Year-End Testing

On Wednesdays I volunteer in the boys' classes. I start off, first thing, in Garrett's class. If I went to his class any later, I'd be up in the business of their math rotations which involve some of them going into different classrooms. When I was in second grade, we just had whoever we had and we stayed with that teacher from dawn until dusk (or whenever the bell rang, whichever came first). We didn't have groups for math and art and music and computers. Come to think of it, we didn't have computers. I feel like those things came about in third or fourth grade and involved black screens with green writing. We played Oregon Trail but it was just a green box bouncing across a screen and we only ever had time to make it to Independence Rock. I would have gladly welcomed rotating to different classrooms in the second grade because my second grade teacher was terrible.

Seriously. The only good thing that came out spending a year with Ms. Cathy Boyle (we had to call her Mizz Boyle. Not Miss Boyle. DEFINITELY not Mrs. Boyle. She was MIZZ BOYLE or no Boyle at all.) was that she gave me a penchant for the written word. Of course, that's because reading and writing were the only subjects she really taught us. This was super because it left me with a rather large deficit in mathematics which I have long since given up on overcoming. She also wore her hair either very curly or stick straight and the straight days were not good days. When she took time to curl her hair, I knew we were going to have a good day. Otherwise, it was doomed from the start.

I digress.

Yesterday, I was in the hallway quizzing kids on high frequency words when the principal made some announcements over the speaker. She said that they were going to be doing year-end testing. (I am confused by this because my children don't get out of school until July 2. For the record, here I am nearly three years in to my children's elementary schooling and I still hate year round school. I still think these breaks are ridiculous. I still want ALL THE SUMMER! Jordan District, are you listening to me???) Anyway, she said year-end testing but that is NOT what I heard.

Nope.

I heard her say that they were going to be doing urine testing. And listen. I knew I had to have heard her wrong. Once I was sure that couldn't have been what she said, I quickly processed that she had, in fact, said, "year-end." However, it took me a full three seconds to come to the conclusion that I definitely had heard her wrong and my very first thought was, "What the....?" and that was followed by, "The heck you are..."

It's not that I think they'd find anything but, somehow, running through my head during those quick three seconds was the fact that I had not signed any kind of permission slip allowing my children to hand their urine over to school officials. So, I guess the moral of this story is that the school can collect my kids' urine only after I've signed a permission slip.