Today wasn’t anyone’s favorite science class, but at least we got it out of the way. Students were randomly given one of the three 8th grade Trimester Exams and took them as a pre-test. Having a third of the cluster take each test is enough to compute a solid average to measure student growth. We won’t be able to see exactly how much each student improved in each subject area, but we will be able to track the group’s growth as a whole as the year progresses. And by doing it this way, we only lose one day of teaching, as opposed to three.

It was good to get the pre-tests over with; we won’t have anymore for the rest of the year. Tomorrow we will begin our study of the Metric System.