I broke up a fight yesterday involving two of my favorite students, and since it was a girl fight it involved prying fingers out of hair. The girl I grabbed had bruises on her arm after the fight. Pretty sure they were from me. Today there was a fight within ten seconds of the first bell of the day.
I have officially reached the point where I am done trying to motivate kids who don’t want to do their work; the deal works like this: I’m going to spend the first part of class teaching to whoever will listen. If you’re obviously not listening but you’re quiet I’m going to leave you alone. After that I’m going to give an assignment of some sort; that assignment’s going in the grade book. Want an F? That’s cool, you can have one, and I’m not going to hassle your ass to get your work done, again, so long as you’re quiet about it. You want to sleep through class or watch YouTube videos for the whole period? Go for it. You’re gonna get the grade you want; at this point in the year I’m here for the kids who want an education and I’m done worrying about everyone else.
Twelve days of school, y’all, and my final exam is in seven.
Like most teachers, I absolutely fucking hate the question “When am I gonna use this?” The answer is never. Never. You, personally, as someone whose sole concern is defending your ability to remain as ignorant as much of the world as possible, are never going to use what we’re doing, because you’re never going to useanything. You live in a country that hates education and educated people, and you’re going to be forty and still using apostrophes like they’re an early defense system for the letter S, mixing up basic homonyms you should have been getting right in second grade, and telling people that you did terribly in school but it doesn’t matter because “you did all right” while hoping your shitty car gets you home to your trailer park and wondering where you’re gonna score your next dime bag from since your weed guy got arrested last week. You barely use the alphabet. You’re not gonna use algebra.
*Ahem.*
I may be a little unreasonable in my hatred of that question, actually.
I have to start teaching transformations this week, and I fucking hate teaching transformations. I have come to terms with teaching equations of lines and slope despite the disinclination of 8th graders to learn them because they genuinely are fundamental to a lot of more advanced stuff, and the correct response to an 8th grader who says they don’t wanna learn that stuff is that you don’t give a shit and you’re not about to let their futures be determined by what they wanted to do when they were thirteen and idiots. Siddown, shuddup and pay attention, you whiny little fucker.
They’re never gonna use transformations. They’re just not. I can’t even figure out what this shit leads toward in an abstract sort of way, and it depends on spatial reasoning to really be able to figure it out, and I don’t know how to teach that, and I have never once in years of teaching math been able to explain satisfactorily how to write a rule for a dilation or a reflection or especially, Jesus, fuck these things rotations, and my kids stare at me with flummoxed and slightly betrayed looks on their faces because they’re used to me making sense at least in theory and Christ do I hate this unit more than anything else in the curriculum. Ever.
I may just make a deal with my kids that I’m not gonna teach this, and they’re just gonna miss the one question that is guaranteed to involve transformations on the ILearn, and everything will be fine anyway, and the trick is don’t tell anybody that we’re watching movies and practicing fucking addition and subtraction and fractions for the next few weeks because God fuck me dead if any of these kids can add -17 and 23 without a calculator and they don’t even know how to put 1/2 + 2/9 into a calculator, much less what it means or how to figure it out. Can we just do that instead and skip this entire fucking unit? Because it really and truly and genuinely does not matter if they don’t learn this in eighth grade.
I am more or less taking tonight off, but I thought I’d let everyone know that my student from yesterday was back in class today and all appears to be well.
I’m not going to get into the details, because it’s a very long story and not rewarding enough for its length, but I found out about a week ago that I had to give a final for the first semester to my two Honors Algebra classes. That’s not a typo– the first semester. The one that ended two months ago, at the end of December. I was, to put things mildly, not exactly chuffed with this development, particularly since we were already behind and this was going to cost us even more time.
I am exceedingly pleased to announce that, given a total of five days of class to review an entire semester of material, most of which I had not directly taught because I did not work there when the material was presented, and a fair amount of which had never been presented since they went over a month without a teacher, of my 32 Honors Algebra students, 30 passed the exam, one has not taken it yet because she was ill, and all but about three got a C or better.
This is great for them, and not for nothing, it makes me look pretty fucking good too.
A lot of my assignments are done through Google Forms, which has the advantage of a wide variety of ways for me to ask questions and auto-grading. I ask the kids to take a screenshot of their score at the end and upload it to Canvas, and then I use Canvas’ SpeedGrader feature to basically just copy the grades and then it syncs them with the grade book. Last year I had to go through student by student (which was still faster than it sounds) and put the grades directly into the grade book so I looked at each individual score report as I was doing it. This year (or, at least, since I started at my new school midway through November) I haven’t interacted with the actual Form all that often because they’ve uploaded the screenshots and I just work with that.
Until today, when I noted that this student had reported a score of 24/24 even though I had screwed up three of the questions. Two of them did not have right answers posted, which means it was literally impossible for any student to have gotten a grade higher than 22/24 on this assignment before I fixed it– and I just fixed it a few minutes ago. Which means my good friend here most certainly did not have the 24/24 he reports here.
I went and looked at his actual score in the Forms document. 0. He’d just gone through and put random letters in as his answers and then– skillfully, I’ll admit– edited his screenshot to show a perfect score. And I’ve zoomed in on that image and that replacement is clean. Part of me is actually proud of him. I’d have noticed this eventually of course but he’s gotten away with it at least a few times.
Tomorrow I shall flay him, and display his skin outside my classroom as a warning to future miscreants.
But not until he shows me exactly how he’s doing this.
I have absolutely had worse first days of school. Any time I make it through the whole first day without quickly and cleanly identifying the kids I’m going to butt heads with all year, I’m starting off the year in good shape. Remarkably, I don’t think my biggest class is going to be my troublesome group, although those two things go together most of the time. My fifth and sixth hour is squirrelly but feels like mostly nice kids; my other two groups seemed pretty chill. No major organizational clusterfuckeries today either.
Do I need to have a word with Mr. Hoe-puller up there? Yeah, maybe, although I’m pretty sure this was meant as a joke.
I’ve also set a new record for kids who made sure to let me know on the first day of school that they are somewhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, including this one (look at the bottom answer):
Gonna have to have a word with that one, I think, to make sure I know exactly what their guidelines are about their parents. Sometimes with these kids, too, you want to make sure they’ve seen how other kids react if I drop an unexpected “she” on somebody in class. I want to respect their wishes, but I also want to make sure they’ve thought everything through first.
Meanwhile– and this is entirely typical for the first day of school– I’m so exhausted that I want to die. There will be no video tomorrow on the channel; I don’t have the energy to do any recording tonight and I’ve been too busy lately to get any kind of buffer going. I’ll try and get ahead this weekend.I gotta go do lesson plans now, though, so y’all have yourselves a nice night.
Every 8th grader in the corporation takes the PSAT right around this time each year, mostly as an indicator of high-school readiness; if a kid enrolls in a high school out of district one of the things they pull as they evaluate the kid is the PSAT score. Now, we let them know early and often that this isn’t precisely the best measuring tool for this purpose (and I don’t know who made the decision to start using this test, but I’d like to have a word with them) and that, particularly on the math portion of the test, there’s gonna be some stuff they don’t know.
Now, the thing is, we’ve only been using the PSAT for a couple of years, and last year, I didn’t administer it, since I was working from home at the time. So I haven’t actually seen what the math content on the PSAT looks like since I took the PSAT, sometime in the early fuckin’ nineties. And here’s the thing: advancing your skills in reading and writing doesn’t really work the same way as it does in math. A talented 8th grader can handle a reading or language test pitched at 9th graders, because reading is still the same thing, and there really aren’t any actually novel skills taught after, like, the middle of grade school or so. Math? Math doesn’t work like that. The PSAT is basically an Algebra 1 test, and if you’re not in Algebra 1, the notation alone is going to make the thing entirely incomprehensible. Like, my kids have never seen f(x) in any capacity, and that renders even something like f(x) = X + 6 when X is 10 somewhat incomprehensible. Some of them will figure out (or, probably more accurately, correctly guess) that they can just add 10 and 6 and get 16, but the majority of them are going to look at the function notation and just fall apart, and a whole lot of the questions used function notation some way or another. There were two math tests on the PSAT, one that was meant to be done without calculators and lasted twenty minutes, and another that allowed calculators (which weren’t going to do most of my kids a bit of good) and lasted 40. I glanced through an extra copy of the test booklet (true to expectations, attendance was miserable) and found maybe three questions on the first test I thought my kids might be able to do, and perhaps 50% of the questions on the second test were possible, or at least would be by the end of the year– second- or third-quarter material, for example.
I’m not writing this to complain about the test, mind you; it’s just not going to be as useful to evaluate where an 8th grader is mathematically than it will be to evaluate where they are as readers. I’m writing this because, as a math teacher, I spent the entire test ignoring pointed glares from at least three or four students– not because they were actually mad at me, but because they decided it was funny to blame me for the math on the test being hard and a couple of them just decided they were going to spend an hour staring at me– because it’s not like they actually thought I was responsible for the questions on the Goddamned thing. I just kept telling them not to panic and didn’t worry about it’ it’s nice, for once, to have them taking something that isn’t used to evaluate me or my school in any way. All the pressure to do well was on the people actually taking the test!
Year seventeen of my teaching career, done and dusted. This was absolutely the oddest year of my time in this profession, but unlike most of the teachers in this country it wasn’t the longest or the most stressful. Honestly, as ridiculous as it sounds, personally this was one of the easiest years I’ve ever had. I can’t claim that’s true for a lot of my students, mind you, and we’re going to pay for this next year– but a year where a computer did my grading and I had no discipline problems to worry about papers over a lot of problems. In a lot of ways, for the kids who showed up, at least, I got to be the teacher I have always wanted to be this year– and I got this intensely gratifying result from my end-of-year survey today as well:
This is only 50 of the 139 I have on roster, so hopefully I’ll get at least a few dozen more responses over the next few days, but this is on a scale where 1 is “I completely disagree” and 5 is “I completely agree.” So there’s a small handful of kids who either think I have favorites or I pick on certain kids, but if anyone thinks I pick on certain kids, no one thinks those certain kids are them. There’s a lot more to dig into on the survey, but these were the two results that really stood out for me and really made me feel like I was on the right track this year. I also got a handful of really nice thank-you notes, which hasn’t happened in a while, and a few kids said they were bringing things for me to the end-of-year recognition ceremony tomorrow.
(Which is going to be at school, and not outdoors in the rain, alhamdullilah.)
At the end of next year, I will have been teaching for as long as our high school seniors have been alive. That’ll be … fun. I haven’t had to teach the child of any former students yet, helped out by the fact that I don’t live in Chicago any longer and reset the clock when I moved back to South Bend, but that’s coming. I know enough of them have children that the oldest of them will be passing through middle school in a few more years.
I’m going into this summer, for the first time in a while, with no real plan to even try writing a book. What I need to do is study for my National Boards test and start seriously planning for next year. Some things are going to change again (we’re going back to block scheduling) and I want to hit the ground running in a way I never have before, so it’s going to take a lot of thinking and planning. I don’t see any real way next year can be better than this year was– structurally, given what’s coming it’s just not possible– but that doesn’t mean I can’t go in ready for it.
