Unread Shelf: August 31, 2021

Luther M. Siler

Had to get this in early, before the most recent batch arrives.

Oh my god I hate you SO MUCH

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

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:

  1. Does this person still work at my school?
  2. 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.

Jumping off a bridge, back later.

Name this Cat, pt 2

Luther M. Siler6 Comments

She is apparently not Morrigan, nor is she Willow. Suggestions?

Introducing

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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.)

On giving up

Luther M. Siler

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.

Sigh.