Tag: 8th grade

In which we are making progress

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

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.

Siler’s Procedures 2025-26Download

Am I missing anything obvious?

I get emails

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  1. Ain’t nobody asking to go to your room. We all know it.
  2. This is the second to last God damn day of school and everybody is done with everything. Speaking as someone who only had five kids in his room in 3rd hour because everybody left and 32 in fifth because everybody showed up, there’s not a single damn thing wrong with letting them hang out with their friends/teachers they like under these circumstances. So long as you know where everybody went there’s no real problem.
  3. There was no reason to email the whole staff about this because now the boss has to get involved and shut the whole thing down.
    • We’re gonna do it again tomorrow even though she said not to. Email? What email?
      • Also, fire me, I dare you.
  4. Shut up.
  5. Also you’re retiring in two days just shove them all out the door and relax.

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.

On inspiration

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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.

It’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

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.

And here we go

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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.

On the final

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I have crunched the numbers, or at least calculated my pass rates, and of the 139 kids who took the 8th grade Math final, 55.4% of them managed to pass it. I curved the test to 20 points instead of 25 before putting it into the actual grade book, and with that adjustment, 66.2% of them managed to pass. This from a test that upon looking at it the first time, I was fairly certain that 2/3 of my students if not 3/4 of them would fail it.

(Only one student failed the Algebra final, before or after the modest two-point curve. I’m not worried about that class right now.)

Furthermore, and I’m not going to post the graphs here because they’re vaguely incomprehensible without the information that I’d have to strip out of them, my kids did pretty respectably compared to the other 8th grade Math teachers in the district. The data I get through the dashboard is incomplete but still a little more fine-grained than just pass/fail rates, but at worst we’re tied for the best performance in the district, at least of the teachers I can see data from, and depending on how you measure, you could make an argument for first or second. I’ll take “tied.”

A couple of other things: first, my 8th graders are unused to the concept of “final exam” or “midterm” to begin with. 7th graders did not have to take either last year. They are also, and I think this might be a place where my current grade policies might be hurting me, not used to the idea of a test they can’t retake in my room. I told them over and over again that they were only getting one shot at this and a bunch of them asked me if they could retake it anyway. I think I’ve managed to create some kids who just sort of breeze through tests the first time, knowing they can redo them if they have to, and if they don’t get a good enough grade the first time, they actually try on the second attempt.

Second, I may need to rethink the way I teach my classes from the ground up, so long as the guy who is in charge of writing these tests remains in charge of writing these tests. I am a big fan of Everyone Who Tries Can Pass, which, honestly, probably shouldn’t be true no matter how much I want it to be. He is a big fan of Rigor, which I generally find to be nothing more than artificial difficulty with no particular instructional utility.

To put this in simpler terms, if the objective is “prove you can multiply,” I’ll likely ask you what 7×8 is. His questions are more likely to be 7.13 x -18.014, that is if he’s not writing something utterly demonic like -7/18 x 8.12.(*) Both are “multiplication,” of course. Mine lacks Rigor. His lacks common sense. I feel like maybe if the kids are seeing a particular mathematical concept in 8th grade, maybe we ask them some simpler questions about that concept to see if they get the idea before we jump to the Rigor shit. Not so for my compatriot; the ILEARN is gonna be Rigorous, so our assessment must be as well.

This is the point where I generally throw my hands up and point out that if you want me to fail half of my students, please have the balls to actually say that. I’d ultimately rather have them feel like they have a chance to pass, and (slightly more importantly) a chance to understand the math I’m supposed to be teaching them. If every test question is high level and Rigorous, I can point at ten kids in every class who are already done before I pass the tests out, and that’s not including the ones who just don’t give a shit one way or another. That’s a whole different conversation, and one I might have sometime during break depending on whether I get around to analyzing my ILEARN data the way I want to.

So what did I do? Detailed guided notes. Detailed guided notes. Here, take a look at them if you want:

8th Grade Final NotesDownload

Basically every question in those notes is a test question on the final that has been slightly rewritten, basically just changing the numbers. In other words, if you paid fucking attention during the four days that we spent going over that nine page document, you had the entire test in front of you. And yes, the test was open notes. 45% of my kids failed with this document in front of them; most of them because they didn’t even glance at it during the test. (You may recall the test I gave a couple of years ago where I literally wrote the answers on the board and 23% of them failed. There is nothing I can do to get some of these kids to pass.)

Anyway. If you’ve read this far, go ahead and look through those notes, and keep in mind that I didn’t exactly keep that document a secret. I shared it with my boss and I gave it to my 8th grade partner teacher. I don’t think she used it with her class; I could be wrong.

You tell me: is this cheating? Meeting the kids where they are? Something else? I don’t know. They did a lot better than I thought they were going to do initially, and there are still a bunch of questions on that test (not all of them, to be clear) that I think are manifestly unfair for 8th graders. Looking at the kids who failed anyway, honestly, I’m not sure how many of them were possible for me to get short of taking the test for them.

The question is whether I just give up on those kids next semester and leave them behind so that I can have the rest of them ready for a test like this without this degree of a crutch, or if I keep providing the crutch. I genuinely don’t know. I really don’t.

(*) To get a little bit further into the weeds, converting decimals to fractions and vice versa isn’t in 8th grade standards, and I don’t have time to teach it. So there is zero chance that I’m going to give my kids a question where that must happen in order to get the right answer. Because it introduces a source of error that is not “do the kids understand this 8th grade standard” and I’m not about that life.

Tomorrow

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I get to spend my entire day tomorrow giving my students standardized tests, and I mean that literally– every single one of my classes, all day, except for my 30-minute lunch, which is going to be delayed a bit from its usual time because of Reasons. I will have to read several pages of instructions six times and ask over a hundred and thirty students “Do you have a cell phone?” and hope none of them are lying to me, because I get to catch all the bullshit from everybody if we have to invalidate a test.

You’ve all heard the rants before; I’m tired and I don’t wanna. I’m going to predict my sixth-hour kids have the worst test scores I’ve ever seen, though, because giving a standardized test at the end of the day is fucking professional malpractice.

And then Thursday the process will repeat, with the ELA teachers giving their half of the test, and I’ll be in my classroom instead, trying to figure out how to keep the bastards busy and quiet for class periods that are ten or so minutes longer than usual. I’m thinking color by numbers. I’m already pre-annoyed by Thursday behavior issues that haven’t even happened yet– that ten minutes don’t sound like much but they’re going to be. My current ability to tolerate bullshit, as well as the ability of the other adults in the building, is calibrated for 53-minute blocks. There will be a lot of damn referrals during the last ten minutes of class over the next couple of days.

Also, I just ate about two thousand calories of deep dish pizza, and it was a bad idea.

The end.

Some good news in some nerdy graphs

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Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.

Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.

But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.

Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:

The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.

There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.

Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.

So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.