I didn’t get around to making Reubens last night; we went over to my parents’ place for chili instead– so we made them tonight.  This was after another excessively long Monday where the kids spent the whole day doing their best to convince me that they were stupid– only to then turn around and pass the first Acuity test of the year (there are three; it’s primarily used as a measure of growth) by more or less flying colors.  All but two of the kids in my first class passed, 60% of my mostly-special-ed class passed (which is pretty damn good; just trust me on that), and all of my kids in Algebra passed– which they’d bloody well better have if they wanted to live.  This, though, from kids who literally ten minutes before the test were trying to convince me they’d never seen long division before.

Two pounds of corned beef and a pound of Swiss cheese made it a bit better.  Along with some rye bread and some sauerkraut and some homemade Russian dressing.  Mmmm.

This, by the way, is the shit that makes me wonder what the hell we’re doing in education in this country.  Should I be judged if a kid who has been taught long division by four different teachers four straight years tries to act like he’s never seen it before?  Am I just that shitty at my job, along with whichever different teachers these kids had before me?  Or can we actually blame the kids for willfully embracing dumbassery?

I really don’t know the answer.  Maybe we all just suck at this and everything they’re saying about American public schools is true.  I don’t know what to do with a kid who has been told the rules of punctuation by every teacher they’ve ever had in their entire lives and still can’t figure out that sentences begin with capital letters and end with some form of punctuation.  Or who treats apostrophes like they’re an early warning system for the letter S.  After every teacher they’ve ever had showed them the right way to do it.

At some point, it has to be their fault.  Or maybe not!  Maybe I’m just that bad at my job– and I, supposedly, am one of the good ones.  Bad teachers must literally suck knowledge out of the heads of the young scholars in their classrooms.

And then they go and pass the Acuity test, which is either a sign that the Acuity isn’t really measuring anything or that they were fucking with me all morning.

Either way, I’m losing my ability to put up with it.

Anyway, I’m gonna go watch the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother, a show I still watch only because I’m a masochist.  I expect it to annoy me; that’s what it’s for nowadays.