Month: February 2024

Just shoot me, ctd.

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I did something today that I’ve never done in twenty years of teaching– I would estimate, without a shred of exaggeration, that 2/3 of the teaching I did during my fourth hour was in Spanish. It was time to sit down with my newcomers and see where they were at, and the only way to do that was to communicate with them in their own language. To wit, I generated this for them:

And then I banished about half of the class from the room, sending them with my co-teacher to her classroom, mostly to cut down on the number of other kids who might want to talk to me and also to prevent a certain student from getting Valentine’s Day-related harassment, and sat down with the kids and went through a bunch of problems with them. I’m hoping that document is translated well from what I typed; based on my meager Spanish it looked okay, and the kids didn’t have questions. The boy read through it, smiled at me, and proceeded to get nearly a perfect score on his assignment with only a small number of questions, all of which, I’m proud to say, I understood; the girls are a little bit behind for 8th grade but not enough that I’m terribly concerned about it. I have English-speaking kids who, based on this one assignment, have bigger problems than they do. One of them does seem to rely kind of heavily on the other, who did most of the talking and also appeared to do the lion’s share of the work, but we’ll see how that shakes out in a couple of weeks.

You may notice, even if you don’t read Spanish, that the actual Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t appear anywhere in that document. That’s entirely intentional; I generally deemphasize the formula itself in favor of the process of figuring out a missing leg or a missing hypotenuse. They know the formula, but I treat this as mostly calculator work, and I drill the phrases “square-square-add-square root” and “square-square-subtract-square root” into their heads until they’re repeating them in their sleep. Since I didn’t have any real idea where these kids might have been in terms of their math skills I decided I’d leave it out entirely for now.

We are taking it easy tomorrow, across the board. I kinda feel like I’ve worked the kids (all of them, not just the new ones) like dogs this week, and between talking a lot more than usual and the added stress of teaching in a foreign language today, I’m ready for a day where I can wave them vaguely in the direction of a Quizizz or something else that has a chance of being fun rather than being at the board or hunched over someone’s shoulders all day. They’re picking this up pretty well so far so I think if I have a calm Thursday before a four-day weekend God will forgive me.

Just shoot me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This week has already featured Blowjob Drama, which is not in my top five favorite kinds of drama, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is one of the very worst days to be a middle school teacher, as roughly half of the ongoing relationships in the building are going to abruptly end tomorrow, and most of them are going to end in desperately stupid ways for desperately stupid reasons. Meanwhile, I still have to teach math. Which they have even less incentive to pay attention to than usual.

Hooray! 

In which my throat is sore and my brain is melted

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I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.

Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.” 

The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations. 

Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.

In which no one is watching

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Tonight is one of those nights where I can pretty much get away with saying anything I want, because the whole world is distracted, in this case by the Taylor Bowl. I am, in accordance with my ancient traditions, not watching, but if you are I hope you’re enjoying it. I don’t much care who wins, although a Chiefs win will make me a tiny bit happier if only because it will make certain very bad people angry, and I like it when those people don’t get what they want. If you want the 49ers to win because you are a 49ers fan, or because you hate the Chiefs for some pre-Taylor-Swift reason, I have no beef with you.

Frankly, the fact that I can name both the teams playing makes this the Super Bowl that I’ve paid the most attention to in a long, long time. The unfortunate part is that on this Day of No One Paying Attention, I don’t have anything tremendously compelling, much less controversial, that I want to talk about. 

Anyway, I’ve got a heavy teaching load tomorrow, as both my Algebra kids and my regular 8th graders are starting a new unit, so I expect to be half-dead when I get home from school tomorrow. The good news is that, compared to systems of equations, slope, and graphing linear equations, which is what we’ve been occupying most of our time with since November, Pythagoras and basic factoring are absolute cake, which means that my job ought to get a little less stressful and their grades ought to come up. I’ve got about an inch of papers to go through sitting next to me and I suspect I’m not going to touch it tonight. This wasn’t much of a weekend– it wasn’t bad, by any means, but I really didn’t do much with it– but if I make it through the next four days, I get a four-day weekend. I don’t want to miss any more days in February so hopefully everything will go nice and smoothly. We’ll see.

On streaks

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!

  1. Blog. Now, granted, I don’t do this every day, but I’m trying to write more this year than last year and I really don’t like taking more than one day off a week. At one point I went for around (nearly?) two years without missing a day. I don’t feel the need to build up that kind of streak again but I definitely want missed days to be infrequent.
  2. The Whole Year Puzzle. My wife got me this thing for Christmas; that’s it up there; I probably should have taken the pieces out, but you get the idea– the months are across the two rows at the top and the rest are days, from 1-31, and supposedly you can rearrange the wood pieces to show every single day of the year. There are multiple ways for most (all?) of the days, too– every time Bek and I have compared our days (she has one too) they have been different. It’s set to Feb 11 because I try to keep it a day ahead. I didn’t do this yesterday either, so today I did the 10th and the 11th, because I can’t skip a day.
  3. Wordle. You all know what Wordle is. Takes two minutes, most days. My longest unbroken streak of wins was 167. It’s been 292 days since I skipped one. Prepare for a NYT games streak, by the way.
  4. NYT Mini Crossword. Generally under a minute. I occasionally go on tears where I’ll do the regular crossword every day, but the longer ones can take over an hour and I don’t usually want to burn that much time. The Mini is much shorter.
  5. Spelling Bee, also an NYT game. I win this every day and I try to do it without any clues. I’m not successful at that terribly often– maybe once or twice a week. That said, I usually only need clues for the last four or five words at most, and there are sometimes up to 70 words. I don’t actually play Connections very often because I’m terrible at it. I lose more often than I win.
  6. Duolingo. I’m back on my Arabic again; I deleted all my progress and started over, but I’m doing a full … circle? Lesson? Whatever they call them, I’m doing one of them a day.
  7. Busuu. I’m keeping a streak up here as well. Busuu breaks down into chapters and lessons; I’m in Chapter 4, Lesson 5, and shit is getting complicated fast. That said, I’m still doing a lesson a day. It’s a lot harder than Duolingo but I feel like I’m learning more effectively. That said, the tiny font is still killing me. I may switch this to my iPad to see if the increased screen real estate leads to bigger letters. I could learn to read this damn language if I could just see it. 

The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!

Halfway there

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After getting sick three separate times in January, I swore that I was going to make it at least to our Presidents’ Day break without getting sick again. Assuming I’m able to get up and go to work tomorrow, I’m halfway there, and seeing as how we have a field trip for half the day I probably ought to go to work. 

(It’s not much of a field trip. We’re taking them to the high school for a tour.)

But either way I appear to have made it to work every day this week, and given how shit of a day Tuesday was, I’m going to call that an accomplishment. The kids in my LGBTQ club this afternoon were particularly fun. They’re so fucking weird; it makes them all kinds of fun to hang out with. 

Hey, did you know you can embed a .pdf in one of these? Because I just dragged this thing I’m using tomorrow onto the screen and it actually looks like it embedded pretty nicely. I mostly found these people through Wikipedia, so I don’t know much about them. Maybe I’ll tell the kids I’ll give them extra credit for picking somebody and writing a paragraph about them or something. Why not, right?

black-mathematiciansDownload

Okay, that was better

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Much more manageable day today, in accordance with the law of averages. That said, this is gonna be another short post, on account of I need to finish the new Sarah J. Maas book before bed or I’ll die.

Quick random thought, though: on a scale of 1-10, how ironic and/or pathetic is it for a middle-aged middle-school math teacher to listen to Killing in the Name on his way home from work at a volume understandable from inside nearby restaurants and retail establishments? While headbanging and screaming along?

Asking for a friend.

In which I take shit too personal

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

They fucking bombed their test today. We’ve been talking about this material since November and I gave them a practice test yesterday that was identical to the test they took today except that I swapped around some numbers, I showed them how to do every question on the practice test in class yesterday, I allowed them completely open notes, and over half of them still failed.

I am so pissed off right now it’s giving me an upset stomach, and I am no longer interested in attempting to educate people who do not want to be educated. Fuck ’em. If 75% of my students are failing at the end of the quarter I don’t give a shit any longer. They should be able to drop the fuck out if they want to. Let them become their fucking parents’ problems again. 

Fuck.