Surprise!  The testing at the middle school started today.

Everything went basically well.  Except that there was a "downtown" lady there.  So there were a few awkward moments where we (the department teachers) were telling the kids one thing and then the district lady got on the microphone and said the exact opposite.  Oh well.

So there we are, giving a test to about 100 middle-school Spanish-speakers, and a lady going around undermining all the procedures we had planned out.  Of course things start to unravel.  I interviewed several kids with basic Spanish questions to gage their fluency (this is a regulated oral section).  Some of the answers were extremely sad.  For example, I would ask (in Spanish) "What would you do with a million dollars?"  which is a great question to judge correct use of the conditional tense.  Most kids answered with "go shopping" or "buy 5 ferraris" and other things you might expect a 13 year old to do with a million dollars.  But one shy little kid quietly responded, "I would buy food for my family."  I immediately said, "oh that's great!" so it wouldn't look like I was pitying him or singling him out... but that made me pretty sad for the whole morning.

The only other response to the oral questions worth mentioning this punk:  When I asked "What did you do last summer?"  He looked right at me and said, "I smoked a TON of marijuana."
I just took his paper and left.  I get that they want attention, and I even understand that some might be trying weed already.  But who would say that to a teacher?

The cafeteria portion culminated with a kid who looks exactly like this, except fatter: