Category: Teaching

Let’s see

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.

Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.

I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.

(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)

I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.

I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.

Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.

Yearly supplies bleg

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I’ve got $75 in classroom decor stuff in my cart at Amazon at the moment, waiting for it to be tomorrow for my paycheck to hit before I pull the trigger, and I’m already planning on hitting the teacher store tomorrow for a few things I’d rather pick up in person. I think this purchase will put me right around $350 for this year, and school doesn’t start for another week and a half; there will be more. I went to work today for most of the morning, moving things around and putting things together and starting to make Real Decisions for how the classroom is going to look.

Which, uh, means it’s time for my yearly request for donations. If — if — any of you happen to have some money burning a hole in your pockets and want to donate something to your absolute favorite middle school math teacher, my Amazon wish list for my classroom is here. These are all consumable supplies; pencils, Post-Its, paper, markers, crayons, and dry erase markers are all enormously appreciated and will absolutely get used.

Thank you in advance for anyone willing to donate.

A small piece of good news amidst a monstrous heap of evil shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching3 Comments

The Supreme Court ruled last week that it was legal to bribe them and today ruled that the President can legally order them killed, so I’m investigating just how the fuck I can get out of this miserable fucking shithole that we’re pretending is a functioning country. I’m going to do the paperwork today to get my passport renewed; my wife and son need theirs for the first time, and I’m going to have to talk my dad into getting his as well.

I think I can apply for German citizenship via descent from German nationals, and it has not escaped my notice that fleeing to Germany to avoid the Nazis is … somewhat ironic.

Anyway, the good news is that I unofficially passed my Praxis test; the score was 182/200, which is a quite comfortable margin. Higher than both of my practice tests, too; I was especially pleased to discover that several of the questions I specifically made sure to review had analogues on the official test, so I absolutely picked up some points during the studying process.

Oh, and in the process of showing off my drivers’ license to my online proctor I discovered that it was expiring in four days, and I went and got it renewed at the DMV in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.

The bad news — because of course there’s more bad news — is that despite the entire test being multiple choice, my official score report won’t be available until August 9, because ETS is the scum of the Earth. There is literally no reason this should take more than a couple of hours. It’s fucking 2024. This means that it’s unlikely that I’ll have the licensure in hand by the time school starts. Will that matter? Maybe, maybe not; the class I’m getting the licensure to teach in the first place hasn’t been confirmed yet, so all of this may have been for nothing. Right now I’m not stressing about it.

Oh, and check this fuckshit out:

Now: those two supplementary monitors are disconnected from the computer, because it won’t let you start the testing software if it detects that you have more than one monitor running. Was that good enough for my proctor? No! I had to point them away from me and cover them with towels. The disconnected monitors, which were not capable of receiving a signal from my computer. I also had to show the camera my glasses and confirm that I wasn’t wearing earrings, because … I guess I might have been wearing Google Glass and had secret spy earrings or some shit.

Don’t miss the whiteboard there; you aren’t allowed to use paper while taking the fucking test. I blatantly violated two of these assholes’ rules; one, I made no attempt whatsoever to disconnect every device in the house other than my computer from the internet, because give me a fucking break, and two, I discovered in the fine print of the rules I was agreeing to in order to take the test the requirement that if I was in a room with a door, that the door must not only be closed (fine) but that the computer I was testing on be placed in such a way that the closed door was visible to the proctor at all times.

Which would require wholesale rearranging of my office, and again, was not a requirement that anyone told me about prior to five minutes before taking the test. I was fully prepared to lie about this one if necessary, and had he given me any bullshit about it, I’d have removed the fucking door from the hinges. Christ, I fucking hate ETS. Like, the Supreme Court ruled today that the President is a king and I still think I hate ETS more than I hate them.

That said, it’s legal for Biden to order Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito executed and Trump sent to Guantanamo Bay now, and I think he should strongly consider it.

Monthly Reads is still coming later today, if (yeah, right) you’re waiting for it.

New classroom!

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Pretty sure you can click for bigger, if you want— but I popped over to work this morning so that I could drop a few things off, and my classroom has officially been moved, so I went in and sat for a while, trying to figure out where to put everything.

Two big problems to be solved right now: one, you will note in one of the pictures that there are huge globs of thick brown glue all over one of the walls. That glue used to be behind a blackboard which they just removed; I don’t mind losing the blackboard in favor of more wall space, but I was assuming they’d take the glue down with it? Maybe it’s on somebody’s To-Do list; I’m just gonna hope and not worry about it until August. Also, there’s print on one of the whiteboards– that bit that looks like watermarking on one of them is actually there— which is hopefully also removable somehow.

Second, I’m coming from a classroom where there were literally wall outlets every two feet around the perimeter of the classroom (my old room used to be a computer lab) to a room with a total of eight– two in each corner of the room. I am trading this for more floor space and an actual window, so I’m not mad about it– I made this decision on purpose, after all– but it’s still something I need to figure out, since I have a shitton of stuff that needs to be plugged in. I mean, extension cords exist, but at some point the building services folks are gonna get mad at me, right? Plus I have to control all those cables somehow, and that’s going to be a lot of work.

There’s a ton more storage, too, so I can probably get away with putting one of my bookshelves back in the old classroom, but I also want to have at least a small classroom library this year, in case we are doing silent reading in Advisory again.

(I am thinking about cell phone solutions, too, and I just discovered this exists. I don’t really want to pay for it, but an actual locking cabinet specifically to hold phones seems like a pretty useful idea, more so than a bunch of pouches on the wall.)

(falls down a rabbit hole)

Actually, let’s talk about that a little more: the state of Indiana just passed a law literally making it illegal for kids to have their cell phones in school, or, to be slightly more specific, requiring schools to have a policy that says the kids can’t have their cell phones. Now, we can say that all we want; we’ve been saying it for years and it doesn’t matter. The kids aren’t going to leave their phones at home, and they aren’t going to leave them in their lockers, but it’s not impossible to set up something where they put them in a specific place in the classroom, so long as it’s reasonably secure and other people can’t walk off with their phones. This is the problem with the “pouch poster” system– anybody can walk off with anybody else’s phone, and if I’m going to monitor when people get their phones out of a pouch on the wall, I may as well lock the damned things up somewhere so that I can just lock and unlock a box at the beginning and the end of class. I’m already planning on having as deviceless of a classroom as possible next year; we’ll be starting most days next year with everyone’s iPads in a pile in the back of the classroom where they’re out of reach. I just have to figure out a phone solution.

Anyway, back to thinking about what to do with that classroom. Anything stand out to you?

In which it looks like I can do this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

I ended up having some spare time this afternoon, and I found a free practice test online through the same people that sold me my study guide (so I figure it’s at least reasonably reputable) so I went ahead and took it, and if I’m understanding the scoring methodology correctly … it looks like I passed, although not exactly with flying colors– I got 42/66 questions right, or 63.34%, for a final score of 163, and a 159 is a pass in Indiana. I could have gotten a 39 and still passed, so I had a three-question cushion on my first try.

Now, granted, no one is ever going to look at my Praxis score again after I’ve passed the thing, so it really doesn’t matter if I pass it by the skin of my teeth or by flying colors, but I want a little bit more of a cushion than that. I was able to go through the practice test after taking it, and I printed out two categories of questions: questions I had gotten wrong, and questions that I got right but I know good and well that I got right by being lucky. That gave me about 27-30 questions to study tomorrow; in there are a handful that I absolutely shouldn’t have gotten wrong, including one thing I’ve taught fairly recently (!!!) and one where I just flat-out calculated something incorrectly and didn’t notice it, but I figure being fully confident of over half the test is better than I expected going in. I missed nearly all of the calculus questions, of course, but I got a couple of the trigonometry ones right without guessing and there were one or two of the harder ones where I was guessing between, say, two answers instead of all four and managed to get the right one. I figure I’m going to do this twice more– I’ll study my wrong answers tomorrow and see which ones I can get comfortable with (some are a matter of just not understanding certain kinds of notation, so those will be easy points) and do another practice test on Thursday, then maybe one more over the weekend, and if my numbers move in the right direction I don’t see why I can’t move ahead with the real thing next week sometime. Which, on one hand, will wipe out one of my big plans for June, but on the other hand will let me focus more on Arabic, curricular stuff, and Spanish.

The other thing I need to make sure I understand is the actual rules for taking a Praxis from home. I know they have a proctor monitoring you but I’m not sure what the tech rules are and I suspect on at least two questions I may have broken a rule, depending on how picky they are. This organization has made me incandescently angry with them on multiple occasions so I need to make sure I’m prepared for literally anything. Hopefully things go smoothly, but I need to prepare for them not to.

34/34

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching3 Comments

I have to admit that I thought that finding out that the Previous Occupant had been convicted of 34 felonies would make me happier. Instead, I just find myself hoping he owns a gun. I want this bastard to face some fucking consequences for something, God damn it. And that pants-shitting waste of my oxygen got to walk out of the courtroom and bitch about the trial being rigged again, so this ain’t it yet.

In other news, the last day of school is tomorrow, and I am not literally too tired to live, at least insofar as I am quite clearly still alive, but I could probably convince myself otherwise. Tomorrow will go by quickly, and then year 20 (21? I may need to recount) will be in the books.

One more day. Piece of cake.

Another short one tonight

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I am bound and determined to get some agendaless lazing-about time in tonight, and for the first time all week I don’t have anything to do for school and therefore don’t need to struggle with my Goddamn desktop— I’m typing this on my iPad, which would have been a monstrous pain in the ass to write tests on but works perfectly fine for bloggery. I published a post at some point about the several stages of being “back” at the beginning of the school year, and I think I’ve probably reached the first stage of being “done,” or maybe the second, the first being finishing all lesson planning for the year and the second being accomplishing all teaching. As they have finals tomorrow and then three days to finish off any missing work they care to do, while I’ll almost certainly show someone how to do something on an individual basis at some point between now and next Friday, I’m done with whole-group instruction for the year.

Done with Grading will be the next step, which I’ll hit next Wednesday, and then The Children are Gone. I might need to go in the Monday after school lets out— or at least sometime that week— to finish off closing out my room, since I’m changing classrooms in the fall so the job is a touch more involved than usual. But that’s it, and I think I can probably call myself done-done once the kids are gone.

Anyway. Back to the lazing.

Soon, but not yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It took over three hours to write my two practice tests– seven and eight questions– tonight, because my computer is a sonofabitch. Tomorrow is the last day of prep and their finals are Thursday.

I am exhausted, crabby, and almost fucking done.