who me? Lol nah, sometimes I'll work out and they swing all over the place. No control over those free thinkers. I could very well drive balls in my back yard though. I'll have to clear a spot of snow haha, maybe mark some spots in the fields to aim for. Just bought a couple cans of silly string yesterday. Why? Why not? I'll find a use for em other than scaring the shit out of friends when they turn the corner and I spray em.
back to the topic on hand, the problem is PSSA's or whatever the abbreviation would be in your state. They teach strictly to what is on those test because the scores are what determine a large amount of funding. We used to spend the majority of our time teaching ONLY for those, with material provided, practice questions etc. Whole months wasted, veering off of the normal curriculum (which was shit any way) in order to study for the PSSA's, in return, we would learn nothing during that time. Then kids would just fill in random answers to get the test over with as soon as possible anyway. It was a novel idea, the schools with higher scores meaning they were teaching better, would be rewarded with more funding. But #1, it backfired completely and totally fucked up a lot of schools. And #2, it obviously wasn't thought out for more than a couple minutes because wouldn't you want to fund the schools with lower scores, to help them improve? Rather than increasing the gap between the high-tec classroom, AAA schools and the A schools using 20 year old text books? Not to mention in my state, we just got a new governor in the last year or something, who cut education funding ridiculously (because that's exactly what we need, less money for our education system...) and our local hs is now over 1 million in debt, after firing multiple EXCELLENT teachers in an attempt to cut cost. Oh, and they just bought a shit ton of iPads. People are so idiotic with money it makes me sick.
edit: how do you know I live on a lake cheesus?