I broke up a fight yesterday involving two of my favorite students, and since it was a girl fight it involved prying fingers out of hair. The girl I grabbed had bruises on her arm after the fight. Pretty sure they were from me. Today there was a fight within ten seconds of the first bell of the day.
I have officially reached the point where I am done trying to motivate kids who don’t want to do their work; the deal works like this: I’m going to spend the first part of class teaching to whoever will listen. If you’re obviously not listening but you’re quiet I’m going to leave you alone. After that I’m going to give an assignment of some sort; that assignment’s going in the grade book. Want an F? That’s cool, you can have one, and I’m not going to hassle your ass to get your work done, again, so long as you’re quiet about it. You want to sleep through class or watch YouTube videos for the whole period? Go for it. You’re gonna get the grade you want; at this point in the year I’m here for the kids who want an education and I’m done worrying about everyone else.
Twelve days of school, y’all, and my final exam is in seven.
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.
My head’s all over the place right now, so let’s do a bullet list.
Indiana voted on Tuesday. The Previous Occupant managed 79% of the Republican primary vote against an opponent who dropped out two months ago. I remind you that I Know Nothing About Politics before saying this, but it’s amazing how the polls say one thing and literally every other thing about this election says another.
Meanwhile, I was assuming my choice for Senate would lose because Indiana would choose the white guy, and they didn’t! Not only did Valerie McCray win, she won solidly, getting about 2/3 of the vote.
The sex pest won his primary too, unfortunately. I am probably just going to leave State Senate blank in November. Surprisingly, there is no Republican candidate, but there is a Libertarian running, and not only is he a Libertarian, he’s an engineer, which means he’s a jackass. It is possible to be either and not be a jackass but it is not possible to be both.
Today was a better day at school, not least because all of my knuckleheads from yesterday were excluded from class today. Today was the Math NWEA test, too, and for all indications it looks like it … went well? Possibly quite well? I won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning because it takes 24 hours for results to be fully available to teachers but damn near every kid I talked to showed growth.
Meanwhile, I’m definitely taking the high school Mathematics Praxis test this summer. My boss hinted that we might have enough 8th graders taking Geometry next year to be able to make a class section out of it, and I will fight anyone who tries to take that class away from me. That means I need to get licensed to teach it, though, so there’s a test to pass and some paperwork to get done. I can take the damn thing from my house, though, which is spectacularly good news.
I have chosen violence, and will be wearing a shirt that just says KENDRICK to work tomorrow. I’m expecting fireworks. It’ll be fun.
The final meeting of my little club of gay weirdos at school was today. We had a pizza party. I thought I had ordered far too much food. They each turned out to be a million locusts wearing skin suits, and everything I ordered was gone in seconds. I’m really going to miss these kids.
We had a fight in the hallway toward the end of the day, and I raised my voice to such a level clearing the hallway that I was hoarse for all of fifth and sixth hour. I’m hoping I can talk tomorrow.
Teenage boys need to be sent to an island, far away from everyone else, and not released until …
… hell, just not released. Send all the teenage boys to an island. Far away from me. Forever. I have been a middle school teacher for a very long time and this is the most exhausting spring in my memory. I’m going to bed.
From the “I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice” department: Between Kyne Santos, who wrote this really awesome fucking book, and a simply outstanding TikTok account called Carrie the One, I follow two different math-based drag queen accounts on social media, or at least I did before I killed off my TikTok account. I say an awful lot that you already know from the title and the cover whether you want to read this book or not, but let’s be real here: a book about math written by a drag queen might be the ultimate “you already know if you want to read this” book, and to be honest this is less of a review than a notification that this book exists, and you might have missed it, and if the notion of reading this book rustles your jibblies in literally any way at all you should go spend money right away.
This book is part memoir, part textbook (simultaneously of mathematics, the history of gay culture and the drag movement, and of the history of mathematics) and part adorably unhinged geek-out about how fucking cool math is. You probably need to be at least comfortable with algebra to be able to fully appreciate it, if only because it’s kind of hard to talk a lot about math without getting at least a little bit into the weeds, but Kyne’s going to be explaining what ℵ0 is at some point and if that terrifies you you should at least take a deep breath before jumping in. It’s only 233 pages, though, so even if you have a rough time with it it’s not terribly long.
Each chapter takes on some aspect of mathematics– there’s a chapter on infinity, a chapter on algebra, a chapter on what “proof” means in a mathematical context and what the difference between numbers and numerals are, and so on, and Santos interweaves their own story and the history bits into the more technical (but again, not super technical, so far as it goes) math-focused parts. I picked up a couple of things that I am absolutely going to be bringing up in class, or at least with my Algebra kids– I have my lesson plans for Monday done already, and they’re directly from an anecdote in this book about imaginary square numbers that absolutely set my brain on fire– and Santos is one of those people who can carry a lot of what could be a slog just by sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. Again, if you’re even the least bit curious, absolutely give this a shot. It’s well worth it.
… you have to be kidding, right? This week has to be over. It HAS to be.
In theory, at least, tomorrow should be easy; today’s second round of unit tests went way better than Tuesday’s did, and a lot of the kids are chomping at the bit to retake the tests they did poorly on. A bunch of them won’t be there on account of it’s the last day before Spring Break, and a bunch more won’t be there because there’s a behavior/grades reward party thing for the 3rd quarter for the last couple of hours of the day and they can’t go, so they’re just going to stay home. Classes will be about half an hour long. I can put up with anybody for half an hour.
But holy shit, this week. I may take a brain pill tomorrow morning just to limit my emotional volatility; it seems unlikely that I’m gonna get punched in the fucking face again tomorrow but if it does happen again I can’t promise I won’t seriously injure the kid involved.
One way or another, I’m about nineteen and a half hours away from Spring Break. So long as I don’t die, I should be okay. We’ll see.
Joe Lieberman died today, so it’s already kind of a heavy lift to make today a bad day when that’s the main headline, but school didn’t go poorly either, although I’m going to wait until tomorrow to make any judgments about whether my new method of test prep worked at all. They appeared to know things about transformations at the end of the day, but we all know the evidence of your eyes can be tricksy.
Oh, and I sent my wife a text begging her to prevent me from falling asleep on the couch at 6:47 and then when I woke up at 8:04 I sent another text that just said “LOL,” because I don’t think Christ and an army of horny angels could have kept me from falling asleep on the couch today. And now I’m here, writing a blog post, and hopefully within half an hour or so I’ll be asleep again, so there’s Wednesday done and dusted, I suppose.
Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?
Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?
Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?
Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.
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