One week until Spring Break. And really the last day before the break doesn’t count, so only four teaching days until Spring Break. I can do this. And apparently ILEARN starts a week after we get back? I had no idea. I thought we had at least a couple of weeks, or maybe the last week of April. One way or another, I don’t even look at the results any longer.
We’re taking a road trip tomorrow for an academic competition for the boy, and we have to be up at like 5:30 in the fucking morning for it. I am complaining here because the boy does not read the blog– I’m pretty sure as of right now he is still unaware that it exists– and I will not complain about it around him, because I’m not going to be that kind of dad. It can be taken as read that the entire thing makes me want to die, though.
Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on April 19th. If you’ve been around a while you probably already know they’ve been my favorite band for basically my entire adult life. They just released a new single off of the album today, and along the way announced that they’re doing what they’re calling a “Dark Matter Global Experience” on the 16th at 500 theaters around the world. One of the 500 happens to be nearby, so I snagged tickets for my wife and I since they were basically the cost of a movie. They’re going to play the new album twice, once in darkness and once with “mesmerizing visuals.” I gotta be honest: even as a huge fan, huge enough that I just bought tickets to this thing, I have no idea if I think this is a good idea or not, but I’m willing to burn $24 on it, and I can’t wait to get home and wash the weed stink out of my clothes so that I can go to work tomorrow without raising eyebrows. If nothing else, this will be a unique experience, I imagine.
Speaking of new music, Fletcher, the other woman in the Miley Cyrus video that turned every woman on TikTok into a lesbian for a few days,(*) released her sophomore album this week. I’m four songs and– sigh– ten minutes into it and so far I’m liking it quite a bit except for the way streaming has fucking ruined music, because I should never be four songs into an album if only ten minutes have gone by. There is one song at 4:09, one at 3:05 and one at 3:02, and every other Goddamn song on the album is less than three minutes long.
I need the whole world to get off my damn lawn.
Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and say a little prayer that I’m about to discover the shitgibbon died while I was asleep. I am going to add more Republican resignations to the prayer, because that shit is getting more hilarious by the Goddamn day and it’s not like God is listening anyway so I can ask for whatever I want.
I note that Jimmy Carter is still hanging on, though, despite all odds. He’ll outlive that fat bastard yet.
We do Students of the Month in my building, awarded … well, every month, as you might expect. Each teacher gets to name one every month, and there are no rules for who you choose to nominate, or at least none that have ever been presented to me. The kids get their picture taken for a trophy case in the hallway, a small assortment of goodies, and free admission to any sports or school activities for the following month. We got the email today to fill out our spot in the spreadsheet for March, and … damn, am I having a hard time picking a kid this month.
My usual rules, or at least guidelines:
Someone I like (obviously);
with good grades, or poor grades that have shown recent and notable improvement;
not a behavior issue, or, again, a former behavior issue who has shown significant improvement;
Good attendance;
I try to pay attention to gender and racial diversity, but there aren’t, like, quotas;
and — and this can be the hard one — has not been nominated before by another teacher.
It’s entertaining to wonder about what might happen– the answer is almost certainly “nothing,” but whatever– if I just nominated the same kid every month; I doubt anyone would say anything, but I like to pick less obvious kids, even if it occasionally leads to kids who are doing great in my room hassling me about how I haven’t chosen them yet. Generally that type of kid is willing to accept “I would, but you’ve already been nominated four times this year,” and if not I can always just tell them I don’t nominate anyone who asks.
But yeah. I don’t have any obvious choices this month, and a couple that might have been good choices earlier in the year have been on my nerves lately, and there’s one kid who I’d like to reward, because he has improved, but he’s still failing all of his classes– he’s just gone from scores in the zeroes and tens to high forties and low fifties, and I’m worried that if I nominate him he’ll immediately get himself suspended.
Which is a thing that happens, more often than is statistically reasonable. Not just with my kids, but with the whole list– I’m pretty sure I could get a decent office pool going each month betting on which two or three kids from the SotM list are going to be suspended within two days of getting the award. Which, by the way, cancels your free tickets, although you get to keep your pencils or whatever and we don’t scratch your face out of the picture.
Hell, that would be kind of hilarious. A big, theatrical X over the face of every kid who got suspended right after being named Student of the Month. Even better if we didn’t explain it, since the trophy case is literally right by the main door to the building. I’d love to see the parent looking at all those pictures and then realizing that 15% or so of them have their faces marked out. Maybe we’ll put a camera in there.
At any rate, I’ve got a tentative choice, and I’ve got until next Friday to decide, but it’s taken a lot of thinking for an honor that is not exactly going to change a kid’s life. Maybe I’ll take a look at the kids who won in August and add them back into the pool. True story: my original August choice got arrested the day before SotMs got announced and I had to switch her out on short notice. This genuinely is a thing, I swear.
One of my oldest friends’ oldest daughter— go ahead, parse it, it makes sense, although I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent sure where that apostrophe should be, or if “friends” should be plural in the first place– just accepted a college offer. Also, earlier today I made reference to an old movie, and a student asked me if it came out in “the nineteens.”
I’m going to go to bed, and crumble into dust, and not worry about any of this any longer.
(My life has just changed; while checking to make sure that I was using the right color to cross out the Busuu app, I discovered that new friend Salman in that famous picture is the guy on the left, not the guy on the right, and for some reason I can’t handle that.)
But anyway. The last time I rattled on about Arabic apps on here I was already starting to sour on Busuu, but things have gotten rather worse since then, and since I’ve also found a decent third Arabic-language app (I will never stop collecting them) I figured it was worth another post. Now, it’s worth pointing out: I’m only discussing the app’s approach to Arabic, as I’ve not tried it with any other language, and Arabic is fucking hard, so I can imagine writing an app about how to teach it is also pretty fucking hard.
But nonetheless. I’m not actually giving up on the app, because the (effectively) dictation sections are genuinely useful, but I don’t think it’s teaching me anything any longer. For example, yesterday’s unit was called “Making Plans.” It taught me the words for:
Plans;
To Be Free (one verb form);
“do you fancy”…
“let me know”
“give me a call”
“How about…”
Shall
“I’d love to,”
“Do you mind,” and
“Sorry, I can’t.”
It breaks these down into groups of three or so, and after each few words it’ll repeat one and I need to click on the definition. After a couple of groups will be one of the listening exercises I mentioned in the post above, and then it’ll go through all the words and I’ll have to pick the translation from three possibilities. A lot of the time a good test-taker with no Arabic could get these right; for example, if a phrase ends in a question mark, and only one of the answer choices is a question, that’s the right one.
And I figured out the other day that this last flurry of multiple-choice questions will be in the order the words were presented, which … makes the whole exercise useless, frankly. And then there’s the social media functions, which I’ve abandoned entirely, because no one who has been using this app could possibly complete these exercises, particularly the written ones. You can record a few seconds of silence to get past the “record yourself talking about making plans with a friend” prompt, but if you write something it wants several sentences, which I am incapable of without literally typing them into Google Translate and copy-pasting what it gives me back.
Oh, and the community feedback had potential to be super useful, except for one little thing: the helpful people out there who want to work with me on improving my Arabic largely don’t speak English. Giving me pronunciation tips or correcting my grammar in Arabic isn’t actually helpful!
So, yeah. I’ll keep fucking with it because I paid for it, but fifty days into Round III of Learn Arabic I’m no longer stressing about this app.
That said, let’s talk about Lingodeer, which sounds dumb but which is the current big winner among my Arabic apps. Wanna know why? Here’s why:
You know what that is? That’s a fucking spelling test. Wanna know the best way to get me to learn to read this language? It turns out that it’s spelling tests. Every letter and vowel and pronunciation mark in that group needs to be used– as of right now, they haven’t started throwing distractors at me yet– and Lingodeer deliberately overpoints everything, focusing on teaching pronunciation much more than any of the other apps would. Many of those characters don’t even appear in standard (?) Arabic– I’m still not a hundred percent certain how the dialect differences work, and this app really wants lots of -un endings on words, but when I type “My sister” into Google Translate I get أختى, which has a few less vowels than they give me up there.
You might have to stare at it for a moment to figure out my mistake here; the Arabic masculine word for “British” is, roughly, biriitaaniyyun. That squiggle that looks like a W above the letter on the left indicates a doubled letter, and I put it in the wrong place– I wrote it as biriitaanniyun.
(Why the doubled vowels? Because there are three long vowels in there. In most cases a long vowel is represented as a doubled vowel when transliterated. Where Lingodeer gets weird is insisting on also including a short vowel every single time a long vowel appears, which it does several times here.)
Anyway, there are thirteen individual characters that needed to be put in the right order to get that right, and I only missed one of them, which felt awesome. And then it hit me with the feminine version, which is even longer, and I got it right:
I give you biriitaaniyyatun.
More hotness? I want lots more of this. Rub it on my face:
Every single section has stuff like this, that gets way into the weeds, and is fucking awesome. Even if I don’t look at it on every unit, the fact that it’s there is magnificent.
This is, slowly but surely, actually teaching me to read. I’m making progress here. Which is awesome. And is why Lingodeer is my new best friend.
Go ahead. Ask me questions. I might be able to answer them.
ETA: I just jumped back in and did some more spelling exercises. I’m proud of this, dammit:
I don’t know how many of you that headline will immediately trigger an auditory memory, but for those of you who are inexplicably thinking about big trucks, you’re welcome.
Anyway, I finished a book today and I am, wonder of wonders, two whole days ahead on lesson planning, and it’s only 7:00. That makes today the most productive Sunday in like a thousand years. What should I do with the rest of my time? Clean something? I should clean something.
Probably just going to play Prince of Persia, though. At least for a bit. There’s one more Red Rising book to finish and then I get to wait for the next one in 2025. Surely I’ll have the unread shelf cleared by then, right?
I tell you what, when you’re someone who tends to write his way through his issues, and you’re realizing that you don’t want to write about the shit that’s currently occupying your mind … that’s a problem.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 