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.
I’ve sat down three times tonight, intending to write something, and it hasn’t worked. Brain melty. Students test tomorrow. Four days until Spring Break.
We do Students of the Month in my building, awarded … well, every month, as you might expect. Each teacher gets to name one every month, and there are no rules for who you choose to nominate, or at least none that have ever been presented to me. The kids get their picture taken for a trophy case in the hallway, a small assortment of goodies, and free admission to any sports or school activities for the following month. We got the email today to fill out our spot in the spreadsheet for March, and … damn, am I having a hard time picking a kid this month.
My usual rules, or at least guidelines:
Someone I like (obviously);
with good grades, or poor grades that have shown recent and notable improvement;
not a behavior issue, or, again, a former behavior issue who has shown significant improvement;
Good attendance;
I try to pay attention to gender and racial diversity, but there aren’t, like, quotas;
and — and this can be the hard one — has not been nominated before by another teacher.
It’s entertaining to wonder about what might happen– the answer is almost certainly “nothing,” but whatever– if I just nominated the same kid every month; I doubt anyone would say anything, but I like to pick less obvious kids, even if it occasionally leads to kids who are doing great in my room hassling me about how I haven’t chosen them yet. Generally that type of kid is willing to accept “I would, but you’ve already been nominated four times this year,” and if not I can always just tell them I don’t nominate anyone who asks.
But yeah. I don’t have any obvious choices this month, and a couple that might have been good choices earlier in the year have been on my nerves lately, and there’s one kid who I’d like to reward, because he has improved, but he’s still failing all of his classes– he’s just gone from scores in the zeroes and tens to high forties and low fifties, and I’m worried that if I nominate him he’ll immediately get himself suspended.
Which is a thing that happens, more often than is statistically reasonable. Not just with my kids, but with the whole list– I’m pretty sure I could get a decent office pool going each month betting on which two or three kids from the SotM list are going to be suspended within two days of getting the award. Which, by the way, cancels your free tickets, although you get to keep your pencils or whatever and we don’t scratch your face out of the picture.
Hell, that would be kind of hilarious. A big, theatrical X over the face of every kid who got suspended right after being named Student of the Month. Even better if we didn’t explain it, since the trophy case is literally right by the main door to the building. I’d love to see the parent looking at all those pictures and then realizing that 15% or so of them have their faces marked out. Maybe we’ll put a camera in there.
At any rate, I’ve got a tentative choice, and I’ve got until next Friday to decide, but it’s taken a lot of thinking for an honor that is not exactly going to change a kid’s life. Maybe I’ll take a look at the kids who won in August and add them back into the pool. True story: my original August choice got arrested the day before SotMs got announced and I had to switch her out on short notice. This genuinely is a thing, I swear.
(My life has just changed; while checking to make sure that I was using the right color to cross out the Busuu app, I discovered that new friend Salman in that famous picture is the guy on the left, not the guy on the right, and for some reason I can’t handle that.)
But anyway. The last time I rattled on about Arabic apps on here I was already starting to sour on Busuu, but things have gotten rather worse since then, and since I’ve also found a decent third Arabic-language app (I will never stop collecting them) I figured it was worth another post. Now, it’s worth pointing out: I’m only discussing the app’s approach to Arabic, as I’ve not tried it with any other language, and Arabic is fucking hard, so I can imagine writing an app about how to teach it is also pretty fucking hard.
But nonetheless. I’m not actually giving up on the app, because the (effectively) dictation sections are genuinely useful, but I don’t think it’s teaching me anything any longer. For example, yesterday’s unit was called “Making Plans.” It taught me the words for:
Plans;
To Be Free (one verb form);
“do you fancy”…
“let me know”
“give me a call”
“How about…”
Shall
“I’d love to,”
“Do you mind,” and
“Sorry, I can’t.”
It breaks these down into groups of three or so, and after each few words it’ll repeat one and I need to click on the definition. After a couple of groups will be one of the listening exercises I mentioned in the post above, and then it’ll go through all the words and I’ll have to pick the translation from three possibilities. A lot of the time a good test-taker with no Arabic could get these right; for example, if a phrase ends in a question mark, and only one of the answer choices is a question, that’s the right one.
And I figured out the other day that this last flurry of multiple-choice questions will be in the order the words were presented, which … makes the whole exercise useless, frankly. And then there’s the social media functions, which I’ve abandoned entirely, because no one who has been using this app could possibly complete these exercises, particularly the written ones. You can record a few seconds of silence to get past the “record yourself talking about making plans with a friend” prompt, but if you write something it wants several sentences, which I am incapable of without literally typing them into Google Translate and copy-pasting what it gives me back.
Oh, and the community feedback had potential to be super useful, except for one little thing: the helpful people out there who want to work with me on improving my Arabic largely don’t speak English. Giving me pronunciation tips or correcting my grammar in Arabic isn’t actually helpful!
So, yeah. I’ll keep fucking with it because I paid for it, but fifty days into Round III of Learn Arabic I’m no longer stressing about this app.
That said, let’s talk about Lingodeer, which sounds dumb but which is the current big winner among my Arabic apps. Wanna know why? Here’s why:
You know what that is? That’s a fucking spelling test. Wanna know the best way to get me to learn to read this language? It turns out that it’s spelling tests. Every letter and vowel and pronunciation mark in that group needs to be used– as of right now, they haven’t started throwing distractors at me yet– and Lingodeer deliberately overpoints everything, focusing on teaching pronunciation much more than any of the other apps would. Many of those characters don’t even appear in standard (?) Arabic– I’m still not a hundred percent certain how the dialect differences work, and this app really wants lots of -un endings on words, but when I type “My sister” into Google Translate I get أختى, which has a few less vowels than they give me up there.
You might have to stare at it for a moment to figure out my mistake here; the Arabic masculine word for “British” is, roughly, biriitaaniyyun. That squiggle that looks like a W above the letter on the left indicates a doubled letter, and I put it in the wrong place– I wrote it as biriitaanniyun.
(Why the doubled vowels? Because there are three long vowels in there. In most cases a long vowel is represented as a doubled vowel when transliterated. Where Lingodeer gets weird is insisting on also including a short vowel every single time a long vowel appears, which it does several times here.)
Anyway, there are thirteen individual characters that needed to be put in the right order to get that right, and I only missed one of them, which felt awesome. And then it hit me with the feminine version, which is even longer, and I got it right:
I give you biriitaaniyyatun.
More hotness? I want lots more of this. Rub it on my face:
Every single section has stuff like this, that gets way into the weeds, and is fucking awesome. Even if I don’t look at it on every unit, the fact that it’s there is magnificent.
This is, slowly but surely, actually teaching me to read. I’m making progress here. Which is awesome. And is why Lingodeer is my new best friend.
Go ahead. Ask me questions. I might be able to answer them.
ETA: I just jumped back in and did some more spelling exercises. I’m proud of this, dammit:
I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.
Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.
Like most teachers, I absolutely fucking hate the question “When am I gonna use this?” The answer is never. Never. You, personally, as someone whose sole concern is defending your ability to remain as ignorant as much of the world as possible, are never going to use what we’re doing, because you’re never going to useanything. You live in a country that hates education and educated people, and you’re going to be forty and still using apostrophes like they’re an early defense system for the letter S, mixing up basic homonyms you should have been getting right in second grade, and telling people that you did terribly in school but it doesn’t matter because “you did all right” while hoping your shitty car gets you home to your trailer park and wondering where you’re gonna score your next dime bag from since your weed guy got arrested last week. You barely use the alphabet. You’re not gonna use algebra.
*Ahem.*
I may be a little unreasonable in my hatred of that question, actually.
I have to start teaching transformations this week, and I fucking hate teaching transformations. I have come to terms with teaching equations of lines and slope despite the disinclination of 8th graders to learn them because they genuinely are fundamental to a lot of more advanced stuff, and the correct response to an 8th grader who says they don’t wanna learn that stuff is that you don’t give a shit and you’re not about to let their futures be determined by what they wanted to do when they were thirteen and idiots. Siddown, shuddup and pay attention, you whiny little fucker.
They’re never gonna use transformations. They’re just not. I can’t even figure out what this shit leads toward in an abstract sort of way, and it depends on spatial reasoning to really be able to figure it out, and I don’t know how to teach that, and I have never once in years of teaching math been able to explain satisfactorily how to write a rule for a dilation or a reflection or especially, Jesus, fuck these things rotations, and my kids stare at me with flummoxed and slightly betrayed looks on their faces because they’re used to me making sense at least in theory and Christ do I hate this unit more than anything else in the curriculum. Ever.
I may just make a deal with my kids that I’m not gonna teach this, and they’re just gonna miss the one question that is guaranteed to involve transformations on the ILearn, and everything will be fine anyway, and the trick is don’t tell anybody that we’re watching movies and practicing fucking addition and subtraction and fractions for the next few weeks because God fuck me dead if any of these kids can add -17 and 23 without a calculator and they don’t even know how to put 1/2 + 2/9 into a calculator, much less what it means or how to figure it out. Can we just do that instead and skip this entire fucking unit? Because it really and truly and genuinely does not matter if they don’t learn this in eighth grade.
The assessment I had to give this week over the Pythagorean Theorem was not written by me, nor was it written by anyone in my building, and furthermore it was split into four parts for reasons that make sense in a way but I will not be getting into here. My partner teacher and I looked at the fourth test and decided that it was much too difficult and so we decided not to count it as a test grade, but to give it anyway, since, y’know, the Lord High Muckety-Mucks want us to.
I decided to Do Science. Anyone who spends any time around teachers nowadays is fully aware of the common teacher complaint that we’ve never seen such a level of don’t-give-a-shit from our kids than we are lately, and that further the level of inability to notice things, in general, is a big problem.
You, being an adult, have likely already noticed that I wrote the fucking answers for the second assessment– yes, it was only four questions– on the board.
106 8th graders in my class completed that assignment today. 26.4% of them failed the Problem Solving portion of it, a number so close to 27% that I am considering writing John Rogers and asking him to make an addendum to his Crazification Factor. If I add in the number of students who clearly did not notice that the answers were on the board in plan and large letters– and I promise you that board is not in an obscure location in my classroom– but did not out-and-out fail, it rises to 45.3%, which is completely Goddamned insane.
One of these days, someone will figure out a way to separate kids who don’t understand something from those who simply don’t give a shit, and on that day, American education will change radically. Until then, however, I’m going to keep bitching about the notion that my job performance is evaluated by how other people act.
Going through a definite dry spell again, and I apologize for that, but my head’s a mess lately. Last night’s promised Hell Storm fizzled, which I suppose is a good thing, but my students shit the bed on another test again today, making it two tests in a row where I thought they were going in prepared and then they just fell the hell apart. Even my Algebra kids got on my nerves today, and that never happens, and the day just never got any better.
Tomorrow my wife and I celebrate sixteen years of marriage and our fourth anniversary. I wish I was more excited; all I want to do right now is sit in a completely quiet room and stare at a wall for several hours. I need to not walk out of work tomorrow in the same mood I walked out of work in today, because I’m not about to let a bunch of dumbasses fuck up my anniversary.
Oh, and for tomorrow’s assessment (yes, there’s another tomorrow; long story) I’m literally going to put the answers prominently on the board and see if anyone notices. They won’t. Noticing appears to be by and large beyond this group’s capabilities. Especially when the things I want them to notice are hidden in words.
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