Category: Teaching

In which assessment is stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

My kids– most of them, anyway– took a test today, and I cannot for the life of me decide whether I have made a massive error in entering this career. On one hand, way more of them failed than should have; I was pretty confident going into today, and my raw pass rates and scores were … not good.

On the other hand, we use a pretest/posttest model, and out of the seventy some kids who took the test today and who I have pre-test scores for (a bunch of them will have to test tomorrow for one reason or another) all but, like, five improved their scores. Not one of them was above 33% on the pretest– not surprising, given that they hadn’t been taught the material– and while there were a lot of failures there weren’t many kids under that mark. So … that’s progress, right? Of a kind, at least?

What if I told you that the kid who skipped my class nine days out of ten during the first semester and has been here every day during the second got a 90% on the test, was given a gold star sticker for her efforts, and when I saw her in the hall a few minutes later was wearing said sticker on her face? Because, I tell you what, I’m going to be grooving on that feeling for a week or two.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sitting at my desk grading and recording test data for, like, two and a half hours, so I think I’ll go interact with my family for a bit before everyone goes to bed.

Just FYI

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Much better day today, although I’m not super keen on spending the whole evening in front of my computer, so not much of a post tonight. But hey. At least it was a better day.

Free advice

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching5 Comments

If, after a reasonably relaxing six-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, you nearly die on the highway on the way to work because 1) somebody parked their car in a really shitty place on an offramp and oh also 2) you’re honestly fighting falling asleep for basically the entire drive, and then you get to work and, bleary-eyed and brainless, try to open your classroom door with your keycard badge, which, uh, doesn’t work on those kinds of doors, just go home. The day is not going to get better.

I also screwed up solving a problem on the whiteboard for my first hour class, only not only could I not find my error, neither could the entire class, and we sat and stared at it as a group for probably ten minutes. Turns out that, while 1.5 is half of three, that doesn’t mean that 3/1.5 equals 1/2! It equals two.

One grown adult, fifteen honors students, and it took me until lunchtime to figure out what I’d done wrong. I definitely should have given up and gone home after first hour.

Another true story of 8th graders

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

Upon entering my classroom this morning upon my arrival at work, feeling vaguely impish, I wrote the following on my whiteboard. I deliberately wrote the words relatively small and up at the top of the board, not front-and-center like I might with something important I wanted the kids to read:

THREE day WEEK end
(clap, clap, clapclapclap)

My sixth hour is the tampon crew. Typically between fifth and sixth hour I will go use the teacher bathroom, which is in the office area across the hall from my room. The kids know this, and they’re well-behaved enough that if I leave them alone for a couple of minutes while I go get rid of my lunch, nothing bad is going to happen, and if I’m not in the classroom the very second the bell rings no one is going to panic.

That little phrase was on the board all day, and none of the students commented on it.

I came out of the bathroom and saw/heard one of my kids in my room say “Okay, he’s coming!”

And then the chanting started.

And they were being so loud and I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t exactly encouraging them to stop, and it took the principal poking her head into the room before everything calmed down. She wasn’t pissed or anything but she was definitely wondering what the hell was going on.

I find myself glad that my classroom isn’t on the second floor. One can only imagine what the teacher underneath me might have thought.

In which I make a new rule

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I did not go to work yesterday, and I left early the day before, and apparently my room did not get vacuumed either day. As such, there was a bit more debris on the floor when I came in this morning than I’m generally used to, both because 1) my kids are pretty clean for the most part and 2) the room does generally get cleaned every night. However, I keep a dustpan and a broom in my closet for just these situations, and as I was cleaning up I discovered something that I don’t normally find on the floor of my classroom.

A tampon wrapper.

That’s new, I thought. Not necessarily alarming, or anything, but … new.

What did prove alarming was when a couple of minutes later I found the applicator. That’s what it’s called, right? This thing?

It had been, uh, discharged, so there was nothing inside it, which actually was kind of alarming, because I’m pretty sure you generally don’t keep those when you’re done with them, right? So somebody either put in a tampon in the middle of Math class, which even in 2023 seems kinda unlikely, or they put it in in the bathroom, brought the wrapper and the applicator back to class with them, and then dropped it on the floor? Or was there a tampon floating around the room somewhere as well?

I didn’t find the tampon.

Fast forward to 6th hour. One of my Honors groups. My favorite class, but I will deny it if you tell them that. They are fucking obnoxious, but they’re somehow obnoxious in exactly the right way? I’m not sure how to explain it.

Anyway, after hearing someone saying something about “the tampon yesterday,” I investigated, and … well, now there’s a new rule in my classroom. No one who does not possess the proper body parts to successfully use a tampon is allowed to use, distribute, touch, throw, or taste tampons in my classroom, nor are they allowed to say the word “tampon,” given that I heard it more in class today than in the entirety of my teaching career up until today. And those verbs? I needed all of those verbs.

Also, I discovered that one of my boys was unaware that there was a difference between a tampon and an IUD, and in fact thought both were contraceptives.

Anybody else wanna teach middle school?

Whatta revoltin’ development

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

Let’s navel-gaze about our social media for a bit, shall we?

The kids discovered my Discord server today. What, you didn’t know I had a Discord server? There’s a reason for that! I never use it. I set it up, and I spend a decent amount of time on an Internet writer friend’s server, but mine just kind of existed because it could. They found it anyway. We had an e-learning day today, with the kids at home and the teachers in the building, and happened to glance at Discord on my lunch break to discover dozens of students, most of my Honors kids, merrily chatting it up in my server, secure in the knowledge that I hadn’t found them yet because they knew I was at work, the little bastards.

A number of things happened very fast– first, renaming the server to remove the word “Siler,” then putting my own name on a list of blocked words– or, rather, making my name the entire list of blocked words– and then rapidly introducing a set of Official Rules that hadn’t been there before because there hadn’t been people there before. Technically the kids aren’t really doing anything wrong, especially once I introduced the Thou Shalt Not Use Each Other’s Last Names and Thou Shalt Not Post Selfies, For Thou Art Minors rules, and now I mostly need to find out if I’m going to get fired if the district finds out about it.

Which strikes me– I’ve never seen any sort of district social media policy, nor was I asked to sign one when I got hired. I actually thought that was a pretty common thing for school districts nowadays, but if we have one I don’t know about it. I’ll have to ask the boss tomorrow. I’ve told the kids they’re on probation– any shenanigans, tomfoolery or other synonyms for nonsense and I’ll either ban everybody or just shut the server down, which, again, I wasn’t using anyway. On the other hand, so long as they’re behaving, it’s a public server and they’re members of the public, so … whatever? I don’t even know who, specifically, 2/3 of them are. I dunno. We’ll see.

This is further evidence of how careful I need to be to keep my social media cleanly split between accounts that use the word “Siler”– the blog, Twitter, and Mastodon, although I’m not using Mastodon a ton just yet– and the ones that just call me Luther, which would be TikTok, Discord (now, at least, as they didn’t appear to notice when I renamed the server) and YouTube. I very much am not interested in them finding my blog or my Twitter, in particular, although I think if any of them had taken it into their heads to Google “Luther Siler,” they’d have done it by now and I’d have heard about it. So I think I’ve dodged that particular bullet, at least for the moment, and if I make it through tomorrow I think I’m in the clear, since we’re on another damn e-learning day and I fully expect them to spend the whole day on my Discord again. Hopefully by next week they’ll lose interest and I won’t have to worry about it one way or another. We’ll see.

Uggghhhhhhh

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I was sick as fuck yesterday, and called in to work at about 3:30 in the morning and then slept for damn near the entire day. I called in for today last night, not feeling much better, and then– miracle of miracles– they called a snow day, not because it was snowing but because apparently so many of our bus drivers are sick that the whole system has broken down, and there’s already another one tomorrow, although this one is synchronous so I get to spend all day in Meets waiting for kids who will not show up. At least I’m feeling better? Sure.

Even money on whether there’s school Friday, or whether any of the kids show up if there is.

It never stops

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To the best of my knowledge, our new friend who I discussed the other day has not appeared in my building yet; I feel like someone would have mentioned it at some point, and no one has, and I certainly didn’t see him in the halls. So naturally I’ve had another situation crop up, this one dumped in my lap and a direct result of my idiotic inability to keep my damn ears shut when my students are talking. I really don’t want to get into details, but it’s ugly enough that I had to spend a minute looking at mandatory reporter rules, and it just skirts everything that triggers mandatory reporting rules right now, mostly because it’s a hideous mess of Billy telling Sally that Jimmy said something happened to Allie, only it might be that Jimmy is picking on Allie and it might also be that something got mangled in the rumor mill, and on top of that replace a couple of names in that chain with a nice, vague “somebody.” A big fucking mess, in other words.

I think once I’m done with this blog post I’m going to dump this in the laps of the counselor and the principal and AP and let them unravel it if they want to.

… and, of course, now that I’ve written that, the second thing this post was going to be about has completely fled my mind, because that’s how my fucking goldfish brain works now. Fuck it, I’mma go write this email and then make sure I’m ready for tomorrow.