I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.
(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)
Guess what my 8th graders are doing in Math tomorrow?
This hasn’t been a bad week, all told– although there was Some Shit going on today that I’m probably going to have to talk about eventually– but, man, there was a palpable loss of enthusiasm from the kids, which you can really see in the last five assignments. Today’s assignment was on paper and I haven’t entered it yet– I think most of them turned it in, but who knows.
Anyway, tomorrow is gonna have to be the first come-to-Jesus meeting of the year. I’m so looking forward to it.
EDIT: Just for the hell of it, I emailed all my parents the above image. Tomorrow’s gonna be a blast.
So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.
Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.
Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.
Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!
I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.
Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.
Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.
And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.
I ended instruction early with my sixth period class, with the words “To hell with this, you’re on your own,” went to my desk and put in for a personal day tomorrow on the spot. When you put in for a personal day you’re supposed to include a note to your administrator explaining what’s going on. Here’s mine:
My initial draft, “fuck this and fuck them,” was lightly edited by AI.
Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?
Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?
Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?
Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.
I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.
Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.
I have this kid in my last class. He’s a decent kid; he’s not, like, one of my favorites or anything like that but he’s not a behavior problem and most of the time he’s a reasonably solid student. He’s absent a lot, though, and he asks to go see the nurse more often than most of my students do. Probably a couple of times a week. This is generally not something I say no to unless I can tell that a (generic) student is just trying to get out of class, and a lot of times with this particular kid I can tell just from looking at him that something’s bugging him and so I’ll let him go.
Today, though, he was off his game more than usual– fidgety, out of his seat a lot, more or less unmedicated ADHD behavior, although I can’t say for certain whether he’s actually on meds or not. He’s already asked to go to the bathroom right after getting to class and then asked to leave again to get a drink maybe ten minutes later, so the nurse request is the third time in a 55-minute period that he’s tried to leave the room, and I know good and Goddamn well the kid hasn’t gotten a single stitch of work done while he’s been in the classroom.
“Why do you want to go to the nurse?” I ask. He gives me a Look. I have been teaching for two decades; nearly one and a half times as long as this young man has been alive. I know this look. This look means I was not expecting to be questioned on this, and I am about to begin frantically making shit up.
“Well,” he says, and then he pauses. I wait.
“I was at the board during advisory, and someone threw an eraser at the board, and when it hit the board there, was, like, a cloud of chalk dust? And I breathed in the chalk dust, and now my stomach hurts.”
I took a moment to myself.
During my moment, I reflected upon a couple of things, to wit: 1) that advisory was a full two hours before this young man entered my classroom; 2) that everyone in the building was doing the same activity during advisory today, and that, while not impossible, it was unlikely that he had any reason to be near the board; 3) that his lungs are not actually connected to his stomach; and perhaps most importantly 4) that there is literally not a single chalkboard anywhere in the building.
I like our nurse; I have liked nearly every nurse I’ve ever worked with, but she is one of my top two or three favorites, I think. Fuck it, I decide, and send him to the nurse, and then I immediately go to my computer and compose a quick email, which I know she will see because her email is open 100% of the time, telling her to make absolutely certain to find out why he is in her office, because I cannot wait to see her reaction to this one.
Rather unsurprisingly, he was back in less than five minutes. I’m pretty certain he did not manage to get any additional math done with the remaining time he had in my room.
Oh, man, I made so many of them cry today. It was awesome.
I said more or less the same thing to all of my classes today, and I said it today because I expect a fair number of them to be absent tomorrow: that this was the first year that teaching was fun in a very long time, and that the last class of kids that I remember with the level of fondness that I suspect I’ll remember this class with was ten goddamn years ago. This is the end of year 19; seven months ago I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to 20. Now I’m back to thinking I might actually retire from teaching whenever that magical date rolls around, as opposed to quitting in disgust and going to do something else.
Tomorrow afternoon is a field day, and the universe has rewarded me for these heartfelt thoughts by putting me in charge of monitoring the inflatables, which means I am going to spend four hours tomorrow stuck in a gym with several dozen seventh and eighth graders at a time, all of whom will be sweaty and, because I’m working with the inflatables, none of whom will be wearing shoes. I cannot imagine what my world is going to smell like tomorrow. I am not sure that I want to.
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