Category: Teaching

I got to say

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A whole lot of kids brought their grades up in class today.

No discipline problems.

Heard good things from several staff members about how pleasant covering my classes yesterday was, and even the ones with things to say were careful to say things like “It was just those two; everyone else was great.”

Found out that one of my least engaged students is really, really good at geography.

My Math Lab kids chewed this problem up and spit it out:

Came home and beat the hell out of some yokai. Tilapia and potatoes for dinner.

And now I’m going to go read until it’s time for bed.

Okay, I lied, I’m going to post an update. I put up this post, with the image below, in late January of 2024:

That’s 72 kids failing out of 134, with 22 kids getting zeroes. Now, this is third quarter– third quarter sucks. My kids’ grades will be worse on January 20 of 2027 than they are right now. So this isn’t a completely fair comparison.

But today was a catch-up day, which is exactly what I was doing on that day up there. And I put a message on the board today, too. And after each class, I updated the numbers. And right now, of my 112 kids who are in my regular 8th grade Math class, I have only fifteen who are failing(*) … and forty-three who are getting an A.

I’m not joking when I say this group of kids is the best I’ve ever had.

(*) That’s less than half the number of kids who were failing at the start of the day.

This is what I mean

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I gave my Math Lab class a paper with six equations on it today, and this one was easily the most difficult of the six. I told them that they did not need to do the equations in order and that I would be paying close attention as they worked, to their conversations with each other, and also to what questions they were asking me, and that I’d be grading them on effort more than whether they completed all six equations in class.

Fully a third of the class threw themselves at the hardest equation first. I gave them the answers; they know that the process is more important to me anyway and it’s useful for them to know if an answer is right before asking me about it. A couple of them refused to turn the paper in at the end of class, saying they were going to take it home and bring it back to me finished on Tuesday.

A lot of them came close, but they all ended up getting lost in the fractions, and one of them basically dared me to solve the question myself. I gotta admit, I was worried; one little calculation error was going to blow my credibility. But that is, in fact, the right answer, as ugly as it might be.

Nice to head into a long weekend on a high.

Time to admit it

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Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.

I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.

If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.

I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.

Another first

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After twenty-plus years of teaching, I don’t encounter a ton of circumstances any longer that I’ve never run into before. I had two in two days, though– first, despite being home sick yesterday, it was the first day that I’ve ever received an email from a school nurse with the phrase “cannabinoid hyperemesis” in it. Which, if you’re wondering if I immediately sent thirty text messages demanding that someone tell me what I’d missed … yeah, I sure as hell did. Apparently four of our eighth grade girls– two of them mine, judging from the suspensions today– decided to hit a THC vape on the way to school, because there’s nothing like being high in middle school at 8:15 in the Goddamned morning, and, well, apparently one of them didn’t react very well to it. Chunks were blown.

I don’t know if the hypervomiter was mine or not.

Today I got a series of emails from one of last year’s kids, now a high school freshman, asking for help with her math assignment. This, in and of itself, is not remotely new– my record for helping former students is a college sophomore, a former denizen of a 7th grade homeroom of mine, who reached out to me completely out of the blue in hope that I could help her with her statistics homework. I could, as it turns out.

No, what was new was that she was doing this while she was sitting in math class. Her current math class, in high school, with her high school Algebra 1 teacher. And, to add to the hilarity, I know her math teacher, and I don’t like her very much. I have received emails from way more of last year’s eighth graders than I usually do this early in the year, and several of them have been begging me either to move up to the high school (nope) or take them back (also nope), and every single one who I’ve asked has turned out to have this particular teacher. I don’t know if y’all remember the saga in my previous district of the teacher whose “medical leave” led to me getting stuffed into her classroom and constantly yanked around when she told people she’d be back on a certain date and then didn’t come back, but yeah, she’s back, and she works at the high school now. She still sucks, too.

Anyway, I got her through her assignment, while teaching my own students. Because that’s just how much of a badass I am, that I can teach two different classes in two different buildings at the same time.

Who wants to touch me?

what the hell is this

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If I look at this very, very carefully, I can pull some correct answers out of it. Like, there’s a 230 next to #1 up there. There’s a B106 next to #7, next to some arcane hieroglyphics of no known purpose. The ones in black pen are my handwriting, obviously. This kid brought this to me with the first four done, asked me if he was doing them right, and the marks on the page resembled no known words in any known language, so I walked him through the very straightforward lesson again and showed him what to do. This is what he turned in.

It is possible that the psychic damage I will take from trying to read this carefully will not be worth it. It is also possible that reading this will teach me spells.

Another thing I ran into with this assignment that I’ve not seen before is kids who absolutely cannot write exponents smaller and in the upper right of the number. As in they don’t have the fine motor skills necessary for it. It’s mind-blowing. We’re going to have to do a lot of written work this year just to get their handwriting to the point where it’s at what we used to think of as a first- or second-grade level. This is, remember, a fourteen-year-old’s work.

Giving these kids devices was the worst mistake the field of education has made during my lifetime. It’s worse than the overemphasis on standardized testing. This is a fucking disaster.

Sunday me day work for free day!

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I think I’m ready for tomorrow, maybe.

I have spent today setting up spreadsheets, looking at IEPs, looking at 504 plans (not done with either of those tasks by a long shot,) setting up my Canvas classes, editing last year’s How My Class Works presentations, putting together an explainer so that new staff know how to sync grades between Canvas and PowerTeacher, redoing seating charts, planning out next week, and somehow, despite the fact that tomorrow will only be the third day of school, grading. I’m not even teaching until Wednesday, guys, and right now Tuesday in my plans is reserved entirely for physical tasks like “give everyone their workbooks and notes folders” and “name calculators,” which is a real thing all of my classes have to do. There is also a section that just says “Whatever else I forgot about.”

Mental note: I need cotton balls and alcohol to remove last year’s names from the calculators. I’m told that erases paint marker nicely. We shall see.

Also: learn 137 names.

Whee!

Survived, happy

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I’ll be back to normal tomorrow, and today was a stellar second day of school, but my God, I’m going to die early for like the fourth day in a row.

Another one in the books

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My 23rd first day of school– I counted, I know I’m right this time– is done and dusted. One down, 179 left to go.

I have been talking for seven and a half hours, and I’m exhausted. I’m changing my plans for tomorrow so that I don’t have to talk as much. I’ll make Monday another big talky-talky day; these kids are gonna have to move around tomorrow. It was pretty nondescript as these things go; I have no immediate problem kids and the handful I had an eye on at least managed to come off as friendly and approachable. No obvious rage beasts just yet, which is good. I said “You will either be my favorite student or my nemesis” to at least two different kids, and of those two, I’m pretty sure I got lucky by having him in first hour. The kid who was widely regarded as the biggest discipline problem in the 7th grade last year is in my fourth hour and did not draw attention to himself today.

All positives, basically. That said, I’m so tired I could die, so I’m going to go do that.