Tag: 8th graders

Child, please

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

God. Kids these days.

That’s a new one

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

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.

And now one more

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

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.

The pink panties story

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I have been reminded that I owe you a story, and now that I’ve totally fucked up the SEO for my site for the rest of time I may as well tell it. I have two Honors Algebra classes, one first thing in the morning and one in the afternoon. This is a high school class that they’re getting actual high school credits for. My morning class is quite possibly the most chill group of kids I have ever encountered. I’ve never seen anything like them. No drama. They come in, they do their work, they ask questions if they have them, and when they’re done they just sit and relax and chat. They’re one of those classes where if I needed to I could just leave and everybody would still be in their seats doing whatever they were doing when I left when I came back. I love them.

I’m at my desk doing something or another and the kids are working at their seats. The word panties floats into my ears, and I hear what sounds like vaguely horrified noises and some relatively uncharacteristic teenage giggling. I look up.

Now, I am perhaps twenty feet away, but it is still fairly clear that there is a pair of pink panties on the floor next to one of my boys.

“Please do not tell me there is underwear on the floor in my classroom right now,” I say.

“There’s underwear on the floor, Mr. Siler,” they say.

I stand up to go look closer. There is indeed a pair of lace pink panties on the fucking floor in my fucking middle school math classroom. There should not be panties on the floor. I take a moment to regret every decision that I have ever made in my life that led me to the point where I had to ask a room of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children “Does anyone want to claim the mystery underwear before I throw it away?”

(Fun fact about me: I detest the word “panties” for no reason I have ever been able to enunciate, and I have already used it far too many times in this post. I do not say it out loud unless I absolutely have to, and that is not a condition that occurs often.)

I look around at my girls. Roughly half of the kids in the room, maybe a little bit more. I note two things: first, they are all wearing pants, and second, none of them appears to suddenly be having the worst day of her entire life. Most of them appear entertained; a couple look scandalized, but not in an oh my god those are mine sort of way.

No one wants to claim the underwear. Someone suggests that the boy it is sitting next to is responsible for them. This would not be enormously surprising, to be honest. I give him my firmest Teacher Look, and he fails to wither under my glare. I think there’s no earthly way he could keep a straight face right now and go to get a pencil, which I use to pick up the underwear.

At which point something equally horrible becomes clear: there is not just a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom. There is a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom and it has been worn. Several days in a row, from the look of it. Soiled would perhaps give the wrong impression, but … crusty? We can go with crusty. There are no obvious signs of blood on them; with girls this age the immediate suspicion would be some sort of menstrual disaster but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I look around again. Each of my girls makes eye contact. There’s no way they would be willing to make eye contact with a male teacher holding their underwear by a pencil in the middle of math class. There’s just no way, right? That’s a literal nightmare.

I throw the underwear in the trash and forbid any of my students to ever speak of this again, a promise that all of them make and I’m absolutely certain that not one of them intends to keep. Two minutes later, my boss wanders by, because of course she does, and I tell her the story, mostly to gauge her reaction. She is horrified but thinks it’s hilarious, and having been a middle school principal for more than ten minutes, volunteers to take my trash bag out of my room so that the boys in the next class don’t go digging to find anything, no doubt to start throwing them around the room.

As of this moment, several days later, I still have no suspects.

It was a weird day.

drowning

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I have a day of training and meetings tomorrow and I have been grading since I finished dinner and I am not going to have time to tell this story, but it involves 8th graders and pink panties and please God don’t let me forget to tell it at the soonest possible opportunity.

Also we did not get a snow day today and I blame God.

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 no, you cannot

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I discovered earlier today that this had happened– read the first couple of paragraphs if you don’t immediately see why I’m linking to it. The lady who wrote it sent me a very nice email about it, which I think deserves a response, if only to point out that I haven’t thrown myself down a hole or anything since I wrote that post. I was fascinated enough by it that I actually outed myself to the rest of the math team this afternoon so that I could share the article with them, so if any of my co-workers abruptly stop talking to me in the next few days I guess I know why.

I’m not quite sure what the hell happened today. My observing student taught his first lesson today, to my first and second hour, who were absolutely perfect for him, a feat that led to me spending $20 on candy this afternoon on the way home, and I intend to distribute every single piece tomorrow. Then third and fourth hours showed their asses in a big way; I had to put three kids out, and then the class period ended abruptly when the entire 8th grade got called downstairs for a meeting on no notice at all.

Oh, and Hosea asked four different girls to either be his girlfriend or to let him kiss them today, so I had to deal with that. One of them brought me a note he had written her. Check this out:

She has declined his offer to be her pudding.

I am not currently aware of whether the same poem was also used for the other girls, or whether those requests were in person.

God, I need tomorrow to be quiet.

In which it is time to be done now

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I need y’all to understand that, with five days of school and only three days of instruction left, I am doing literally third grade material with my students right now. We’re doing area of 2-dimensional shapes, something my son, who is in third grade, was doing earlier this year. And they can’t do it, and I’m well beyond the point where I’m particularly concerned about whether it’s an issue of ability or volition, because this shit is too fucking simple for you to be failing even if you don’t give a shit any longer.

Those are actually the first five questions on my assignment for tomorrow. The last, if you don’t recognize it, is a TikTok reference. It is a meme referencing someone who has had something simple explained to them and they somehow still do not understand it. They’ll get it.