On Arabic, pedagogy and my new life goal

On December 19, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

Something happened at work today that rarely happens in a middle school: I, the teacher, was bored. This is dangerous. I’d finished my grades, my kids were all quietly working on something or another, and other than randomly wandering around and talking to people, I didn’t have anything in particular that needed doing. Somehow I got thinking about Arabic again, and that led to me downloading a book called All The Arabic You Never Learned The First Time Around. This book is by James Price, but you’ll never know that from looking at the .pdf I downloaded, which never mentions the author’s name.

Y’all.

I need a print copy of this book, and I think I’m probably going to have to make one by going to Kinko’s (does Kinko’s still exist?) and printing all 564 pages and then binding the damned thing myself. Amazon wants over seven hundred dollars for the sole used copy they have, which also looks home-printed, and if there’s another copy out there on a legit site I can’t find it.

I have never encountered a bitchier textbook in my life, and I love it.

There will be a lot of images in the rest of this post. They are all from the first two chapters of, again, a .pdf that is five hundred and sixty-four pages long.

In general, this man despises all human life. It’s glorious.

Who does he despise the most? American journalists. Oh my God does James Price hate journalists.

You know how most language textbooks pick a few basic words and use them for examples over and over? And how lots of times those are simple, easy words that everyone uses all the time? You will never guess the first three sample words this guy picks. Not if you try for a thousand years.

I’m not kidding. This is going to happen over and over again:

Any hint of confusion is met with immediate scorn, which is something all good teachers do:

This is the last paragraph of the first chapter:

Chapter Two starts getting into case endings and something called “Idaafa,” which I cannot explain just yet. I can tell you that James Price thinks idaafa is very simple and easy and does not have a whole lot of patience for people who do not understand it, to the point where this chapter starts using typesetting for emphasis along with the usual heavy doses of sarcasm:

I am going to start modeling all of my teaching after the last two sentences in this paragraph, including the use of all-caps, underlined bold text:

Shit, is that what it means? I understand now!

Toward the end of the chapter, we get this gem, where he makes fun of the reader for studying the text he wrote:

I’ve only read two chapters, remember, and I haven’t really thoroughly studied them, but I think I’m starting to detect a theme here, as this is how he ends chapter two:

This is the best textbook I have ever seen, and James Price is my new educational idol. Please, please, let someone find me a print copy of this, or I swear to God I’m making a leather-bound copy myself.

We put the tree up

On December 2, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:

They have a feature where you point your phone at the tree after you put the lights on, and then the app maps where the lights are, which allows you to pull off effects like this, which come from the center of the tree:

Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.

Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.

Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.

On the Michigan Renaissance Festival

On September 16, 2024September 16, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.

So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.

After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:

Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.

The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.

And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:

Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.

I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.

The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. ~~It’s a murder weapon~~. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!

(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)

Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.

So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.

Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?

THANK YOU

On August 13, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I am an idiot, and got distracted, and I did not successfully get a picture of the pile of donated supplies. Be aware that probably 75% of this cabinet is donated, and this isn’t everything.

There are 2500 pencils in a different cabinet, and look at all the markers.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In which Indiana is awesome

On July 30, 2024July 30, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Yes, really, I said that. I have a rule, and I’ve had this rule for, I don’t know, three or four elections now. I do not vote for straight white men if there is an acceptable candidate who is not a straight white man on the ballot. That is, effectively, the tiebreaker.

Y’all, look at my ballot for this fall’s election:

Starting from top left, clockwise:

Kamala Harris, President of the United States

Jennifer McCormick, Governor

Valerie McCray, Senator

Maureen Bauer, State House Representative, District 6

Destiny Wells, Attorney General

Lori Camp, House of Representatives, IN-02

The Vice-President will almost certainly be a white guy and Lieutenant Governor is a white guy. I will vote for both of them, of course. My State Senate representative, Dave Niezgodski, is also a white man, but I will not be voting for him as he is a sex pest. Amazingly, the Republicans are not running anyone for the seat and his sole opponent is a Libertarian (and an engineer, which I find hilarious) so Niezgodski will likely win 70-30 without my help. And honestly the Indiana statehouse is so Republican-dominated at the moment I don’t even care if we lose the seat for a cycle. It genuinely won’t matter.

I’m basically casting six votes here, and all six are either for women or for tickets where a woman is at the top of the ticket. I have never been able to do that before, and it’s fucking awesome. I can’t wait to get into the ballot booth.

Oh god I’m a nerd

On May 10, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.

In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.

I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.

Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.

This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.

And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.

Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:

Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.

I want a fucking raise.

The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.

If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.

This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.

God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.

I wore shorts today

On February 21, 2024February 21, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

It wasn’t nearly as hot in my room as it was yesterday, in accordance with prophecy, but it was still hot enough that I wasn’t annoyed at all by having decided to wear shorts. It was also sixty Goddamn degrees at the end of the day.

I don’t have a ton to say today, other than that for some reason everybody kept trying to get into fights around me– I managed to keep anything from developing into an actual fight but by the end of the day I was genuinely pissy about the number of kids I’d had to write up for instigating. Whatever; the day’s over and I survived it, on to the next one.

In closing, I was sent a research survey by someone at Berkeley who is researching teachers and teachers unions. This was the final question:

There was an “Anything else you’d like to tell us?” box after this question, and I wrote in that box that I was absolutely going to steal this question for use on a future test or assignment. Because this shit is brilliant.