Although I missed our class dearly, I have to admit that I had a great time in Olympia. I’ve talked a lot about “range finding,” and the best way to describe it is this:
We looked at the rubrics for the short answer questions on the math WASL. We looked to make sure the rubrics were fair and reasonable for 3rd-5th grade students.
It was a good experience because I think sometimes we teachers spend a lot of time blaming “the people in Olympia,” but everyone I encountered here had students’ success at the forefront of every decision they made.
Here are some photos from my trip — they’re not terribly exciting because most of what I did was a) confidential, b) eating, c) doing Pilates, or d) sleeping. :)
Now, although the domed building is called the capitol, the city of Olympia is called the state’s capital.
I stayed further down the street, in the Phoenix Inn. The employees took very good care of me there.
Keep your fingers crossed that I did a good job and that I’m invited back in the future!
Oh, finally, before we left, I had to determine the total time we spent range finding. Seriously — I was the official time keeper. If I kept time incorrectly, we wouldn’t get paid for the full amount of time we spent working! Remember the discussion we had about real-life problem solving in class last week, ladies and gentlemen? That’s what I was doing! I thought you might enjoy seeing the elapsed time problem I had to solve (I got it wrong the first time, but I fixed it!).
(Note: I rounded a bit at the end at the request of our facilitator.)
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