Month: May 2021

In which we have a problem

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

On the one hand, something has finally dragged me away from Skyrim, although I’m not remotely close to finishing the game and will be going back to it sooner or later. Skyrim is just that big, if you’ve never played it, that a month of four or five days a week play has gotten me maybe halfway through it. If I’m lucky.

On the other hand, the game that has dragged me away from Skyrim is Returnal, otherwise known as the game where you can’t save, and I just had a pretty successful run (I finally found the sword, and I beat the first boss for the first time) that took nearly two hours, on a night where I legitimately had a handful of other things I would like to have done. I was having fun, mind you, and I don’t necessarily begrudge the game the time, because it’s immensely satisfying to play– but I would like to have quit after, say, an hour of that successful run to go do something else, and come back to the game at some other time. I’m only typing this now because I finally got killed a bit of the way into the second level and thus was able to get up and walk away.

They’re gonna have to fix this, I think, for this game to be viable. The basic gameplay loop is a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m going to get more efficient at it as I play more and get better, but tonight was about as long as I ever have to play at a stretch (he said, ignoring the imminence of summer vacation) and they’re going to have to build in a viable way to put the game down and walk away or I’m really not going to be able to play this for much longer.

I had a whole thing planned here as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, but it’s almost Goddamned nine already, and I guess I’l let you wait until tomorrow and tell you how my Cheating Solution went. I expect to leave work tomorrow with every student I have angry with me.

In which modernity is stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

You may not be aware of this, if you’re not a math teacher or a middle school student: did you know you can just, like, Google any equation, and it will not only solve it for you but it’ll actually explain how to do it? I’ve talked about calculators here before, and my policy remains more or less the same: that I allow calculators on any assignment where calculation is not the point, because I don’t want a kid’s issues with basic multiplication to get in the way when they’re trying to internalize the Pythagorean theorem.

This one is … a bit more annoying. I mean, sure, it explains how to do the problem, which is an actual advantage over calculators– it’s not like the calculator is going to walk you through the multiplication algorithm or anything like that– but the Venn diagram of the types of kids who are going to Google equations rather than solving them and the types of kids who will read explanations is two completely separate circles. Also, I’m a little hamstrung right now by the fact that I need to present my assignments on computers; the easiest way to ensure that more of them do the work properly is to simply present the assignment on paper and restrict device use during those classes. I could also require them to give me answers as decimals, since Google always puts theirs as fractions, but that’s just going to add a different confounding factor to my grades, dragging down the kids who don’t know how to convert fractions to decimals and the kids who don’t read directions.

There is also the possibility of simply writing more complicated assignments than a list of fifteen equations to solve, of course; I could do word problems or any number of other things, but the problem is the specific skill I need them to have actually is solving equations. I need them to understand the logic of modifying both sides of an equation at once, the idea that constants and variables alike can be moved willy-nilly from one side of an equals sign to the other as needed, so long as you follow the rules properly … because if they don’t get this shit at this easily-Googlable level, life’s going to suddenly get much harder in high school when they hit equations that you can’t, at least yet, easily feed into Google. I think anything requiring a superscript or any actual math symbology might be a problem, for example, although I haven’t tried to test that.

I’m going to choose to ignore this particular problem, for the moment. There are ten instructional days of school left and I have two days of equations practice planned before we get back into systems, and I’ll make sure to write those assignments so that they’re not as easily Googled. Frankly, most of the kids who are cheating have grades so deep into failing territory that it barely even matters, so I’m not going to waste the energy necessary to stress about it other than maybe barking at them about it tomorrow. It will, children, actually hurt you much more than it will ever hurt me if you don’t get this stuff. You may think I’m training you to solve equations, which, true, you are unlikely to be presented with as an adult! However, mastering basic fucking logic is a life skill, as it turns out.

Music

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music1 Comment

The highlight of my day was trying to find a Lauryn Hill album in my music collection and then after several minutes of angrily insisting to myself that I owned it and I wanted to listen to it and god damn it did I lose files when I switched over to this computer??? I realized that the reason that I couldn’t find the album is that Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu are two whole-ass different people and somehow my brain thought “search for Lauryn Hill” and my fingers searched for Erykah Badu.

At any rate, Lauryn’s Unplugged album remains a Goddamned masterpiece. Erykah Badu’s is not a masterpiece, because Erykah Badu is a different person and she never recorded an Unplugged album.

Dumb-ass brain.

I can do this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

10 days left with my kids this year, and I had my first “maybe I should turn around and go home or at least drive off a bridge” moment on my way in to work this morning, which is really weird, because this hasn’t been that kind of year. Like, yesterday was probably the worst day since I’ve been back, and yesterday was nothing when compared to a bad day in literally any other year I’ve been teaching. Like, darn, I had two hard classes and wrote two kids up. Suck it up, Buttercup; I think my record was, what, seventeen in a day at the Hell School in Chicago? And that was a year when I only had maybe 60 kids in a day and not 140?

(Well, okay, I’m probably not actually seeing sixty kids a day right now, but you know what I mean.)

I’ve got the rest of the year planned out; I need one good day and I can actually get all the assignments written out for those classes. Hell, if I had any balls I’d just put all of them online right now as a grand experiment in what the kids would actually do. “Here is all of your work for the rest of the year; go for it” might be a really interesting thing to say, and it’s not like anybody is watching me too closely right now or would be mad about it if they were.

… hell, I might actually do that, just to see. The data collection aspect of it might be too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it, though. But it would be a fun story.

I need to start some hard-core planning for next year. I’m getting lazy, and I need to break out of that; it’s been a long time since I had the same job for three years in a row, and I need to make sure I’m actually doing a better job next year than I have been. (Not that I’ve been doing poorly, mind you, but the thing about even my first year at my current school was I had to hit the ground running, and this last year and the last quarter of the year before that have been “figure-it-out-as-you-go” kinds of years. I need this one to be well-planned and effective, and I probably ought to alter some things about my practice or at least try out some new shit and see how it works.

Lots to think about. That makes it video game time, obviously.

In which I am frustrated

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It was inevitable; after basically a month back at work, I had a really rough day today. I have done a total of three office referrals all year before today and one of them was on someone else’s behalf; I did two just today. My morning classes were fine; my two afternoon classes were nuts enough that they tossed the whole day into shit status, and it’s currently 6:38 and I’m ready to go the hell to bed. I spent part of yesterday contemplating switching grades before deciding not to do it; today I just want to throw all the 8th graders away.

Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure, but … gah, I need them to not be crapweasels. May 26 can’t get here fast enough.

#REVIEW: A bagel

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

I actually meant to write a blog post at work today and ended up surprisingly busy for a Wednesday. I have gotten efficient enough this year that I often don’t have much to do on these non-student days, and today I managed to plan out the entire rest of the year and build a new desk chair, so I feel like things were accomplished. I have, as I said earlier this week, a few blog posts rattling around in the ol’ melon, as they say (I have no idea who the “they” is that says this, but it sounds good) and they have … somewhat different tones. The first is looking thoughtfully at differential discipline as it affects students of color, and particularly black boys, in school, and comparing a school model of discipline to policing. I will have to write it very carefully and expect some pushback, as the way I’m currently conceptualizing things may actually require me to be slapped around a bit.

Or I could review a bagel I had this morning.

The choice is pretty obvious, I think.

Let’s talk about Einstein Bros. Bagels and their Nova Lox bagel.

This is going to be the second food-related blog post in a week or so, and in fact it grew out of the Dagwood’s Supreme Twitter conversation that I memorialized here recently. You’ll notice that there are some replies here and there that didn’t make it into the post; one of them moved to discussing pastrami, and at some point later there I revealed the fact that I have never had lox. There’s really no good reason for me to have had lox (that’s a lie; I was a Jewish Studies major, for God’s sake) and upon realizing I’d made it to nearly 45 without having any I decided it was a problem I needed to fix.

Well, turns out there’s an Einstein Bros. Bagel place in town, and they offer a Nova Lox bagel, which probably isn’t as authentic as something you’d get from a kosher deli in New York or some shit like that but fuck it I live in Indiana and I’ll take what I can get.

Y’all! This is delicious!

I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising, as I’m a fan of five of the six ingredients that the food is made of so long as I think of lox as “smoked salmon” and not lox per se– I’ve probably had capers at some point or another in my life but I can’t think of when– and the textural combination of bagel, lox, tomato, cream cheese, red onion (the only kind of onion I can eat raw) and capers is Goddamned delightful. The capers pop, the red onion is crunchy, the bagel was chewy, and the lox, tomato and cream cheese all did their thing too. I could start the day with these on a regular basis if I wanted to.

The only problem? I also had a cup of coffee. Now, I’ve not had Einstein Bros coffee before– it was the first time I’ve ordered anything at all from them, in fact– and it’s entirely possible that their coffee, taken black, is simply more bitter than most coffees I’m used to. But I got the distinct impression that drinking coffee with this bagel was the rough equivalent of drinking orange juice immediately after brushing your teeth– there’s something, and I think it’s probably the capers, that enhances the bitterness of coffee until it’s utterly out of control, and I ended up switching to water because I couldn’t take it. That said, the taste of the bagel stuck with me all morning (in a pleasant way, mind you) and it was filing enough that I was able to make it to the end of the day without breaking for lunch.

10/10 yum yum would eat again

BLUE

On By Luther M. SilerIn PhotographyLeave a comment

I shut down both my Facebook and Instagram accounts a while back, because evil. I haven’t missed Facebook, but every so often I miss Instagram.

Anyway, have a photo.

In which I forgot to put the headline in and now the url is gonna be all dumb and stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I have an awful lot of teacher talk types of posts sloshing around in my head right now, and I’m not a hundred percent sure if any of it is done sloshing yet. Today was one of those days where after the school day I have half an hour to get home so that I can go to a two-hour meeting, and at this meeting we were shown some data from our building that has me alarmed. Quite alarmed, in fact. Not from an instructional or a learning standpoint, but from a building culture standpoint– and, to make things worse, I have no idea whether the data we’ve been shown is actually worth a damn or not. Basically, my kids appear to believe they attend the worst school in the history of schools, and as an instructor at that school I am interested in several things:

  1. I am interested in my school not being the worst school in the history of school;
  2. I am interested in my kids having better feelings about the building they go to school at;
  3. I am interested in knowing whether they actually believe that the school is the utter, irredeemable shithole that the data is indicating they think they attend;
  4. I am interested in figuring out, if the answer to #2 is yes, why their perception the building and mine is so different; and
  5. I am interested in figuring out what role the factually inaccurate student statements play in all of this. For example: students reported overwhelmingly that they were in physical danger in school and that fights happened regularly. They simply don’t. They reported that students frequently show up at school events and at school under the effects of alcohol and drugs. Also no. They reported that students carrying guns or knives was common at school. Also no!
  6. Some responses were simply bewildering. 3/4 of the students or so disagreed with the statement “My teachers let me know when I am misbehaving.” Seriously?

Now, I actually have a ton of reasons to suspect this data is unreliable. We have responses from less than a third of the kids in the building. The surveys were taken in December, when they weren’t in school. Sixth-grade students, in particular, hadn’t even physically been to school for more than a handful of days to ascertain the building climate in the first place! A bunch of them appear to simply have gone through and hit “disagree” on everything. One of us went through and looked at the data from other schools, which we also have access to, and reported that they all look astonishingly similar, which is suspect. But, like, one figures that if the kids were invested in school in the way we want them to be, they’d probably have taken the survey seriously, right?

Is there a way to craft some sort of measure for student satisfaction at their school that they either 1) will actually be invested in reporting honestly on and/or 2) can trick them into reporting more honestly? And how much of #5 up there represents the kids’ actual perception of the school, regardless of whether it’s “true” or not? After all, it’s kind of problematic to tell someone “Yes, you do feel safe at school” when they don’t, and as long as we’re talking about climate there really isn’t much difference between the kids thinking that everyone nearby is packing a weapon and it actually being true.

Also a useful question, tying in with all the middle schools being so similar: how much of this is my building and how much of this is a combination of covid-frustration and American culture in general hating education?

And I haven’t even started talking about discipline data. Lemme give you a preview of another post that’s rattling around. The following two sentences are both true:

I have only written up black males this year; and

I have only done three office referrals this year, and one of the three was on behalf of another teacher for a situation I wasn’t involved in.

But we’ll get to that later.