didn't want to wander aimlessly, so I selected a path that, while simple, didn't allow my mind to fall into autopilot.

After several circuits through the room, I decided that I wanted to find more statistics than just my steps/distance.  I timed how long it took for me to make 4 circuits, all of which fell within .5 seconds of each other.  I counted the number of steps that it took to get to the end of a column and how many to cross over to the next column.

I also decided that, in addition to keep the information, I should also mark down the path that I was taking, both as a list and as an annotated map of the room.

At the conclusion of today's testing, I had a nice amount of data, a scanned copy of which can be found below.

Here are the highlights:

Steps Taken: 8721
Steps per Circuit: 96
Time per Circuit: 50 seconds
Approx Distance: 4.3 miles
Approx # of Circuits: 90
Approx Time: 75 minutes

I actively monitored for 4.3 miles today!