Category: Teaching

A disappointing fact

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

I finished the Tesla book last night, and the most interesting thing I learned about Nikola Tesla is that J.P. Morgan had rhinophyma and was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a colossal asshole about it. Unfortunately, that isn’t a fact about Nikola Tesla!

Anyway, I started Soraya Bouazzaoui’s Aicha last night, and based on the first chapter I suspect I’m going to like it quite a bit.

… and after staring at my screen for five minutes without writing a word, that might be the most interesting thing I have to say tonight. We had a field trip this morning; the 8th grade split up and went to three different colleges, and apparently everyone had very different experiences. We had a campus walking tour and that was basically it. Not bad, necessarily, but not worth the large amount of legwork and nonsense that a field trip requires. Tomorrow I have a study session after school for however many of my algebra kids want to stay after school to prepare for their final on Thursday. Thursday I have the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club. And after that, I’m basically done, except for the part where I have five more days of actual school to survive.

Well, I’ll survive it; I’m fairly confident of that, having done it many times before. The operative question is how many of them will survive it. Hopefully all of them, but I’m not making any promises. The words “If you two idiots don’t sit down I’m going to set the entire room on fire” came out of my mouth today, so I may be nearing the end of my patience.

I mean “idiots” in the most loving way possible, and “set the entire room on fire” as a metaphor for the power of my love, of course.

How did that happen?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.

(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)

Deep breath

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

Just tossed a job application off into the void, likely to never be heard from again. It’s a moonshot; there’s a national search taking place and, well, that’s probably enough right there to not stress myself out about it. But fuck it, I’m definitely not gonna get it if I don’t apply, and the hour or so it took to update my resume and dash off a cover letter isn’t exactly a massive time investment. It took longer to find a copy of my resume that wasn’t a .pdf than it did to do the writing.

It was a long day today. We started the final round of ILEARN testing today, so <insert rant here> as you see fit, and then I had an interaction with a student at the end of the day that led to me genuinely wondering why I don’t just slap a motherfucker in the face once in a while. To be clear, I was thinking about doing the job application before that— I’ve been tossing it around for a couple of weeks, in fact— but hearing “I’ve been written up 600 times this year and nothing ever happens to me” definitely was a factor in pulling the trigger.

The number is 24, by the way, not 600, and considering that the kid has been absent for nearly eighty days this year (not counting suspensions) I think it’s fair that she does, in fact, have some experience interfacing with the office. I’ve done a good job letting this shit roll off my back this year; life is going to take care of this kid sooner or later, so it doesn’t have to be my job. I normally try to have a little more compassion with my kids, but this one wasn’t even one of my kids, just some random shithead in the hallway being a shithead, so to hell with her.

Anyway, I promised a book review today, which is going to have to wait until tomorrow, but if it helps any there may be a semi-irate in-progress video game review after that? I dunno, we’ll see.

A real thing I was asked at work today

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

“Mr. Siler, can you help me find vagina?”

I declined.

I will not be providing any further explanation.

Victory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have made it to Spring Break. Certainly not the hardest year to do so, but I started my last three classes of the day with the words “your job is to make sure I don’t go to jail today” anyway. My official observation last week turned out literally perfect, and the guy who was in my room for the disaster lesson on Tuesday was back yesterday and everything went beautifully.

I even made it through April Fool’s Day without any particular nonsense, although one of my students did attempt to convince me she’d passed out, sticking to it until I stepped over her prone body and pointed out to the whole room that generally when human beings pass out they fall backwards.

“I guess she could be dead,” I said. “If that’s the case, someone needs to drag her into the hallway. There’s no dying in here. Y’all know the rules.”

One of the boys actually got up and that’s when she abandoned the joke.

And yes, I really do have a rule that no one is allowed to die in Math class, and I really am like this, and I guarantee if you ask my kids to name one rule in my class, about a third of them will mention that they need to stay in their seats and the rest of them will say they aren’t allowed to die.

Anyway, I’ve been playing video games all evening, and now I’m going to go read until I decide it’s time to go to bed. Hooray!

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

Ha ha ha lol we’re all gonna die

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Nine teachers out tomorrow already, before 9:00 PM. Five of them are out for the entire week. I went ahead and signed up for coverage every day next week, figuring that it’s going to be one of those weeks where I don’t end up having a choice. I slept all afternoon and into the evening and am bound and determined to be back in bed by nine, which is in ten minutes. I have not had dinner. Last night featured truly spectacular digestive distress. Whatever this is, I’m planning on sleeping it off, because hell if I can afford to miss any school this week.

Four days. It’ll be fine. Really.

Some good news

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today— not that this is a hard bar to exceed— was much better than yesterday.

Honestly, I have no real complaints at all. The cafeteria was calm despite the presence of a lot of the same kids (the one who started all the nonsense in the morning wasn’t at school, and I’m at the point where I’m genuinely hoping his parents transfer him), my classes were at least as functional if not more functional than normal, and I didn’t have to cover a class during my prep. The next few days ought to fly by; I’ve more or less got them planned out and a lot of the stuff we’re doing is autopilot by now.

That said, I’m having a formal observation in the morning— these things always go fine but they’re stressful nonetheless— and I got an email from the district’s head of secondary Math instruction that he wants to observe in my Algebra class on Friday for some reason. It’s not a problem, mind you; my Algebra kids are my angels, but it feels kind of unfair having it two days after my formal.

Seven days of school until Spring Break. We can do this.

On a slightly different note: the new laptop had a system software update today, which did not solve the issues I’ve been having with Gutenberg, but it seems that simply turning Gutenberg off fixes the problem without creating any differences that I can see in how I interact with WordPress. So I’m going to assume that this is Gutenberg’s fault somehow, and that eventually they will update it in the background and I probably won’t even notice when the problem gets fixed. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.