My day began with an email from my boss, and that email began with the words “I don’t know how many of you remember …” and then the name of a man who I, in fact, did not remember. The email went on to say that this man’s partner had passed away, and then gave information about the viewing or the funeral or whatever.
You don’t work with me, right? Probably not. So use your reading skills and your thinkin’ brain, based solely on the small amount of information I have given you, and answer two questions for me:
Does this person still work at my school?
Was this person included in the email sent to the staff?
If your answers were no and no, respectively, congratulations! You possess at least a modicum of reading comprehension and common Goddamned sense.
So why the fuck did I spend all day deleting emails from the reply-all brigade expressing their condolences to Mr. So-and-So, who doesn’t work at our school any longer and has not in at least three years and furthermore could not possibly read any of the emails that you were sending to the eighty people on our staff??
And to make it worse, some of the people sending the emails joined the staff after I did, meaning they were sending their personal condolences to someone who not only was not going to see the message but they didn’t know.
How did I make it through the day without losing my shit? Am I going to get a reward for this? Please say yes. Because sooner or later I’m going to strike back, and the building will never be the same again afterwards.
Her name, right now, is Morrigan, which might be shortened to Morgan for convenience or might end up being something else entirely, but we are now a three-cat household.
(There are several more in the litter- four or five orange bois, another tortie and two calicos, one of which I really wanted but was overruled. If you’re in the market for a kitten and you’re in the area, let me know.)
My kids took the NWEA this week, which ate up my Tuesday and Wednesday, and will knock another couple of kids out of class on Monday while they finish up. I would, in general, prefer not to have to worry about standardized tests, but as such things go the NWEA isn’t bad. It hits most of my checkboxes for what I want for these things: first, it’s a growth test, meaning that it’s keyed to individual students and it’s possible for a very low student to demonstrate a lot of growth and have that treated as a positive thing even though they don’t do objectively as good as a more advanced student who stayed the same. Second, there’s no notion of passing the test. Their score is keyed to grade levels, yes, but there’s no cutscore where a student is arbitrarily determined to have “passed” or “failed” regardless of their grade. And while we administer it three times a year, any given administration doesn’t take very long– I was able to get most of my kids tested in a single block, and two blocks got basically everyone who was present to take the test in the first place done. That’s not that bad. Realistically, we’ll lose more days this year to me being sick or absent for training than we will to the NWEA.
The median percentile score (also: percentile scores are more useful than arbitrary scores, although the NWEA generates both) of my three groups, nationwide, was 19, 16, and 13. Meaning, in case you haven’t studied measures of central tendency recently, that if 100 randomly-chosen kids took the test, 81 of those kids would outscore half of the students in my first block, 84 would outscore half of my kids in 2nd block, and 87 would outscore half of my kids in 3rd block.
Eight of my students are in the 1st or 2nd percentile, meaning that 99 or 98 of those randomly-chosen kids would outscore them.
Let us, for the moment, simply postulate that there are a number of possible reasons for these scores including but not limited to that a large percentage of them effectively took 1/4 of 6th grade and all of 7th grade off and then lay that aside. I’m not especially concerned with why for the purpose of this post.
We are supposed to discuss these results with our kids, which for the record is something I support. If we don’t talk about how they did, the test becomes meaningless to them, and there is absolutely nothing that is more of a waste of time than a standardized test that a student isn’t taking seriously. So it’s useful to let them know how they did, what it means for them, and what they might want to do to improve.
Where I am struggling right now, though, is this, and forgive me for another post whose point gets boiled down to a single sentence after five paragraphs of lead-in:
I do not know how to tell a fourteen-year-old kid “99 out of every 100 people who took this did better than you” in a way that does not sound functionally identical to “You should give up.”
I can couch it as as much of a pep talk as I want, and I already know that at least one of those eight kids is going to work her ass off for me this year because that’s who she is, and if I have her at a third- or fourth-grade understanding of math by the end of the year it will be a triumph. And unlike many years, I think all of these eight kids are at least potentially reachable still. There have definitely been years where I had a kid at 1% who I was privately convinced was going to stay at 1% out of sheer spite for the rest of the year, and these aren’t those kids.
Similarly, it is difficult to communicate those median percentile scores to a classroom of kids without a number of them concluding that they’re just dumb and should give up. When the highest-scoring kids in the room aren’t past the 60th percentile (which is the case) they all need extra help, and I can’t provide “extra” help to 27 kids at once. One of my classes can barely get through a basic lesson right now because of the number of behavior issues I have. And that’s before I have to give them information that demoralizes the hell out of them for what are, unfortunately, entirely reasonable reasons. In most circumstances, if 99 out of 100 people are better than you at something, you are probably going to stop doing that thing! So what the hell am I going to do in a situation where not only are 99 out of 100 people doing better than my kids in math, but many of them don’t even want to be good at it? Remediating this would be a Herculean effort from someone fully invested in improving. And right now I just don’t know how the hell to ask for that kind of effort (and expect to actually get it) from people who, to be charitable about it, don’t have academic success as a high personal priority right now.
I am home alone, as the wife and the boy are out at a birthday party, and I am sorely tempted to go out and hop in the pool by myself. But there is so much left to do if I go get in the pool– things like removing and replacing the cover, possibly checking chemical levels (it rained last night) and then there’s the whole putting on a bathing suit and drying off afterwards bits, and … I may be too tired. Maybe I’ll just look at the pool. That’s relaxing too, right? Sure.
I wrote up six kids today– six!!— which is a number that I have not reached in … a while, and received reports from other teachers in the building that their kids were also out of their Goddamned minds. I very badly need to get my middle group under control. I did something I have not done in a very long time today, and emailed the words “I need help” to my boss, as it is too early in the year for these kids to be this nuts. My other two classes are good-to-great, so it’s not just this grade, and it’s not even all of the kids in the middle group, but it’s enough of them that I’m putting out a different fire every twenty to thirty seconds for an hour and a half straight, and I’m going to end up in tears in front of these motherfuckers at some point soon if I don’t kill one of them first.
I’ve got the weekend to rest and relax, and then five days until a three-day weekend. I’ll figure something out. I always do.
My lesson today made me wish I had been recording, which feels super good in the moment but this is going to be another one of those “I’m home and alive and now I’m going to go die” blog posts. Have a lovely evening, all, I’ll see you tomorrow.
It took me much too long to get to Chuck Wendig’s latest book, The Book of Accidents, because Chuck is from Pennsylvania and so is Sarah J. Maas, who I had already read a book by this year, and therefore Pennsylvania was already filled up on my stupid little map. But I’d been looking forward to this a lot– Chuck is one of my favorites– and I finally got to it this week.
I didn’t like it as much as I feel like I should have, and I really hate it when that happens, because I never know how to translate that to a star rating, and then I get irritated with myself for caring about star ratings— I may just start rating every single book I read that doesn’t personally irritate me at five stars on Goodreads just to stop having to agonize about this– and I think I ended up just calling this one four stars for the hell of it.
Here is the deal with this book: I said to my wife during the first or second night of reading it that it really feels like Wendig, with his last couple of books, is quite deliberately trying to horn in on Stephen King’s turf, or at least the turf that King occupied when he was writing his most well-known and immortal books. Wanderers, which I liked quite a lot, got compared to The Stand all over the damn place, and with very good reason. And while this book didn’t map onto any specific King book as cleanly as Wanderers did, it still felt quite a lot like vintage, if updated, Stephen King.
And it also very much wants you to think it’s a haunted house book for, oh, the first third or so of its length. And it is not a haunted house book. It is so very much not a haunted house book, no, it is something else entirely. Like, I really don’t think you’re going to see a lot of what this book has for you coming.
I, uh, was really looking forward to a good haunted house book, though, and I got super excited about what looked like it was going to be a great haunted house book.
Which is why I’m not calling this a review, because I’m not sure if it’s the book’s fault that I wasn’t willing to go with it where it wanted to go. Maybe it is! I mean, it’s not like I picked up a Louis L’Amour book expecting to read a haunted house book. Like, there’s haunted house DNA all over this damn thing. Which sounds gross. You know what I mean. It’s not unfair to expect a creepy haunted house story from this book. In fact, I think Wendig is pretty obviously counting on it. And normally when something like this happens while I’m reading– you think the story is going to go BLAH, but instead it goes NYAH, it’s a compliment. Predictability is generally bad. Except, apparently, in this case, where I can’t claim that it ruined the book– it’s not like I regret reading it or anything, although I think even at my most charitable it’s not as strong as Wanderers. It’s just not what I wanted from it, and as a result I didn’t like it as much as I thought I was going to.
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