Reading, Writing, Speaking

Each year, the local school district sends out a succinct summary of how your child is doing, based on their standard tests. We received ours today. Its not current -- the results of the tests she took about eight months ago -- but it's interesting.

The report is divided into reading, writing, and math. As normal, she was rated in the fourth, or highest, level of proficiency for reading. They don't give a value for that box -- just X and above. Her rating put her comfortably into about the middle, I'd guess, of that highest rating. Her math rating was about the middle of the third box, which is a tad surprising -- she usually does a little better than that. Still, no problem. Her writing, though -- she was rated only a bit into the third box for that. Not borderline, but, as someone once said, she could see it from where she was.. Being me, this alarmed me. I was ready to sign her up for writing courses, tell her she needed to focus on writing ability. I thought about sending a note to her English instructor (who, incidentally, is passionate about understanding a piece of writing; not so much the grammatical structure as the style, the content, why it was written the way it was). Then I thought 'okay, be aware, but calm down a bit.' Besides, she's gone all day today at a color guard event.

But I'll show it to her mother this afternoon. I bet her reaction will be much like mine.

Its funny to read reactions to the debate last night. You sometime wonder: did you see the debate I did? Disregarding the groupies, who are loud in their fervent praises of how incredibly well their candidate did, most commentors seem to feel as I did -- it was a balanced presentation, with slow parts and fast parts, with parts where McCain did well and parts where Obama did well. Some pointed out something that I'd thought -- that Obama had occasionally come off as a disinterested law school professor, and was occasionally deferential to McCain -- while others thought that McCain seemed old, tired (I didn't -- I thought he looked pretty good). I did think it amusing that in the spin party afterward, someone noticed that Biden was there, spinning like crazy, but Palin wasn't there at all.

The spaghetti sauce is cooling now. Looks pretty good.