It wasn’t nearly as hot in my room as it was yesterday, in accordance with prophecy, but it was still hot enough that I wasn’t annoyed at all by having decided to wear shorts. It was also sixty Goddamn degrees at the end of the day.
I don’t have a ton to say today, other than that for some reason everybody kept trying to get into fights around me– I managed to keep anything from developing into an actual fight but by the end of the day I was genuinely pissy about the number of kids I’d had to write up for instigating. Whatever; the day’s over and I survived it, on to the next one.
In closing, I was sent a research survey by someone at Berkeley who is researching teachers and teachers unions. This was the final question:
There was an “Anything else you’d like to tell us?” box after this question, and I wrote in that box that I was absolutely going to steal this question for use on a future test or assignment. Because this shit is brilliant.
Forgive me for splattering my horrifying visage across your computer screen or whatever digital thingamabob you’re using to view this, but what I’m wearing is actually kind of important to this story. It was eighty-five degrees in my classroom when I got to work, again. I bought that pullover over the weekend, on clearance, for fourteen bucks. It is wonderfully soft and while it is warm it’s not quite as warm as it looks (that’s a good thing) and I like the pattern and the color. I spent the whole weekend planning to wear it today and looking forward to it.
As I was walking into the building this morning, I thought to myself that it was probably going to be hellishly hot in my classroom and I wasn’t going to get to wear my nice new pullover because it was going to be too hot. And I was exactly right. I didn’t last into second hour, especially since I insisted on drinking my Goddamned coffee, temperature in the room be damned.
We got an email that the Thingamawhosis had broken, and that there was already a guy in the building repairing it, and that classroom temperatures would start coming down soon. By lunchtime it was still 80 degrees, and I sent a cautiously worded follow-up email, which generated a second message to the whole staff that the Thingamawhosis had been fixed but then it promptly broke again. So, just sweat, I guess.
It’s supposed to be in the mid-sixties tomorrow, which is one of those painful things where it’s sort of been winter for a little while and warm weather is going to feel nice but it is also terrifying because it’s fucking February and it’s not supposed to be in the mid-sixties, and the nice weather is a sign of the fucking world ending. One way or another, I’m wearing shorts, because fuck it, that’s why. I strongly suspect that wearing shorts to work will result in the Thingamawhosis not only already being fixed when I arrive, but magically working at higher capacity than normal for the entire day, resulting in the exact same kids who told me it was hot when they walked into my classroom every single class period, as if I didn’t already fucking know, coming in and complaining about being cold.
At least cold 8th graders smell a lot better than hot ones.
I did something today that I’ve never done in twenty years of teaching– I would estimate, without a shred of exaggeration, that 2/3 of the teaching I did during my fourth hour was in Spanish. It was time to sit down with my newcomers and see where they were at, and the only way to do that was to communicate with them in their own language. To wit, I generated this for them:
And then I banished about half of the class from the room, sending them with my co-teacher to her classroom, mostly to cut down on the number of other kids who might want to talk to me and also to prevent a certain student from getting Valentine’s Day-related harassment, and sat down with the kids and went through a bunch of problems with them. I’m hoping that document is translated well from what I typed; based on my meager Spanish it looked okay, and the kids didn’t have questions. The boy read through it, smiled at me, and proceeded to get nearly a perfect score on his assignment with only a small number of questions, all of which, I’m proud to say, I understood; the girls are a little bit behind for 8th grade but not enough that I’m terribly concerned about it. I have English-speaking kids who, based on this one assignment, have bigger problems than they do. One of them does seem to rely kind of heavily on the other, who did most of the talking and also appeared to do the lion’s share of the work, but we’ll see how that shakes out in a couple of weeks.
You may notice, even if you don’t read Spanish, that the actual Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t appear anywhere in that document. That’s entirely intentional; I generally deemphasize the formula itself in favor of the process of figuring out a missing leg or a missing hypotenuse. They know the formula, but I treat this as mostly calculator work, and I drill the phrases “square-square-add-square root” and “square-square-subtract-square root” into their heads until they’re repeating them in their sleep. Since I didn’t have any real idea where these kids might have been in terms of their math skills I decided I’d leave it out entirely for now.
We are taking it easy tomorrow, across the board. I kinda feel like I’ve worked the kids (all of them, not just the new ones) like dogs this week, and between talking a lot more than usual and the added stress of teaching in a foreign language today, I’m ready for a day where I can wave them vaguely in the direction of a Quizizz or something else that has a chance of being fun rather than being at the board or hunched over someone’s shoulders all day. They’re picking this up pretty well so far so I think if I have a calm Thursday before a four-day weekend God will forgive me.
I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.
Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.”
The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations.
Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.
After getting sick three separate times in January, I swore that I was going to make it at least to our Presidents’ Day break without getting sick again. Assuming I’m able to get up and go to work tomorrow, I’m halfway there, and seeing as how we have a field trip for half the day I probably ought to go to work.
(It’s not much of a field trip. We’re taking them to the high school for a tour.)
But either way I appear to have made it to work every day this week, and given how shit of a day Tuesday was, I’m going to call that an accomplishment. The kids in my LGBTQ club this afternoon were particularly fun. They’re so fucking weird; it makes them all kinds of fun to hang out with.
Hey, did you know you can embed a .pdf in one of these? Because I just dragged this thing I’m using tomorrow onto the screen and it actually looks like it embedded pretty nicely. I mostly found these people through Wikipedia, so I don’t know much about them. Maybe I’ll tell the kids I’ll give them extra credit for picking somebody and writing a paragraph about them or something. Why not, right?
Much more manageable day today, in accordance with the law of averages. That said, this is gonna be another short post, on account of I need to finish the new Sarah J. Maas book before bed or I’ll die.
Quick random thought, though: on a scale of 1-10, how ironic and/or pathetic is it for a middle-aged middle-school math teacher to listen to Killing in the Name on his way home from work at a volume understandable from inside nearby restaurants and retail establishments? While headbanging and screaming along?
They fucking bombed their test today. We’ve been talking about this material since November and I gave them a practice test yesterday that was identical to the test they took today except that I swapped around some numbers, I showed them how to do every question on the practice test in class yesterday, I allowed them completely open notes, and over half of them still failed.
I am so pissed off right now it’s giving me an upset stomach, and I am no longer interested in attempting to educate people who do not want to be educated. Fuck ’em. If 75% of my students are failing at the end of the quarter I don’t give a shit any longer. They should be able to drop the fuck out if they want to. Let them become their fucking parents’ problems again.
This was the thermostat in my classroom when I arrived at work this morning– half an hour early, as there was a fairly important meeting scheduled in my room before school and I needed to get some shit done– and I would officially like to state for the record that I cannot.
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