O%

This post isn’t going to make a lot of sense to the general public, much like my entire job. I know there are folks in the world who think that early childhood is easy-peasy, or just glorified babysitting, but trust me – it’s not. We make lesson plans and make assessments. Let’s talk about the assessments.

We are using a national system to enter our assessments. I won’t say its name, but it rhymes with BOLD. I really dislike it. We assess children over nine domains with 32 objectives within those, and most objectives have 2-5 sub categories. Twice a year we have to have all our documentation entered to select and ‘finalize’ the child’s learning level at that time. It’s called a checkpoint. Monday, October 31st, is when the next checkpoint is due.

I’ve been chugging along with entering my information, and had a conversation a while back with a coworker where she said something like, “It’s a pain that you can’t just select their level when you are entering documentation.” I didn’t really pay attention to the rest, because I was entering my stuff and selecting the level. No problem.

Except it was a problem. Yesterday I was ready to pull the trigger and ‘finalize’ – days ahead of the deadline! I was 100% done! See?

Look at those glorious triple digits! Then, my director said, “For some reason, I can’t see your documentation. It says you’re at 0%.”

What?

What?

I went into the ‘checkpoint’ area, and suddenly, what my co-worker said weeks ago came into focus. (They have changed the format and this all looked different from the spring checkpoint.) Yes. Yes, you did have to go to another page and click the level ALSO. Ugh.

I spent some time last night working on it, because every early childhood teacher in America is scrambling to get their checkpoints in by Monday and the servers are crashing.

I’m at 55% now.