The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Sometimes you stay home from work because you feel like hell, which means you have to push your Algebra final back a day. But then your son also has an Algebra final on Wednesday, so you end up having to prepare an 8th grader for an Algebra final anyway.
It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
We took a field trip today, to a manufacturing plant, and got a tour and little presentations by a dozen or so different people over the course of the trip, and … man. Maybe talking to kids is a lot harder than I think it is? Not teaching, mind you, just talking to kids. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these folks, and there’s something to be said for trying, and everyone was really nice, but it was really, really clear that these folks have been embedded in manufacturing-speak and boat-speak for forever and that they had no idea how much of the vocabulary they were using would be completely opaque to adults outside the field, much less actual children. Like, maybe when you’re talking to a bunch of kids, don’t use a lot of acronyms? I’m a grown-ass man with two Master’s degrees and I don’t know what the hell a BMA could possibly be, and the context isn’t helping me at all because I don’t know shit about manufacturing or boats. I could follow along with the IT guy’s spiel, on account of being a big nerd, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the room, and he’d probably have gotten a lot more engagement out of the kids if he’d talked about the giant gutted server blade that was sitting on the desk in front of him. Instead, he just kept talking about blades, and my kids were looking around for swords.
Here’s everything I know about boats, in fact:
Sigh.
I mean, whatever; the trip ended with my group getting to climb all over a couple of very expensive looking boats, and they enjoyed that, and at least we didn’t go to the box factory? One group got two hours about boxes. Boats are better than boxes.
In other news, and I don’t think this is me being mean or inappropriate but if you disagree let me know and maybe I’ll delete it, but I encountered this man on my way home yesterday and he is the angriest … banjo? Ukulele? Mandolin? Let’s go with mandolin, it looks like it’s got eight strings– player I’ve ever seen. Like, prior to observing him for a minute or two at a red light, I would not have believed that you could play a mandolin at someone, much less at passing cars, but holy hell. I don’t know what he was upset about, but every ounce of it was getting poured into that instrument. I kinda wish I could have heard him.
There’s still plenty to do, of course– I have never once in 23 years started the school year feeling like I was completely ready– but given that it’s Tuesday and I don’t even start getting paid until next week, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape right now.
I am going to put a lot of effort into being more explicit about my procedures this year so that I can tighten up behavior a little bit. These are going to be scattered around the room in appropriate places, and I think I’m probably going to actually laminate little cards for the “Start of Class” and “End of Class” ones and tape them directly to the desks. They won’t last the whole school year, obviously, but hopefully after a few weeks they won’t be strictly necessary any longer.
Am I missing anything obvious?
We are going to the zoo for a special Nighttime Zoo Experience tonight, so this is all you get for today, since I got home and took a nap on the couch. So have a great night.
One thing I can be reliably counted on for is that I will massively overthink my awards at the end of the year. Each teacher in my building gives at least two; one for best student (this one is easy, because it’s objective; I look at my Algebra class, average their grades out over the entire year, and the highest kid gets it) and one for “most inspiring” student.
Y’all, “most inspiring student” is hard. There was one year where it was a gimme; the kid had walked into the building with literally no English at all midway through the first semester and proceeded to work his merry ass off for the rest of his time in the building, pulling a perfect GPA in Math and a respectable average in the rest of his classes along the way. This year I’m in the kinda weird position where I could justify a number of kids for being inspirational in theory but not necessarily inspiring to me specifically. My kid with the neurodegenerative disease who is in a wheelchair and has held down an A average, just for example. But honestly? He doesn’t work with me specifically all that much; he has a 1:1 aide and there’s also a special ed coteacher in the room with him, and he’s way more likely to talk to the two of them than he is to me. I have a couple of decent examples of the same general type of kid as last year’s winner, only none of them are as good of a student as he was and all of them had more English when I met them, plus I don’t want this to become The Smart ESL Kid award. There are a lot of kids who are amazing in a lot of ways but the word inspiring just doesn’t float through my head when I think of them. What I want is to be able to give like twelve “you are awesome” awards. Maybe a button that says I Am One Of Mr. Siler’s Favorites, Suck It Losers.
Right now I’m leaning toward a kid who is in my advisory but doesn’t actually have me for Math, which feels like a bit of a cheat; this kid is also in my weird little gay nerds club and I love them dearly so they will probably end up being the choice. But I dunno. The awards were due at the end of the day on Friday and I completely whiffed on them, but I figure I still have until the end of the day tomorrow to think about it.
Watch, both of my nominees will end up getting suspended tomorrow, for the first time ever in both cases. That’s how these things usually work.
State math testing tomorrow and Wednesday, and then I’m … well, it’s middle school, so never, ever stress-free, but at least a lot less stressed than I am right now. I sat down during our team meeting with the other 8th grade Math teacher and once we went through everything we knew we had to do already for the rest of the year I realized I only really have like eight more assignments to plan.
I told them today that I was going to keep things super simple in class for the next couple of days, and that tomorrow’s assignment in particular was going to be extremely short. Like, five problems short. I have entertained myself by making those five problems insanely complicated,(*) and I’m going to put the answers on the board and not mention it to anyone. We’ll see how many of them notice! I’m going to guess roughly a quarter do not.
(*) Insanely complicated and yet within the skill set of anyone who has been actually paying attention. So, f’rex:
I may throw some extra credit at anyone who actually solves them instead of just circling the right answers. We’ll see.
I would typically expect to be Sundaying pretty hard at the end of Spring Break, but that’s not what’s happening. I’m not stressed at all. That said, I’ve had one hell of a time figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my students this week, and more specifically what I’m going to do with them tomorrow, and I finally settled on a super basic, 20-question paper assignment with a mix of stuff from the last quarter on it. I’m titling the assignment “I Hope You Remember Math.” They’re all going to be lethargic and asleep tomorrow anyway so I think trying to start anything new (and the next unit is probability) is probably going to work against me. Then Tuesday through Friday on the basic principles of probability, skip the test, and two weeks of ILEARN review? Sure. Why not.
And after that … well, I chose the image up there for a reason. Right now I don’t even know what classroom I’m supposed to be in tomorrow (I was supposed to be back in my original room, but the weekly staff bulletin says otherwise, but the weekly staff bulletin also shows significant signs of having been copy-pasted from the last weekly staff bulletin) and that makes it really hard to plan. So tomorrow is going to have to be the last gimme day for a while, but that’s fine. It’s all fine. It’ll all be fine.
Unless the world blows up or something, but I’m gonna try not to worry about that too much.
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