Tag: assessment

Day 26

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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.

An admission

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

“Dipshit groyper in it for the lulz” was not one of the identities I had considered for the shooter.

I need to figure out what it is about the first test of the year that causes all my kids to turn their brains off. Because I’m pretty sure I’m four, maybe five years deep where after the first test I wanted to quit my job and go pick onions for a living. My next classes are going to be yet another one of those situations where I have to struggle to keep the words fucking idiots from escaping my lips. Tell me, gentle reader, what do you think about this statement:

Any number to the power of 0 is 1.(*)

I feel like that’s pretty unambiguous!

Can you explain to me why, in a question about the power of zero, where the notes stated that any number to the power of zero is one, some students said that no, this number wouldn’t equal one, or worse, that some of the example numbers would only sometimes equal one? Gentle reader, can you give me a single example in mathematics of the word sometimes showing up when we’re talking about something equalling something else?

Christ, I’m tired.(**)

(*) For the purposes of this conversation, remember this is 8th grade math, and we’re going to ignore the fact that there’s debate about whether 00 equals one or zero. They’re not going to get asked about that in 8th grade. Literally every other fucking number equals 1 when raised to the power of zero, and I’m willing to tolerate a tiny inaccuracy in what I thought, again, was a clear and unambiguous statement.

(**) I have had this exact conversation, multiple times: “The rule is any number to the power of zero equals one. What’s three to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s twelve to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s three hundred to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s negative four to the power of zero?” “… negative one?” “The rule is any number to the power of zero is one.” “Oh, one.” “What’s point five to the power of zero?” “… point five?”

Any means fucking any, God damn it.

Three down, one to go

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I applied to teach summer school, did I mention that? I don’t know for sure that I want to do it, but I can’t decide that I do want it unless I apply now, and I have no real sense of how many jobs there are or what my chances are to get one, because for this type of thing they basically drop the teachers into a spreadsheet that sorts us by seniority and licensure and stuff like that and then spits out the teachers that get offered jobs. Plus I really only want to teach Algebra 1; I’m licensed for high school (there’s no middle school summer school this year) but I don’t want my first time teaching, say, Geometry to be in a three-week intensive summer course. Seems like a bad idea!

But yeah. I’d work four hours a day for three weeks and make a few grand (I’m paid at my hourly rate, which … I’m not 100% sure what my hourly rate is but it’d be decent money) and then I’d have all of July and the first week of August for my break, which doesn’t seem like it would be too terribly exhausting. We’ll see what happens.

At any rate, I’m done with three quarters of the 2024-25 school year, and I’m reaching the point where I’m having to admit that this has been a pretty good year so far. I’m pretty sure I’m failing fewer students this quarter than I ever have, or at least since returning to teaching after the furniture sales years, and that’s a good feeling. Then again, I had to fill this out for each of my classes, which is reliably the most annoying part of giving grades:

I know you can’t read that, but that’s a class of thirty or so students and I have had to rank each of them from zero to two on Persistence, Respectfulness, Initiative, Dependability, and Efficiency, and if you’re thinking that some of those sound like they might kinda be the same thing and you’re not entirely sure what some others mean, well, the kids never look at the numbers either so even putting enough energy into them to spread them out like I did is kind of a colossal waste of my time. This is more a measure of what kind of mood I’m in when I’m doing the grades than anything else, to be honest, and I wish the district would stop doing it. Annoying for teachers and irrelevant to students and parents is not a good combination, guys! Half of them don’t care about their actual grades, why would getting this shit matter? Plus every teacher ranks all of their kids– so I had to do this a hundred and eighty times– and so each kid gets thirty of these stupid little grades, which are just slapped into the margins next to the grade for each class in a way that is barely readable anyway.

Blech.

Today was the first day of spring– shut up, yes it was– and the way I know is that the entire building suddenly shifted to 100% playing grabass with each other all day. It’s supposed to be in the seventies tomorrow, and it’s Pi Day, which I don’t like, because there’s a building tradition that the math teachers bring pie, but I have a tradition where I pretend to forget to bring pie, while wearing the Pi shirt that doesn’t quite fit very well and I wear one day a year. And guess what? I’m gonna forget to bring pie again tomorrow! My wife and I almost stopped for pie on our way home from dinner but then we decided we were tired and I didn’t want to spend my hard-earned money on pie for however many Goddamn teachers we have in our building.

Also, I’m wearing shorts to work, because 74 or so outdoors for the first time all year will translate into approximately 190 degrees in my classroom, and that’s if they remember the heat’s not supposed to be on. I may burn to a crisp tomorrow, is what I’m saying, and that makes it even less likely that I’m going to be enjoying any pie.

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.

In which assessment is stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

My kids– most of them, anyway– took a test today, and I cannot for the life of me decide whether I have made a massive error in entering this career. On one hand, way more of them failed than should have; I was pretty confident going into today, and my raw pass rates and scores were … not good.

On the other hand, we use a pretest/posttest model, and out of the seventy some kids who took the test today and who I have pre-test scores for (a bunch of them will have to test tomorrow for one reason or another) all but, like, five improved their scores. Not one of them was above 33% on the pretest– not surprising, given that they hadn’t been taught the material– and while there were a lot of failures there weren’t many kids under that mark. So … that’s progress, right? Of a kind, at least?

What if I told you that the kid who skipped my class nine days out of ten during the first semester and has been here every day during the second got a 90% on the test, was given a gold star sticker for her efforts, and when I saw her in the hall a few minutes later was wearing said sticker on her face? Because, I tell you what, I’m going to be grooving on that feeling for a week or two.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sitting at my desk grading and recording test data for, like, two and a half hours, so I think I’ll go interact with my family for a bit before everyone goes to bed.

Grading update

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Quick post tonight, because my eyes are bugging me and my head is full of The Mandalorian but I don’t want to talk about it yet– I did, in the end, refuse to fail any of my students, at least for the semester. I decided any missing work would go in at 40% rather than a 0– 40% because it puts a little bit of a buffer between that and the 50% floor grade I’ve always used for work that was attempted but done poorly. After that, any student between 51 and 59% got bumped up to a D-, and then I did give the higher of the two quarter grades as a semester grade rather than an average. For most of my students that didn’t end up being much of a change; a B+ sliding up to an A- or maybe a D+ going to a C, but there were a few where it was a pretty staggering jump, and I don’t care. If you were an A student one grading period and an F student another grading period, it’s because something happened, not because you suddenly forgot how to add. That actually did happen with two students, and I gave both of them the A.

There were maybe twenty kids who still failed both quarters even with those changes, and those kids got an N, which is effectively a “no grade.” Basically every kid who did something over the course of the semester passed. I don’t know that I’m willing to go to quite these lengths to keep kids from failing in a non-pandemic sort of situation, but that’s the situation we’re in right now, so I’m going to adapt to it.

Thinking through my grades

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My final grades for the quarter and for the semester are due … well, actually, I don’t have any idea when they’re due, but they’re going to be finished on Friday before noon. I’ve talked before about how much it rubs me wrong to fail any of my kids this quarter, and I’m currently thinking about what I want to do about my grades right now. Represented above are the actual current grades for my first hour students. The Q1 grade is what they actually received (you can see a couple, like Marge Simpson and Riri Williams, whose grades I nudged up a bit already) and the Q2 grade is their current grade with my current policies on grading– ie, nothing turned in and genuinely attempted receives less than a 50%, but work that is not turned in at all receives a 0.

(There are one or two kids whose grades go down slightly; this is an artifact of me doing this quick and sloppy and a couple of extra credit assignments causing weirdness. Ignore those.)

Ignore the third column of numbers, as it’s just their total number of points. The fourth column is their grade in the 2nd quarter if I change every zero to a 50%. The ones highlighted in yellow are the kids who would still fail the quarter under that arrangement. Highlighted in green are the kids whose grades would have been Fs for the 2nd quarter but move into passing range if I bring up zeroes to 50s. Homey DeClown should also be green; I missed him.

A couple of things stand out. First, note Bruce Wayne, who had a D+ during the first quarter and is pulling a hundred percent during the second quarter. Bruce has not suddenly become a good math student, and interestingly, Bruce’s sister’s grade also shot up. I am attributing this to issues at home during the first quarter. Notice also the grade of Montgomery Burns, who was a stellar student first quarter and who fell apart during second– also not, I presume, because all of his math ability suddenly leaked out of his ear.

I have no reason to believe that this class is any different from the rest of mine. We have been given the option of giving an N grade to kids who simply haven’t shown up; N effectively means No Grade. There is talk about high school students having to retake any grade they got an N on and it will not change a GPA. I am fully expecting them to back off on that requirement and I don’t actually know whether it applies to middle school.

At any rate, of the six kids who would still be failing: Flash Gordon has been in touch all year, and I am absolutely certain that the reason he’s not been in school is that he’s been raising his siblings. He’s passing. I should have passed him first quarter, honestly. Peter Parker, as far as I know (and I’m cognizant of the fact that there’s a lot I don’t know) is the kid you’re thinking of when you talk about the kids who don’t deserve the bump they’d get from me fiddling with their grades, because they made their beds and they should sleep in them. Last year he was a smart kid who chose to fail and frankly e-learning hasn’t noticeably changed his grades. The rest of them have more or less been no-shows and would be good candidates for the N grade.

Also, I’m not averaging semester grades. The semester grade is going to be the higher of the two quarter grades, period. I’m doing that even if I don’t end up bumping the zeroes to 50s. The office can fight me on it if they want to; I don’t think they will and frankly it’s a fight that I think I’m well-positioned to win.

In which I’ve done 1/3 of my job, maybe

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I love the visual shorthand that has evolved for pictures of teachers; there are literally dozens of variants on this picture of a teacher rubbing her temples at a desk piled with books with vaguely math-looking chalk notes on an obsolete blackboard behind her.

I received some small amount of evidence today that I have, indeed, been teaching at least seventh grade math for the last, oh, five weeks or so; my kids had a test today on adding and subtracting positive and negative integers and they did, on the whole, a bit better than I thought they were going to. I apparently have not been teaching eighth grade math, which makes me wonder just what the hell I’ve been doing with my time four class periods out of every day for that same five weeks. My students certainly do not appear to have learned anything, or at least they have not learned anything about classifying numbers, which is what I’ve been trying to teach them, and spending yesterday telling them exactly what was going to be on the test as well as providing them with an extensive supply of notes, presentations and videos on the subject (in addition to my own actual instruction) appears to have gotten me absolutely nowhere.

I’m blaming them, mostly.

Okay, that’s probably unfair, but I note that the kids who I can generally count on to give a shit appear to have actually learned something; the problem is that in 8th grade the supply of available Give a Shit is somewhat lower than it is in other grades, and, well, my kids have a bit of a shortage situation going on at the moment. This is, it should also be noted, not the most interesting or immediately useful of mathematics, either; even laying my usual cynicism about the world to the side I can’t really pretend that knowing how to distinguish a rational number from an irrational one is a skill that any of them are ever going to actually need. And while I usually bare my teeth and snarl at the when are we gonna use this school of avoiding acquiring new knowledge, there’s still a spectrum to these things, and this isn’t all that high on that spectrum.

Ah well. This was actually a pretty good week once it got started, and don’t tell anyone I said this but it’s possible that I’m starting to make some headway with the gang of hellions in my seventh hour class. I discovered to my bewilderment earlier this week that despite them being my most behavior-impaired class by a wide margin they are also getting the best grades and have the smallest amount of missing work. This fact rendered me unable to even for nearly a full hour. I was curious to see if it would also lead to them getting the highest grades on the test today; they … did not. I made the mistake of praising them and it went to their heads, I think; I’ll not make that mistake in the future.

I really like my seventh grade classes, by the way. They’re both fun groups even when they’re being more buttheady than usual. I like nearly all of my 8th graders as individuals; as classes … well, we’re still working on about half of them. But we’re only a month in. Plenty of time. I’m sure I’ll have everybody beaten into shape by June.