Homecoming 13. Video Games

Coming home to the Moulin Rouge!

Homecoming happened at the great Moulin Rouge! On September 24th, Fort students all celebrated coming back for another year of schooling. What happened? Who won royalty? Who stayed longest? While that last question might not be answered, the first two will, with a recount of all the great events. At the Moulin themed dance everyone partied. The theme colors were red, black, and silver and the courtyard was decked out with streamers, a red carpet and balloons. Many photo opportunities, such as at the bench with the black backdrop, the giant photo set up at the start, and just the entire party in general. The DJ played 2022 hits and the rave kicked up to eleven.

Food and drinks were served for five dollars, which after a night of dancing many were excited to buy them to enjoy. At around 8:40 the homecoming royalty for freshman, sophomores, juniors, whereas seniors were announced at the Homecoming football game. The royalty were announced in this order: Freshmen, Lillie Piermen and Isabel Laib. Sophomores, Lila Sasse and Molly Molane. Juniors, Brianna Ruffner and Lacey Mchan. Seniors, Theresa Lopez and Raymond Chen. Congrats to them!

Video Game News by Tjay Barhitte

Elden Ring offers lots of adventure, a fascinating universe,

super difficult bosses, and so many secrets. Players really

love the game because it’s so hard to play. Elden Ring is

the most talked-about video game of 2022, despite — or

perhaps because of — its immense difficulty and complexity.

Modern Warfare 2 was released on October 28, 2022,

for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One,

and Xbox Series X/S. Like its predecessor, the game takes

place in a realistic and modern setting. The campaign follows British SAS forces as they team up with various other countries’ military

members to locate a terrorist.

In Batman Gotham Knights, Batman is dead. A new expansive, criminal underworld has swept the streets of Gotham City. It is now

up to the Batman Family - Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin - to protect Gotham, bring hope to its citizens, discipline to its

cops, and fear to its criminals.

I-READY FOR SADNESS

I-Ready. I know so many of you guys hate this test! It’s crazy how much of our student body trashes, absolutely trashes, on this test. It’s called a criterionreferenced test, and I’ll explain why in a second. I´ll talk about the strengths, it’s weaknesses, the thoughts of you guys; the students, and more. What is I-Ready? I-Ready tests for English and math. I-Ready is a test that selects questions from a database, and has you answer them.

It will then record your answers, digitally, and then give you harder or easier questions depending on what you got. It will continue to adjust your overall skill level until it finds a happy medium, where you get 50% right, and 50% wrong. This system is called criterion-referenced testing; results are based on which questions you got right, and determine the final skill level. Is this system better than conventional pre tests and normal testing? Potentially.

Let’s get into why I-Ready is good.

First, the use of I-Ready. You can use I-Ready as a stronger pre-test. It can identify a student’s strengths and weaknesses. Because I-Ready is multiple choice, all of its multiple choice answers have meaning too. All of the answers are linked to an accident in the process, letting I-Ready know potentially where you could have messed up. This tells the teachers what they need to teach! Some of them also use it as a checkpoint, letting them learn what their students have done and what they need to improve. This makes it really important for some teachers, as they can skip some reviews and help with big other problems. This really helps in minimizing the amount of class time wasted on topics everyone understands.

Now let’s get into sections. For English, the test is very good at identifying the understanding level of the article. And for math, the test is very good at identifying problems in the students’ decision making processes, leading to mistakes or accidents, and a wrong answer. Everything listed above sounds awesome! This test sounds super helpful and useful for teachers and students, leading to less boring classes and more effective teaching… until you get to the problems. This magnificent house of cards is going to come down due to some glaring problems. Problem number one. We didn’t even learn that! Let’s give some context. You are doing pretty well, you got so many questions right so far! You are on a streak, but then, everything starts falling apart. Well, look at this. The better you do, the harder questions it gives you. But it will do this in small blocks, leading to sometimes HUGE increases in difficulty. You don’t even know this stuff. You don’t know the answer to 10, maybe 15 questions in a row. This throws a wrench in your critical thinking, and you don’t even want to try anymore. This is a problem.

By disabling students who want to do well, so soon as they start, is going to lead to incorrect results! This means that the teacher is now misinformed, and doesn’t truly know the level of the class. This can send your virtual “rating” or skill level down, and know you are labeled incorrectly, as not understanding this or that.

Also, this test is boring. This test has the potential to take up to 3 HOURS, or even more if someone is slow, or I-Ready doesn’t understand their level. This means the student doesn’t even fall into the trap listed above, they can just start to lose stamina, or get bored. I know some of you guys don’t even want to try this test. You hate it! You can’t see the good things about it, and I understand! This does mean that any of the effectiveness listed above, doesn’t even qualify. Now, every time you try this test again, you can’t stop thinking about the previous times, and don’t want to try. Let’s get to another pretty big problem. This influences English so much. Language is subjective, or to be more accurate, dependent on the population. Well alright, doesn’t seem too bad. That’s where you are wrong. With questions like; “What does this mean to the reader?”, “What’s the moral of the story?”, or even “What does this word mean or what are its connotations?” This is a big time issue. What does this mean to you is a question that should never be asked when it comes to a “correct answer”, because there isn’t any!

Language can be so much different to different groups of people. This means I-Ready can label you as not understanding reading, not being able to analyze, and more. Let’s get into your guys’ opinions. Let’s start with some stats, taken from the polls. These will be percentages of the students who answered. These may be higher or lower than the actual thoughts of our whole population. Let’s start with how well you guys think I-Ready gauges and portrays your abilities. 37% of you said a 1 out of 5, and 26% said 2 out of 5. And I think this quote portrays it perfectly:

“It is very long and requires a lot of focus. The articles are, for the most part, not relatable to me.”

I think this is the root of the problem, a lack of focus. There are so many other things to worry about, a non graded standardized test, where the scores don’t visibly impact you at all, will not get results. This student really knows the problem, and shares it in the poll; “I personally don’t think I-Ready is needed in highschool. We already have the cat’s sat’s psat’s and finals at the end of semesters. I-Ready is added stress for a test that doesn’t even count towards anything grade wise and is just another non counted standardized graded test.”

It is absolutely useless to the average student. It barely affects them. You need something to hold their focus, and what we have right now, just aint it. What can you do to fix it? Make it relatable, useful to the students. Honestly, look at what the students are doing right now, what apps are popular. They hold attention because what they contain holds its own value! They don’t have to rely on the student to create their own excitement, the app knows what they already like! You could ask students what articles they want to read, and test them on that. You could add games into the breaks instead of breathing exercises. Also, you could just make it shorter! I know so many people aren’t going to make it to the end of this article, they just don’t care enough. But, I digress. I-Ready has potential to be useful to teachers and students, it’s halfway there. By fixing some of these more issues you could get a more helpful diagnosis of the students skills. I think so much more can be done then what is currently being done. But also, some of the responsibility falls to you guys. Do take your time, you can make it worth your time by making the results real. And, like it or not, I-Ready is probably here to stay.