Category: Teaching

In which I get an award

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I mentioned to my first hour that I had a band and choir concert to go to tonight at my son’s school, and a moment later joked that I kind of had to go because I am still married to the boy’s mother and we still all live in the same house and it would be rather difficult to pretend that I had something else that I needed to be doing other than going to the concert.

This provoked a literal chorus– multiple kids– telling me that their dads were still married to their moms and never showed up for any of their concerts anyway, and why was I such a good dad (calling it “doing the absolute minimum” probably didn’t help) and could I be their dad instead of the actual dads that they have now.

Uh. Oops?

At any rate, middle school band anchor concert, and it’s 9:00, and we just got home, and I’ve been there for (no exaggeration) hours, so I’m gonna cut this short and go to bed now.

On experimentation and grading

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I did something this quarter that you normally can’t do in schools, and that’s using my students to perform an experiment. I have two honors Algebra classes, and I decided early in the 3rd quarter that I was going to grade most of their assignments simply on completion. In other words, I wasn’t going to go through any of them question by question and decide, okay, this one is a 9/10, or this is a 7/10, or whatever. Turned it in, and it looks like you tried? 10/10. Didn’t turn it in? 0/10. Same late work policy as the rest of my classes; ie, if it gets turned in it gets graded and I don’t care how “late” it is.

One would think, that if the only grades that were possible outside of tests were either zeroes or A+, that would really skew grades toward failing or high-A grades, and with a group of honors kids, generally more predisposed than others to turn in work, one would expect to see higher grades across the board.

One would be wrong. This policy barely moved grades at all. Most of the kids whose grades changed also turned in more work. There was no skew to the extremes, because kids inclined to failing assignments also don’t turn in a lot of work, and the amount of work kids turn in is really damn close to the scores they get on the assignments they turn in. Find me a kid who turns in every single assignment on time and I’ll show you a kid getting an A. Damn near every time.

Tests, of course, are a great leveler, and one other thing I have to pay attention to is whether test grades are plummeting, which might also be a side effect of this policy. Once kids figure out they don’t necessarily have to work super hard on classwork, because missing a question or two isn’t going to hurt their grades, maybe they don’t learn as well and that shows on the tests? All I can say is I didn’t see it, and I was paying pretty close attention. I might take one of my regular ed classes next quarter and see how well this policy works; I’m not going to try and apply it to everybody, though, at least not until I’m certain what kind of effect it’s having, and I don’t have remotely enough evidence for that right now.

(Reminder: all grading is arbitrary. Yes, all grading, even the system you have in mind right now.)

Third quarter ended today. Two weeks to Spring Break, about a month to ILEARN, and then that’s year 19 done and dusted. Amazing how fast the year has flown by since I changed schools. Just amazing.

Quick note tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

It’s not like I’ve been writing at length lately, but I had two hours of parent/teacher conferences tonight, not as the teacher but as the parent, and while none of my kid’s teachers had anything especially surprising or bad to say about him, shit, that was exhausting.

I have had a number of post ideas rattling around in my head this week that haven’t made it to the screen yet, and honest to God as I’m sitting here right now the only one I can remember is one I definitely don’t want to write tonight. The Algebra kids did not do well on their test today, which took me quite a lot by surprise, and I’ve completely rearranged the next few days as a result; I’m giving them the test back ungraded on Friday and we’re going to go over every single question as a group, and next Thursday they’re going to take another test. It’s going to be the same as this one, but with the numbers changed; I am hoping with a couple of extra days of preparation and with absolutely no ambiguity about what they’re getting into I will see a better result. The rest of my classes will spend tomorrow either frantically trying to bring their grades up on what may as well be the last day of the quarter or demonstrating why they have the grades that they have. Hopefully more of the former than the latter; we’ll see.

In which I entertain myself … with evil!

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

My Algebra kids are having a test tomorrow over factoring. I gave them a study guide today which basically was composed of a list of exactly what kinds of questions would be on the test. The very last entry on the list was “I will try to make you cry. (1 point)”

They all assumed that that meant the final question was going to be exceptionally difficult. Ha. I have just written the test:

Obviously there are no wrong answers to this, provided they write anything at all that resembles an equation. But God, am I looking forward to the reactions.

Because, face it, some of them are dumb

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching2 Comments

I am putting together a quick and it-should-be easy assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem right now, to make up for an assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem from late last week that did not turn out to be easy. It contains this question:

There is an absolutely 100% certainty that someone will come up to me and say something along the lines of “Why are there four numbers here?” And then I will say “Can you make a triangle with four sides?” And they will say “No.” And then I will say “Well, then, can those sides make a right triangle?” And they will not know the answer, and they will stare at me, with big, cow-like eyes.

I am tired and perhaps a bit crabby.

Oh, Ricky, you’re so fine

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I don’t even think it’s raining outside yet— and you might notice the typical St. Joe Valley Weather Shield wrapped protectively around South Bend at the moment– but the snowfall tonight is supposed to be just ugly enough to raise thoughts of … well … The Good Thing Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. Go sacrifice something to Winter Storm Ricardo, please.

Decline!

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

The most exciting thing that happened today was that I was driving home minding my own business and all the sudden everything was on fire. That’s not a joke; there was a series of brushfires on the side of the road over the course of a mile or two, at least three total, assuming none of them had grown together, and one of them had not been noticed by the fire department yet. Today was, to be honest, dreadfully boring, although it wasn’t actively insulting or anything– we just had more time available to spend in our rooms than I was expecting and I really didn’t have that much to do, as I got caught up on my grading over the weekend pretty thoroughly. So other than the parts where I was trying to not be on fire or impede the fire department, I was falling asleep, and I decided to not go to the comic shop today because the notion of driving back out there after picking the boy up just felt like a lot of work.

Still on a weird spate of not sleeping well, too, so I’m really going to try and fix that tonight.

In other news, they’re telling me to expect another winter storm Thursday night to Friday morning, so of course I’m trying to convince myself Friday will be a snow day. It won’t. It’s March. There are no snow days in March, it’s a rule.

Now this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I may have picked the wrong weekend to completely redo my office, as this week my wife is out of town on business and I’m a single dad until Saturday morning. Really all I’ve done so far is get up half an hour early to make sure I have time to make the boy’s lunch and feed the cats before I take him to school and I’m ready to curl up and die already. I slept like hell last night, probably not related to the lack of a second person in the bed with me, but I took her to the train station quite late– we left after I would ordinarily have been in bed, and it’s a good 20 minutes away– and it just threw my schedule entirely off, and I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. Combine that with getting up early and … yuck.

And then it was Monday at work, and Mondays at work are never great, especially after three-day weekends. Today was really weird, though; first hour wanted to talk about anything and everything other than math– I rarely have to fend off questions about the afterlife from my students, but holy shit did they want to know every single thing about my opinion about what happens when we die today– and sixth hour was all about the what is this forrrrrrrrrr that I have a lot of trouble answering coherently for some reason.

Here’s the thing about algebra, right? You don’t use algebra, necessarily. Nobody majors in algebra in college. But if you don’t know algebra it locks you out of a whole lot of shit that may or may not have any direct connection to whether you can properly square a binomial or not. And if you want any future in a career involving math, forget it. I tried to make an analogy today to the alphabet. Imagine a kindergartner asking how they’re gonna “use” the alphabet in the future. Well … you don’t, really? Because the alphabet itself is just a baseline entry skill to a shitton of other stuff that is not, in and of itself, the alphabet. Do you want a career that involves reading or writing, kindergartner? Well, sure, or at least maybe, but what does that have to do with learning which letters are vowels right now? Am I gonna have a job in vowel-identifying later on?

You’re not gonna “use” a whole lot of algebra, honestly. You’ll need it because it’s building blocks to all future mathematics, which are useful to a whole lot of skills and careers, and even if you don’t go into those careers, I’m training your ass to think logically, which is useful to make you a more functional person.

But they don’t want that. They wanna know why they have to multiply binomials, and tomorrow they’re gonna be all about when am I gonna have to factor things, and my answer will be “Today, shut up,” and on we go.