…no, I’m not giving you a picture, as it’s dark outside, but the district sent us all home today with an email darkly suggesting we “prepare for a delay or cancellation” tomorrow, as the entire region is expected to be blanketed in ice tonight, and given that fact, I have absolutely no intention of doing any lesson planning tonight, so I’d prefer if they would just get it over with and cancel something. The smaller and more rural districts are already starting to pull triggers, so … let’s just do it now, okay? I want to know when to set my alarm for tomorrow, dammit.
Category: Teaching
In accordance with prophecy, progress
I’m caught up with my grading for the week; everything that has been completed and turned in is entered. And, as I suspected, grades are substantially improved– the fraction is kids still failing and the number afterward is the number with literal grades of zero, and (while the 11/27 and 13/28 are still a big problem) I no longer have any classes with half or more of the students failing, and all the classes together have fewer students with zeroes than sixth hour by itself before I brought my inner bastard out. This is not good enough yet, but it’s Progress. I’ll take it.
You tell me: anyone want to read a barn-burner of a shitty review of a game that came out in 2018? I’m tempted to not bother but sometimes rage-reviews can be fun.
Come to Jesus
This looks terrible, I know, but the genuine truth is that it happens at the beginning of nearly every quarter, nearly every year. We are about to start the third week of the third quarter. At the end of a quarter kids get used to the idea that no one assignment is going to have a huge impact on their grades. Then they forget how averages work and suddenly they’ve missed one assignment and bam all by itself they’re down to a D or an F, because there have only been two or three assignments that went into the grade book in week two of the quarter.
And one of the things people don’t realize about teaching is just how much acting is involved. Because I know exactly what’s going on here, and I know it’s going to get fixed, but did I begin every single non-Algebra class with a five-minute “Fix this or I will end you” lecture? One where I demonstrated that if I want to terrify my students my most effective tool is not to yell at them but, rather, to lower my voice? Did I use the word “pathetic” a whole lot more often on Friday than I usually do in a typical day, much less a typical week?(*) Yep. Sure did, to all those things, and not a single peep was uttered by 96% of my students (actually, let’s do the math, since I bounced three kids to the office during the lectures … ninety-eight percent) during any of it, because in stark contrast to most of my previous schools, very few of these kids have ever seen me genuinely pissed.
Which, uh, I wasn’t.
But I’m good at this, so believe me, they didn’t know.
I’d say a third of those kids got their grades up to passing during their math classes on Friday, and another third will be up to snuff by the end of the weekend. The rest will require some more individual work. But most of my classes this year haven’t had more than one or two kids failing, and I’ve seen more than one, miraculously, where at the end of the quarter every single student was passing. So they’ll fix it. And then fourth quarter I’ll have to scare the shit out of them all over again.
(*) I have never described an individual student as “pathetic,” just for the record. I have used that word to describe specific work outputs, however, and I’m entirely comfortable with using it to describe the current grades of an entire class.
SNOW DAY DANCE
If you don’t know one go make one up, but I expect everyone to participate. I don’t wanna go to work tomorrow!
In which I am bad at the subject I teach
I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.
But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated.
You would be wrong.
I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.
I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.
And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.
Okay so far so good
Today was not a bad day by any measure, and a few revisions in my rosters led to two classes becoming substantially easier and one becoming slightly– manageably, I think– more difficult. You could tell that it was the first day back from break– I’ve never had more kids fall asleep or try to fall asleep in class than I did today, and by the end of the day I just stopped worrying about it. Yeah, it’s fucking stupid that you went to bed at 4:00 in the morning and only got two hours of sleep, but none of these kids live in my house and I can’t control their sleep schedules and I know they’ll be back to normal by the end of the week.
Which, granted, still means some of them are going to try and sleep through class every day, but not remotely as many. I’ll take “back to baseline” without complaint, I think.
Meanwhile, speaking of sleep schedules, it is 7:20, I am dead tired, I am anticipating a two-hour delay tomorrow (they won’t cancel, but the worst of the weather will be between 1 and 7 AM, which is never a good sign) and I will be in bed by 9:00 tonight or die trying.
How was your Monday?
Proof of life
No matter what else happens, in 44 hours Winter Break will have started. There is, I admit, a slight possibility that it won’t matter because I’ll be locked up for messily dismembering a student, probably someone from sixth hour but who’s counting, but probably I’ll be home and relaxing. Right now I’m on the couch and watching my son play Elden Ring. There have been worse Tuesday nights.
Oh this just isn’t fair
My Algebra kids have a final on Tuesday, God, and as much as I’d like to see a massive blizzard start at 5:00 in the morning and cancel school this week, if you could put it off until Wednesday morning and then maybe have it last a couple of days I would appreciate it. Thanks.
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