I’m either getting sick again— which, Christ, please, fucking no– or my medication got directly on top of me after today’s shot, and one way or another I had more ledge-talking-off-talks going on at the end of the day and apparently I’ve become the staff emotional support teacher this year?
It genuinely wasn’t that bad of a week for me, but holy hell am I shot emotionally right now, mostly because of all the heavy lifting I’ve had to do on behalf of other people. I want to play video games for an hour but it’s also 8:33 right now, which makes me twenty-seven minutes away from being able to go to bed without feeling bad about myself, and if I start the process now…
… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?
No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.
Dammit.
On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.
Everyone in my house has something abdominal going on right now, although we don’t appear to all have the same thing and in my case I’m pretty sure it’s a medicine side effect. But it’s not exactly leading to the home front being a relaxed and peaceful place to be, what with a bunch of us being in various forms of pain and some of us occasionally needing to spill terrifying amounts of liquid from some orifice or another, often on short notice. I myself stayed home from work today, not because I was too sick to go in but because the precise kind of sick I am means that going to work, where I have to wait for the office to send me coverage in order to go to the bathroom, is an automatic no-go even if I feel absolutely fine 95% of the time. It’s my least favorite thing about teaching, the way we absolutely cannot leave these little crapweasels alone for any amount of time, or half of them will start having sex and the other half will start drinking alcohol and then some of them will set things on fire, possibly while drunk and fucking. And that’s before the fights start.
Sigh.
My classes this year are absolute hell on subs, too, which on the one hand I’m supposed to be professionally angry about and on the other hand what-fuckin’-ever, so long as none of them are dead at the end of the day and they don’t destroy any of my shit. I don’t know why these groups are so bad to outsiders; I’m certainly not having perfect days or anything but, halfway through the first quarter, so far as a whole this is one of my more manageable groups of kids. They just fall the hell apart when I’m not there, to the point where it’s going to start being difficult for the office to convince people to cover for me when I’m not at school.
(I am hoping to make it to November before I miss another day. I’ve already taken the election and the day after off as personal days, and there’s a four-day Fall Break in there, so hopefully I’ll be able to pull this off. Most of my missed time has been medication-related, which, again, annoys the hell out of me.)
Anyway, I’m going to go find a surface to wipe down with bleach. Stay away from norovirus, kids, it’s nasty.
Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.
Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.
But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.
Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:
The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.
There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.
Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.
So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.
I win the bad teacher award for today, and I probably badteachered enough today to win the bad teacher award for the month, and I was so stressed out during my lunch break today that I didn’t eat, which … well, you saw yesterday’s post, you can imagine how infrequently I skip meals.
My wife and also my son for some Godforsaken reason both want to watch the debate tonight. I am probably going to go out onto the front lawn and drive nails into my dick instead, but we’ll see.
I have removed the Second Skin from my new tattoo, and the itching is absolutely maddening, so I’m going to distract myself with math. Because that’s why you come here, right? As a reminder, this is the original image, and the question is the ratio of the inner square to the outer square:
The first thing we’re going to do is draw the two diagonals of the inner square. These are, by definition, perpendicular to each other, and they are also equal to the circumference of the circle. Let us define the radius of the circle as x:
What we have now is four right triangles inscribed inside the circle. Pythagoras tells us that the sum of the squares of the two legs are equal to the square of the hypotenuse, which is the line on the left of the square there. Therefore, defining the hypotenuse as Y, we get:
x2 + x2 = y2 2x2 = y2
Take the square roots of each side, and we get:
√(2x2) = √(y2)
And therefore:
√(2x2) = y
Which means that all four sides of the inner circle are equal to √(2x2), thusly:
To get the area of the inner square, all we have to do is multiply √(2x2) by √(2x2), which, conveniently, just gets rid of the square root symbols. The area of the inner circle is 2x2.
Now, we need to realize that since the radius of the circle is x, the diameter of the circle is 2x, and that the diameter of the circle also equals the width and the height of the outside square. So that outer square is 2x high and 2x wide:
Therefore, all we have to do to get the area of the outside square is multiply 2x by 2x, which gives us 4x2. Which, conveniently, is exactly twice the area of the inner square, which was 2x2.
The outside square is therefore twice the size of the inner square, and the ratio of the inner square to the outer square is 1:2.
Or, y’know, you could just rotate the fuckin’ inside square, which makes it visually obvious.
It has been, I think, sixteen or seventeen years since my last tattoo. I know my wife was with me; I’m less certain that we were actually married at the time. And while you very well might be looking at that and wondering what the hell I was thinking, I’ve been thinking about this exact design for my next tattoo (that’s my right wrist) for most of that time, and only just now decided to pull the trigger on it.
It is, oh, I dunno, sometime during the first Obama administration, and I am at a training with a bunch of other teachers from my school, none of whom are math teachers. We are presented with three pieces of construction paper, held together in the center by a brass paper fastener, in this shape: a large square, with a circle inscribed in the square, and a second square inscribed inside the circle.
“Figure out what the ratio of the inner square to the outer square is,” they tell us. “You can do whatever you like to come up with the answer.”
My entire group looks at me.
Sigh. Okay, fine, I’ll math this shit. To be entirely honest, I do not, at this time, remember exactly how I got the answer, but there was a lot of Pythagoras involved, and I think at least one place where I solved a set of equations with two variables. It took a few minutes. I’ve considered reconstructing the math, but I think the story is kind of better if I don’t. The ratio is 1:2. In other words, the outer square is twice the size of the inner square.
Anyway, they give us a few minutes, and then ask if anyone wants to share their answer. My group volunteers me to explain my answer, having heard my explanation and apparently accepting none of it. So I attempt to explain my logic to this group, again, none of whom are math people. It takes a few minutes and I may have killed at least one of them. The presenters, now with wide grins on their faces, because they are a step ahead of me and I have walked into their trap, ask if anyone else solved the problem in a different way. A large man on the other side of the room raises his hand. They call on him. He looks like a not-insignificant portion of the people who know him call him Coach, possibly including people he has never actually coached.
He asks if he can use their prop. They say yes, and their grins get larger.
He demonstrates a solution in about a second, by rotating the inner square exactly forty-five degrees to the left.
“S’ half,” he says, and sits the fuck back down.
I start swearing. There’s a moment of disbelief and then the whole room, including me, starts laughing.
Perhaps you have trouble picturing what he’s done. Let me draw this real quick:
I think it is probably immediately clear to everyone looking at this, with the inner square rotated, that the inner square is half of the outer square.
A few days later, I found a second construction-paper shape similar to this one in my classroom, also held together by a brass paper fastener. I kept it in my classroom for years. I don’t think I have it any longer, but I had it for a really long time, across multiple classrooms in multiple schools.
This tattoo is my permanent reminder that sometimes shit does not have to be complicated, which is something I have been fairly accused of in my life, more than once.
Okay. I got grades caught up today, and only a quarter of them are failing! Still too many although I’ve certainly seen worse. I’m going to try and do a catch-up day tomorrow; we’ll see how that goes.
All that said, I’ve been grading for three hours, and I would like some time for recreation tonight, so this is all y’all get for tonight. Something cool should be happening tomorrow though so you may eagerly anticipate that if you like.
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