The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
…yeah, that literally couldn’t have ended any better than it did. I need to marathon my way through the entire series again this weekend. If you’re not watching this show you need to torrent it or steal it or build a fuckin’ time machine and go back in time and watch it or summat. Holy shit.
What should I get obsessed with next? Looking at you, Orphan Black.
Picture One is my front yard. Note the mostly clear deep blue sky and the snow-free, mostly-dry driveway. It is nearly fifty degrees outside and beautiful. The snow is melting as fast as snow can; it looks like it’s raining by the door to my back yard, where the eaves are not quite angled properly.
My phone just blew up about a “severe” winter storm watch due to begin at midnight Tuesday night.
The second picture, I think, needs no explanation. Other than, maybe, BAM.
There is a note in the letter along with the check sternly warning me to have this deposited within five (5) business days. Ha. Are there really people who get checks this large and go Oh, I’ll get to that when I have a chance?
I may be rather quiet today, other than this; I did something horrible to the muscles in my abdomen sometime last night that the paranoid/hypochondriac part of my brain is insisting is, like, twelve hernias and the more sensible part of me figures is probably some sort of muscle pull. At any rate I plan on spending the rest of the day lying down and continuing to mostly avoid the interwebs until I’ve seen True Detective tonight. Note that if you’ve left a comment anywhere on the site I haven’t seen it yet and won’t until tonight. Regular angry posteration should resume tomorrow as expected.
But not in that order.
This has been… kind of a shitty day, though not in any way I can put my finger on. I normally don’t notice the time change, and don’t remember ever having reason to gripe about it before, but I am messed up today for some reason. I may just be getting sick, in which case that sickness can go straight to hell because this is ISTEP week and I do not have the goddamn time.
I took a nap this afternoon, for God’s sake, which I don’t do very often, and which just made everything worse– I woke up feeling sicker, tireder, and crabbier than I’d been when I went to sleep. I’ve spent most of the rest of the day reading. Ordinarily “read and then took a nap” would be a good Sunday, and it’s not like there’s any work hanging over my head or anything like that; I finished that huge pile of grading yesterday.
Item: I have to go on a complete internet blackout starting around eight or nine, because I’m not going to be able to catch the True Detective finale, to say nothing of Walking Dead, until tomorrow… this has been the case for the last several Sundays, of course, but I figure tonight it several times as important. True Detective has been the best thing to happen to TV for years, as far as I’m concerned, and I ain’t going anywhere near the Web so y’all can screw it up for me.
Another item: I’m never pre-ordering anything from Amazon again. Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance will have been out for a solid week before it finally shows up at my house on Tuesday (it might be here tomorrow; I often find that I get things a day earlier than they project.) Ordinarily this wouldn’t bother me except that I pre-ordered the motherfucker in July. See, Amazon, I pre-order shit so that I can get it right away when it’s available. That shit shoulda been shipped to be at my doorstep at the latest the day after release.
I finished a re-read of The Way of Kings– that’s the first book in the series– this afternoon, meaning that my last four or five books have all been fantasy epic doorstops. It’s stunning to me just how much better the Sanderson book is than The Wheel of Time. I know I’ve done two posts about that reread already, but… man, while I enjoy Jordan’s writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, going through the series again (I’ve finished the first three books) has convinced me that the books really aren’t any damn good. They’re engaging, which is a good thing, but nothing fucking happens in the entire second book, which is like eight hundred goddamn pages long. In the SECOND BOOK. The characters are all literally in the exact same place at the end of the book as they are in the beginning. In the third book, the main character barely shows up.
This is bullshit. And I’m not making it to the end without a massive expenditure of willpower, as there are fourteen books in the series and I haven’t hit the long ones yet. My wife is trying to finish the final book as we speak; she was about a third of the way through it when I started The Eye of the World and I finished the first three WoT books plus the first Sanderson book and she’s still not done with it, and I’m pretty sure nothing but bullheadedness and spite are keeping her reading at this point. They’re just not very goddamned good, that’s all.
It’s almost 11:00 and I don’t care.
Teaching is for stupidheads.
I’m pouring myself a cup of coffee. I need dairy, so I go to the fridge to get milk.
I not only grabbed sour cream instead of milk, I got so far as to grab a spoon from the drawer before I realized what the hell I was doing.
I may be about to have a long day.
I have, for about a week now, been bouncing around ideas for a way to write a post with that title. I can’t do it. So I’m just going to link to a bunch of YouTube videos for songs that, in my opinion, are perfect. The reasons may not be clear; for some of them I’m not even sure there is a reason. There are lots of perfect songs; this is not going to be remotely an exhaustive list, and it might even be something I return to from time to time. Feel free to argue and/or suggest other songs in comments.
Also, don’t get too het up about the order. I happen to be listening to #1 right now, which is why it’s first. (Actually, as I’m putting this together? Go ahead and pay attention to the order, because I’m fascinating myself with how my own brain works as I choose these songs. This… means something.)
Harvey Danger, “Flagpole Sitta”
Bob Marley, “No Woman No Cry”
Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue”
The Dave Matthews Band, “Ants Marching”
The Presidents of the United States of America, “Peaches”
Pearl Jam, “Black”
Pink Floyd, “Comfortably Numb”
David Bowie, “Space Oddity”
Ol’ Dirty Bastard, “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”
K’naan, “Fatima”
…because I can never, ever stop talking about this.
You may recall, if you’ve been reading for a bit, my post where I declared all grades to be arbitrary bullshit. Yes, all grades. Go ahead and click the link for additional explanation, or just click here to get the whole three-part series. What is also arbitrary bullshit, always, is how we determine what is a “pass” and a “fail” on a standardized test.
Lemme back up.
I didn’t do any teaching today. The first round of the ISTEP test is next week. It’s what they call the “Applied Skills” portion of the test, with the multiple choice part coming in either the last week of April or the first week of May; I don’t remember. Basically, the Applied Skills portion of ISTEP is the story problems part. It’s still paper-based and the kids have to write everything out and show all of their work, which is why it’s so much earlier than the rest of the test– because it can’t be graded by a machine.
I spent all day today with The Hunger Games playing on my class DVD player, calling my kids back for what are called test talks— a brief three- or four-minute conference with me where we went over their ISTEP score from last year, their performance on the three Acuity tests over the course of this year, and– and this was a new wrinkle I threw in this year– their performance, specifically, on the Applied Skills portion of last year’s ISTEP.
It will not surprise you, I think, regardless of whether you teach or not, to discover that kids (not just mine) tend to have a harder time with open-ended story problems than they do with (somewhat) more objective multiple-choice problems. For one, you can’t guess your way through an open-ended question, and just multiplying together every number you can find– the go-to “I don’t get this” reaction– is not often the right response. I had many, many conversations today where I praised a kid on their high ISTEP score, then flipped the scoresheet over to the other side and watched their faces fall when I showed them their scores on the objective portion of the test. My reason for doing this? Those are the money points. Nearly all of my kids can substantially improve their ISTEP scores just by being a little bit more conscientious on the applied skills test they take on Tuesday. It’s literally a matter of moving some zeroes to ones. Individual points on this test count more toward their overall score than a single question on a multiple-choice test will, so if they focus on doing their best on Tuesday they’ve got a really good chance of bringing up their overall score.
Back to arbitrary bullshit: I discovered today, and I’d suspected this before but I hadn’t actually seen proof, that it is possible to pass the ISTEP for mathematics in seventh and eighth grade and get no points whatsoever on the entire Applied Skills portion of the test. I have at least two kids who pulled that off– literally zero Applied Skills points, but a pass on the overall test. No points at all for “Figure the area of a rectangle that is four feet by three feet,” but we’ll pass you if you can figure out that C, 12, is the answer if the problem is 4×3.
You tell me how useful a “pass” actually is under those circumstances.