Category: Geek

Oh god I’m a nerd

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.

In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.

I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.

Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.

This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.

And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.

Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:

Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.

I want a fucking raise.

The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.

If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.

This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.

God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.

Not right now god damn it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy5 Comments

I have had my current desktop for just a noodge over five years, and I am starting to think that I might need to replace it sooner rather than later. It is the most insanely aggravating tech problem I have encountered, in that it isn’t one tech problem. Shit just Keeps Going Wrong, and I can’t for the life of me isolate what the problem might be beyond a vague suspicion that my dedication to Apple products is about to bite me in the ass. If this were a home build, I could start replacing parts– I mean, that would be expensive and insane, but I could do it. I could keep replacing bits of the computer until this random fucking series of crashes, application hangups and hardware shutdowns — my trackpad, for God’s sake, keeps shutting down, and it has a physical on/off button– stopped, or I’d managed to create the iMac of Theseus and just gave the fuck up.

The Music app crashes. Chrome crashes. Safari crashes. The monitors are going wonky. The trackpad shuts down randomly. The entire computer keeps hard restarting in the middle of the night and when I first wake it up after a hard crash it takes a good ten minutes before everything starts behaving, and then it’s fine for an unpredictable amount of time– anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days– until it’s not anymore.

I don’t know how to diagnose this. I thought a Safari patch had cleaned it up but that only lasted a few days and now Music is crashing, and there are 65 fucking gigabytes of music on this damn computer, so moving to another one is going to be a huge pain in the ass. Also, just to make it worse, Apple isn’t making 27″ iMacs any longer, so I can either move to a smaller main monitor or a Mac Studio, and those start at two fucking grand before you buy a monitor to go with it. I mean, I can spread that out, and truth be told I can afford it, but I really don’t fucking want to right now. I want to fix this, and normally “fix my computer” is included among my skill sets, but there are enough things going wrong that I’m starting to suspect it’s either the motherboard or the hard drive, and … that’s a new computer, since I can’t replace either.

I mean, I could go back to Windows, but I could also shoot myself in the fucking face and not have to worry about it, and those options are of equal attractiveness right now. I loathe Windows and I’m not interested in going back into that ecosystem when every other piece of tech in the house has a picture of a piece of fruit on it. If Apple was still making 27″ iMacs this wouldn’t be that hard of a decision, because $1600 is a lot more palatable than $2000 plus a monitor. But even if I stuck with the two I have (and remember, I’m running a supervillain lair here)* it’s still $400 more than the iMac I’d probably end up with, which is pushing it.

Anyway, I’m off to spend three hours Googling “everything is wrong with my computer” until it crashes again. Wish me luck.

*Three monitors and a standing desk, and how the fuck is it possible that I can’t find a picture of my desk on this website anywhere? NO way.**

**EDIT: Found one, and added the link.

Hey, did you hear?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

There was an eclipse today. I’m pretty sure none of my students were blinded by it; if any of them were, I refuse to take any responsibility for it, as I told them clearly and without qualification that they were not to look at the God damned sun without their glasses on about a thousand times today. Each.

As my focus today was more or less just pure survival, I don’t have a lot else to talk about; attendance was poor but not as bad as I might have expected and beyond the eclipse (which, as an astronomy nerd, was super cool to watch, but everyone knows about it and there’s not much of significance to say) not a whole lot happened today. This week in general is kinda placeholdery, honestly. As an IU grad I support Purdue tonight in theory but I probably will not support them in practice; a 9:00 start time on a Monday is not gonna get me watching sports again, sorry.

(Actually, okay, that’s not quite true: I was, for the second eclipse in a row, convinced that it was going to get a lot darker. We weren’t at totality, but Christ, 97.4% is not that far from totality! And it definitely got darker and the sky looked like it had a filter on it but it’s amazing to think that even getting less than three percent of our usual light from the sun still left enough light to easily see by. The sun is bright, y’all.)

New hotness alert

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek

Mental note: it takes four hours to buy a car.

This is the second time that one of us has bought a new car and we have been so starving afterwards that the only possible response was to get to the nearest fast food restaurant as fast as possible, thus the official New Car pics being taken in the parking lot of a fucking Taco Bell. My wife had her car totaled for her a couple of weeks ago (no injuries, thus my lack of mentioning it here) and after some intensive research decided on a 2024 Honda CRV hybrid, with many bells and whistles and lots of exciting features we’ll forget about and rediscover a couple of years down the road. It’s pretty. I didn’t spend a lot of time in it other than the test drive, so we’ll have to schedule a road trip somewhere soon. I was never a huge fan of the Honda Fit that just got wrecked, so while my wife’s car isn’t really a huge thing in my life– it’s her car– it’s nice to think that I’ll fit in it properly if I ever have to drive it.

But anyway. I have survived to Spring Break, and I even survived getting picked up from work and spending four hours buying a car and then filling myself with Taco Bell, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be dead in an hour, so I’m going to bounce. My brother and his family are going to be here tomorrow, apparently, so a smart person would start doing at least some light cleaning right now.

I never said I was smart.

FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH BUSUU

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching

… now Lingodeer is my best friend.

(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:

Screw it, let’s give some examples

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek

I pulled this from my post the other day about the conversation quizzes. Remember, the way this works is I get sentences one at a time, spoken by what sure sounds like a native speaker, and some of the words are blanked out. I get a word bank to choose from to fill in those blanks.

Let’s get into a few explanations, and I’m not looking any of this up right now— I’m typing this on my iPad while watching John Wick 3, so I’m not going to take the time to nail down the details. Basically any of the dots on those letters are for differentiation between different letters. So the difference between a d and a z or an s versus a sh might be how many dots are on the word. Some base letters have as many as three variants. I don’t think there are any with four (no dots, one, two, and three) but I might be wrong.

The little circles that show up here and there indicate a letter that does not have a vowel after it. This was never explained in Duolingo and has never been mentioned in Busuu; I had to look it up.

Dashes indicate short vowels. A dash under a letter indicates a short I, a dash above a letter indicates a short a, and there’s a little curlicue-lookin’ thing that appears above the letters that indicates a short u. I don’t see any of those in this sentence but that might be a font thing.

Here’s the problem: there are a bunch of symbols in those words that haven’t been explained in either of the apps, and I have no idea what they mean. The double-line above the vertical letter on the far left? No idea. The double line underneath the leftmost letter of the second word from the left? No idea. The symbol on the rightmost letter of the leftmost word? No idea.

I can’t read these words if you don’t explain what these symbols mean, guys, and while some of them are vowels, occasionally I feel like maybe some of them represent multiple letters together, or are maybe a contraction of some kind? I can’t just figure this out. Stop fucking with me.

In which I reconsider

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek

I think it’s probably time to admit that if I want to take a serious shot at learning Arabic I’m going to have to 1) spend time with textbooks and 2) probably suck it up and take a class. I was pleased with the way Busuu introduced the alphabet, but it went from that directly to “Okay, you know this now, and you’re ready for entire sentences in this tiny-ass font, right? Plus a bunch of symbols that we never really discussed in the alphabet section? You won’t be able to make half of them out anyway so don’t worry about learning them.”

Like, guys, language learning apps should explain shit, and I don’t understand why they don’t. Busuu’s approach to anything that isn’t the alphabet has been to give a handful of examples that may or may not generalize, not explain them, and then just … move on. Like, my last unit was on comparatives and superlatives? It gave me bad/worse/the worst and, I dunno, maybe good/better/best and that was it. I liked the “pull words out of this conversation” feature the first time I saw it, but I just don’t know enough to be able to do that easily and I can’t read well enough to go from spoken word to one of four different words that may not differ from each other all that much. Especially when, again, I don’t know all of the vowels and diacritics. Every so often it will show me a picture and ask me to say something about it for one of the social media features, and, Christ, I don’t even know where to start.

There also might be a dialect difference between it and Duolingo, and I can’t figure that out either. Lots of the nouns end differently (-atun seems to get added to a lot of them, and sometimes just -a) and I can’t figure out what the ending means, or why Duolingo’s vocabulary never bothered with it, and gendered endings seem inconsistent, and … gah. I’m smart enough to learn this shit, but I’m not smart enough to figure it out, especially given limited examples and the weird fact that that ending doesn’t seem to be properly represented by the actual letters at the end of the word, which is probably a function of one of those symbols I never got an explanation for.

And, for the record, if you happen to understand Arabic, don’t worry about explaining how all of this works. Like, I have access to other sources of information, and to a certain extent this is a function of my own laziness. I want there to be an app that explains this at the depth and quality that a textbook would, because I want to learn Arabic five minutes at a time while sitting in a comfortable chair in my living room or my library, and not hunched over a textbook or sitting in a classroom that I have to pay tuition for. I shouldn’t be surprised when I can’t find that.

In which I have been here a long time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek1 Comment

I discovered a rogue bit of autocorrect had changed “Baldree” to “Balder” in the previous post and went to fix it, only to discover this little bit of blogwankery. My review of Bookstall & Bonedust was the four thousand, four hundred and forty-fourth post on the site, and this one is number four thousand, four hundred and forty-five.

Whew. That’s … that’s a whole lotta words, right there.