Six whole parent conferences today, and in only one did the parent threaten to put her child in foster care.
I shall now melt into a puddle.
Category: Teaching
Go ahead, ask her
I returned to work today, although I was unable to tough it out and go to conferences. It became clear after a couple of class periods that all I was going to be capable of doing was preventing any of them from killing themselves or each other, and a twelve-hour day simply wasn’t happening today. It’s 8:30 PM as I’m writing this, and I feel more fully human than I have in a week, although I still haven’t managed to eat a real meal. Lunch was half a package of saltines, a banana, and a couple of cups of applesauce. Dinner was some mashed potatoes and a couple of pretzel sticks.
I am hoping to eat a salad for lunch tomorrow without paying for it. We shall see.
I had one of the more bizarre conversations/arguments with a student today that I’ve had in a while; I don’t remember exactly what got us on the topic, but two of my fifth hour girls had come back to my desk and the topic of my son came up. One of them appeared completely bewildered by the topic, and even more bewildered by the notion that I might be 50 and have a fifteen-year-old.
“He’s adopted, though, right?”
Uh … no. He’s mine.
“But was he … born?“
I swear that’s what she asked, and that got her a weird look from both of us.
Yes? My son was born. I was there. Watched it happen, at least sort of. They put you behind the curtain when there’s a c-section, but there wasn’t a baby one minute and then there was a huge hole in my wife and a baby, so I kinda made some assumptions? Plus the whole pregnancy thing that ended right away.
“But … you’re gay.”
It is worth making clear here that this child had not one trace of doubt in that statement. None. It was apparently more logical to her that I had somehow conjured my own son than that I was a heterosexual married to a woman.
“I promise you I’m not. Married to a woman and everything.”
“You told us you were gay!”
At this point her friend literally shakes her head as if she can’t quite believe what she’s looking at and is trying to clear the cobwebs. It was kind of hilarious.
“He never said that.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes you did! You’re gay!”
“He has a wife,” the other one hisses at her, clearly mortified.
At this point I produced my phone (did I mention I decided not to order the Duo? I didn’t order a Duo.) and showed her a family picture. I swear she was no more than a moment or two from telling me my son’s graduation picture was AI.
Now, here’s the thing: I am certain a nontrivial portion of my students assume I’m gay. The room isn’t exactly full of pride flags, nothing like it was at my previous school, but they’re there, and they all know I run the school’s LGBTQ club, and I come down hard on homophobia in my room. And, and this is my fault, and I should probably fix it, there aren’t any family photos prominently displayed anywhere, so a casual observer of my room couldn’t be faulted for jumping to a conclusion. I make it real clear to the Gem Club kids that I’m cishet because I don’t want them feeling like I’ve misrepresented myself, but I genuinely don’t care what the rest of them think– and I think the fact that I don’t make a big deal out of it when kids do ask if I’m gay doesn’t help. I’ve never had a kid ask with any sort of hateful or disgusted feelings attached to the question, and a lot of the time they’ll apologize beforehand. I always tell them the same thing, more or less– yes, I’m straight, but I’m not bothered by the idea that they thought otherwise at first. I will be okay. So will they.
This is, however, the first time that someone has argued with me about it.
Let’s see if you can make me II
We have, like a lot of districts, an e-learning day scheduled for November 3rd, which is Election Day. Schools still get used as polling places frequently and a lot of districts have decided it’s safer and easier on everyone if they just get the kids out of the building for the day. We found out yesterday that we were going to be expected to be in PD all day. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should post this flyer or not, and landed on “fuck it”:
You’re already starting off in a deep, deep hole if you want me to take you seriously and the first thing I encounter about you is a fucking AI flyer. I’m stunned that it’s not in that AI font that is absolutely fucking everywhere all the sudden over the last couple of months.
I had a few minutes this afternoon and, knowing full well I was about to piss myself off, I looked into the company behind this, again, six hour training. A six hour training at which they have already told us they will be taking attendance twice. We have been instructed to bring “a writing utensil and a hard surface to write on,” because we’ll be stuck in fucking auditorium chairs all Goddamned day. What this means is that we’re going to spend at least a third of the six hours “reflecting” and “sharing” with an “elbow partner.”
So you can imagine just how excited I was about this even before finding out that the person behind the company has all of four and a half fucking years of classroom experience, and all of that was at a high-ranked district in Georgia, and all of that was as a special ed teacher, meaning that she’s very likely never been in charge of a full classroom, and all of that was before Covid and before 1:1 tech instruction, where we handed all these demonic little fuckers perpetual distraction devices.(*)
Their website also offers a free brochure (“free” meaning “give us your email address”, here you go) with five “tips to give teachers what they need to thrive in the classroom.” There are more typos in the brochure than there are useful tips. The first page calls it an “ebook.” It is nine pages long, counting the cover.
No.
This person has nothing to say to me that I need or want to hear. The last time they pulled this shit on us it was a three-hour presentation where the guy began by promising to “respect our time” (not once in the history of humanity has anyone said those three words and meant them) and whose most insightful contribution to behavior management through his three hours was assigned seats, which he presented as if he’d invented the idea himself. This time it is six hours, followed by a “mandatory” presentation by the superintendent that falls entirely outside of our contract hours and which I have already bitched to the union about.
And again: they’re telling us they’re taking attendance twice, so they know good and fucking well that they’ve spent a lot of money to bring this asshole here to waste our time.
I’m not doing it. I’m calling in sick that day, and if for some reason I’m prevented from calling in sick I’m going to show up with a bag full of rotten fruit and I’m going to heckle until I get fired. Just because you can con bureaucrats into shoveling money into your gaping maw does not mean that you have anything relevant to say to me, and we’ll see how your little behavior management techniques work on a grown-ass man who is pre-tired of your bullshit.
(*) I’ve found her LinkedIn, too. She has four and a half years of teaching experience, four years in three different behavior analyst jobs, and then founded her consulting company. She is a fetus, and she knows nothing.
Two quick stories
I went to work today! I still feel like butt.
QUICK STORY 1 of 2: I walked to Bree! Sort of. Every so often an ad for this app called The Conqueror will scroll across some social media or another, and I finally decided to bite and try the first Lord of the Rings challenge they offer. The idea isn’t super complicated: walk 145 miles, over whatever time frame you personally desire. You get access to an app that helps you keep track of your walking and after 145 miles they send you a medal that says you walked from the Shire to Bree. There’s a little miniature ring inside that envelope on the back of the medal. There are several more of these, of varying lengths; the next one takes me to Rivendell, and eventually all the way to Mordor itself. There’s also one that lets you follow Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas’ road instead, or you can do all of them. I just signed up for the one at first, because there’s a cost to it and I wanted to make sure the medal felt like it wasn’t a piece of junk, and it’s not. It’s a decent little display piece, and it’ll look even cooler with seven friends on it. So: off to Rivendell!
QUICK STORY 2 of 2: I had my first real referral of the year today, for something I’ve never written a kid up for before: starting a fire in class! With a lighter he’d managed to kludge together by stripping some wires on a vape! I would be impressed with his ingenuity if it wasn’t being used in the pursuit of such sheer stupidity. He rolled up a piece of paper into what looked like a joint and lit that, so it wasn’t a big fire, but as it turns out that’s not an especially salient detail when you set a fire in a school. Even small ones are a problem! You’re not supposed to do that.
NOT A STORY BUT I’M INCLUDING IT! I’m reading this book right now, and this is easily the prettiest author signature I’ve ever seen:
I really want to see the fountain pen she used. That had to be a fountain pen.
In which my job is impossible
This isn’t the usual rant, although I’m pretty sure after 5,485 posts over the last thirteen-plus years, I’ve probably written it before. I locked grades for the first quarter today, and in keeping with previous practice today’s classes were given over to test retakes and missing work, or for doing nothing if you were satisfied with your grade.
Y’all, I only had twelve kids fail my class this quarter. That’s out of a hundred and thirty-four. That’s 8.9 percent. Thirty-two in my regular Math class are getting an A, plus seventeen more in my Algebra and Math lab classes. 36.5%.
I gotta admit, that number feels too high, although it’s skewed by my other two classes being Algebra and a Math Lab class that nonetheless is full of Algebra students. But even my regular Math classes managed 29.6% getting an A. That’s crazy.
To put this in perspective, I have had plenty of individual classes where more than 12 kids were failing. Typically if it’s below fifteen percent I feel okay about it. I really want to go back over the last few years and compare my grades during first quarter to see if I’m just remembering wrong.
So, what am I doing right now? Congratulating myself on, at the least, motivating more kids to get their work done, because it’s not like there’s anything I can do if they choose to do nothing? Marveling at how my command of my craft means that my kids are really learning this year, and that’s the reason grades are up?
Nah, of course not; I’m trying to figure out where I’ve gotten easier and lazier about grading. There is no good news in my goblin brain, and there are a million ways to take anything that looks like good news and turn it into bad news.
Tomorrow, I get to remind everyone that grades are starting over, and because of that when half of them don’t turn in their assignment tomorrow, that half will wake up on Saturday morning and find out they’re failing Math. I’m also super psyched about the way the good news is only going to last for about a day.
Well FINE
No book reviews for you, you bums!
Which is fine, honestly, because I’m just as crabby tonight as I have been all week, and I’m completely convinced that tomorrow is going to be annoying. I want to gripe about how my kids shat the bed on a test again today, but they didn’t, really; the average for everybody is a C, which is right about what you’d expect, and had I given it three weeks ago it would have been about a 10%, so I have actual evidence that learning happened. Just not, like, evenly. Which is the perennial gripe of my job.
They aren’t allowed to talk to me at all tomorrow, by the way. I’m handing each kid a piece of duct tape or a stapler, their choice, when they walk into the room. Here is your progress report. You have until 3:20 to fix it. Go away.
Well, that was no fun
In accordance with prophecy, the parents of Little Billy Who Only Just Wanted To Play Football were already in the office when I got to work this morning. LB did not play last night, but as his grades are now fixed he can play the last two games of the season … which is exactly what would have happened had they pulled none of their bullshit at all. IEP talk was shut down quickly and forcefully by the head of the special education department, who pointed out that a student failing a class is not, in fact, automatically a violation of an IEP. Oops!
And then I missed half my lunch and had to write my first three referrals of the year, none of which were for my own students or even my own grade level, and all three of which resulted in suspensions. I still haven’t written any for my own kids. I may very well make it through the first quarter. There’s only three weeks left!
That said, it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I came home and killed yokai for a few hours, and now that it’s 8:00, and since the book I’m reading has nearly 1300 pages … well, it’s Kindle time in the Siler household. Because my wrists aren’t strong enough to hold a 1300-page book for very long. This is clearly what ebooks were made for.
I wish you would
I wish I thought I could get away with posting work emails in full, because hoo-boy, did I have a doozy of a banger of an email thread waiting for me when I woke up this morning– waiting for me in the morning, because it was sent at 12:30 last night. A parent emailed thirteen different people because her darling sweetheart wasn’t eligible to play middle school football any longer, on account of his failing three of his seven classes, including mine. Has he been failing three classes for weeks? Of course he has. Do teachers have a way to see if parents have been checking their kids’ grades? Of course we do. Have they? Of course they haven’t.
This decision was “potentially affecting his future.” He is five foot two and 110 pounds, dripping wet. He will not even make the high school team, much less anything beyond that.
Now, as it turns out, I had him retake a test last week, which he didn’t finish. Had I been at work yesterday, I’d have had him finish it then; I was planning on him finishing it this morning, which he did, and which brought his grade up to passing. I want this perfectly clear: I was going to do this anyway, even if the email had never been sent. That didn’t stop the thread from continuing to escalate throughout the day, as she apparently thought that everyone involved up and down the command structure was just going to drop everything to make sure that little Billy got his ten minutes of playing time tonight. At least two of his teachers do not have prep periods and one has been out for the last two days; needless to say, nobody is making replying to hysterical FAFO emails their highest priorities. Also, literally none of us have a single drop of influence over whether he plays football or not, and I suspect none of us care.
Then Dad, who no one has ever heard from all year, got involved, and Dad decided to cc in the superintendent, who I can absolutely assure you neither has the time nor the inclination to give a single damn about whether a kid with three failing grades played football tonight. Mom’s email was, in its own way, reasonable; Dad’s very much was not, and trust me, sir, only showing up to gripe about playing time in football is not endearing you to any of us. Two of my kids ended up in the hospital after the last 8th grade football game, one concussed so bad that he hasn’t been back to school yet after a week. As far as I’m concerned the entire fucking sport should be banned.
The worst thing? Dad’s a teacher in our district. Which means that he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he’s full of shit, and that no one is trembling at the thought of the superintendent stepping in. By the end of the entire mess Mom was hyperventilating about the kid’s IEP, which, needless to say, does not mention sports eligibility on any of its nineteen pages and also does not contain any particular restrictions on the grades we have to give work that is not turned in. Does he have extra time to get his work done and turn it in? Yes! But he still has to turn it in before that matters, and … well.
The last email was a “demand” that she receive a “clear and written explanation” about whether her son could or could not play in tonight’s football game and why. If she received any such thing, I was not included in the response; I look forward to seeing her in the office already as I walk in in the morning. Because I’m not even failing him anymore and I am genuinely looking forward to this conversation. Of the three of us, me and his sports-obsessed idiot parents, who do you think has actually read the lad’s IEP?
Tomorrow’s gonna be awesome.