The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
It was an insanely long day– I looked at my watch at one point, fully expecting it to be 7:30, and it was 2:30– but I am home now, and I can sleep, and somehow it is not Friday and I have to go back to work tomorrow. In the meantime, though, have classroom pictures. In some ways it’s very similar to last year, but I like the tweaks I’ve made an awful lot.
I think “malaise” is the right word to describe my last few days. I’m not in the mood for anything, I took a five-hour “nap” this afternoon because despite a cup of coffee and a Mountain Dew I was falling asleep every time I sat down for more than a few seconds, and my stomach and head hurt. I know this is my third day in a row with a nothing post, but Christ, I can’t get my brain moving to save my life right now. I emailed my boss just now to find out when the building was going to be open again. I have enough stuff changing this year– a new curriculum, just for starters, and I’m seriously thinking about going permanently back to pencil and paper assignments and saying to hell with the iPads entirely– that I really ought to start heavy thinking and planning, and I may as well do that in my classroom if I can.
But … man. Right now I just want my head to turn back on.
I am probably 95% done in my classroom. I have to put some things in closets and do some cord management and things like that, but if school was starting tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be terribly worried about it. Since I have a week, we’re absolutely all good, and I can start focusing on curriculum.
Want a tour?
I’ve got $75 in classroom decor stuff in my cart at Amazon at the moment, waiting for it to be tomorrow for my paycheck to hit before I pull the trigger, and I’m already planning on hitting the teacher store tomorrow for a few things I’d rather pick up in person. I think this purchase will put me right around $350 for this year, and school doesn’t start for another week and a half; there will be more. I went to work today for most of the morning, moving things around and putting things together and starting to make Real Decisions for how the classroom is going to look.
Which, uh, means it’s time for my yearly request for donations. If — if — any of you happen to have some money burning a hole in your pockets and want to donate something to your absolute favorite middle school math teacher, my Amazon wish list for my classroom is here. These are all consumable supplies; pencils, Post-Its, paper, markers, crayons, and dry erase markers are all enormously appreciated and will absolutely get used.
Thank you in advance for anyone willing to donate.
I love how the panorama effect makes my classroom look much deeper than it actually is, and the fact that the lights changed color a couple of times while I was … panorama-ing … is kind of neat too. But basically that’s all I’ve managed to do so far, is get the lights up. The desks are absolutely not staying in that configuration, but I want something new this year and I haven’t come up with the new look yet. I do like how the lights look, though, and when they’re off and the regular lights are on you can barely tell they’re there, which is also nice. That white bag in the middle of the picture is full of stuff from the teacher store that needs to go up.
And, just for the hell of it, no pressure, no nothing, here’s my classroom Amazon wish list. If any of you happen to have discretionary income piling up with nowhere to go, even a couple of boxes of pencils would be massively appreciated, and I genuinely mean that. (And, in all seriousness, if you were to get one thing on that list, it’d be pencils. We go through so many pencils.)
I need to rewrite every policy I have, redo the class website, and ten thousand other things, and I’m also in a weird place where despite knowing all of that– after nineteen years, you can imagine some of this shit should be muscle memory– I feel like I have no idea what to do. I’m kind of reconceptualizing what’s going to go on the walls this year, where I only want to put things up there if I think the kids are going to actually look at them once in a while. So, what does that look like?
Dunno. I got a week to think about it, I guess.
I’ve got the BlueTooth keyboard hooked up to the phone again; this resulted in a deleted post yesterday, so I’m probably pointlessly repeating history here, but we’ll see what happens. I’ve been in the building for about three and a half hours so far today and have succeeded in completely moving myself out of the old classroom. I’ve got some more teardown to do in there, but we’re probably talking about twenty minutes, max, and I may not even do it until I know who the new teacher in the room is going to be. For all I know he or she may want to keep some of the stuff I’ve got up.
I did break down and buy a new laser printer yesterday, but I bought a new laser printer for home, not for work, and brought the old one here. The new one is wireless and AirPrint ready, so I can print from my iPad and my wife can print from her computer and her laptop, none of which we ever figured out how to do with the older printer hardwired to my Mac. It cost more than I was planning on spending, but I think it was probably the right move. The old one, luckily, quickly paired with my work computer, which I was nervous about– the school corporation has a terrible record on pointlessly disabling useful technologies, and I was nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to use my printer on the work computer because of some nonsense over OMG VIRUZZIZ or some stupid shit like that. (“Viruses” is always, always the answer to any why-can’t-I-do-this-perfectly-reasonable-thing question, even when the activity in question is one that cannot possibly produce any sort of computer security issue– like, say, hooking a non-wireless-capable printer to a desktop computer.)
Anyway. I have another ukulele appointment in a couple of hours; constant scheduling conflicts have kept us from meeting again since the first one, so this one will be a double session. Hopefully I’ll walk out of the session feeling like I have some idea of what I’m doing. I haven’t been practicing as regularly as I should have, which probably won’t surprise anyone. I have, however, discovered that the boy is positively entranced by watching Daddy play, which will give me some motivation to keep going. The boy certainly likes music; he apparently was over the moon about watching a drummer at SerbFest last weekend. That’s worth some extra practice time.
Possibly a double post day, especially if this one actually goes through. Stay tuned.
That picture doesn’t suck nearly as much at regular resolution; apparently the technology to make it clickable just doesn’t exist yet, or something. I call bullshit; Xanga could handle it so WordPress ought to be able to. JUST DISAPPOINT ME AGAIN, WEBSITE, THAT’S OKAY, I DON’T MIND.
(OH, OKAY, I FIXED IT.)
I was all proud of myself this morning; I’d gotten the bright idea to hook my Bluetooth keyboard (which I carry around for when I want to write on my iPad) to my phone– since my phone actually has connectivity in my new classroom, I’d be able to use it to write and upload a post. Well, I wrote a post, and I uploaded a post… it just didn’t post a post. There was even a notification put up on Facebook that said post existed, only it didn’t. It stayed live in my phone for a while, then deleted itself for no clear reason and then the link on Facebook and Twitter went to nowhere.
Woo?
Anyway: I spent the whole day moving stuff from the old classroom into the new one and making vague, half-assed attempts to get the new one beaten into shape, none of which actually worked out very damn well. I’ve come up with a whole lot more reasons to spend more money but precious little that actually seems to count as completed work. I’d be more annoyed by it but it isn’t actually August yet and I’m under no real pressure to have my classroom ready for a while. I should be out of the old one this week; that’s just being polite to whoever inherits it from me– but I don’t need to be done with the new one for weeks yet.
It’s that damn alcove that’s driving me insane. I’ve got a couple of tables in there right now, but I don’t especially like them. I think I’m going to find some cork rolls and see if I can find some way to get that attached to the cinderblocks (god, my KINGDOM for a damn classroom with bloody drywall in it!) behind it, which will make that space more usable. Also driving me insane: the barely-visible computers on the right side of the image, which are blocking my bulletin boards, although I think I have a sneaky way to make those not a problem anymore that doesn’t involve accidentally leaving them outside.
Also fun: the realization this afternoon that there is literally no place in the building that is farther from my current classroom than the one I was in last year. There are classrooms that are farther apart, but I couldn’t have moved farther away from where I was than this room. I probably walked for an hour today just in trekking back and forth between the two rooms.
Now to talk myself out of buying a laser printer. I don’t know where the hell the computer in this room prints to, but I sure as hell know it’s too damn far away.
I’m writing this while listening to/watching the livestream of Richard Hill’s presentation to the Indiana Department of Education about the interruptions in ISTEP testing earlier this year. I haven’t read the whole report, obviously– it was just released fifteen minutes ago– but he’s already nutshelled his own results: he found no evidence whatsoever that the interruptions had an overall effect on test scores. This seems, initially, entirely unbelievable, but he appears to have included his numbers in the report and he says he’s going to go over them. So it looks like ISTEP is going to count after all this year.
(And he’s showing some charts now, and, well, yeah, that looks rather convincing.)
(Fifteen minutes or so later, this guy is doing precisely the analyses that I’d do if they’d hired me, and… yeah. No effect. Remarkable. I don’t even know how that could be possible.)
So, uh, DOE, could I maybe have my goddamn results, then? Like, YESTERDAY? Please?
In other news, Indiana has pulled out of the PARCC consortium, which is good news, as the PARCC scared the hell out of me. But it also means that all the money we’ve spent on getting ourselves ready for the PARCC and the Common Core over the last year or so appears to have been completely wasted money.
I’m changing jobs next year. I’ve known it was coming for about a week now, but it just became official today. I’ve been teaching sixth grade math and science for the last two years, and next year I will teach seventh and eighth grade math. I’ll have three groups of kids; I should get the eighth grade honors group and it hasn’t been determined yet what my other two groups are going to be yet. I had my interview today and then spent a couple of hours sitting in my classroom.
(Somehow, I failed to take any pictures. I’m not sure how I managed that.)
I don’t know what the hell to do with this room. Like, everything that is supposed to be there is there, but it’s all in the wrong bloody place. My building was an elementary building eight or so years ago, and my classroom used to be a kindergarten classroom. There’s a weird alcove along one wall that I don’t know what the hell to do with. Right now the only good way to do it is going to be to set the room up along the longer axis, which I’ve never liked doing– my kids don’t like to wear their glasses, and when they get forced to wear them they tend to “lose” them a lot, so I like to try and get everyone as close to the whiteboard as possible. I’ve also lost some whiteboard space since there’s not as much wall to hang it on. There is, in fact, generally a lack of wall space across the classroom. Right now I don’t know where to put any of my stuff. Also, I’m way too damn far from the teacher bathroom. 🙂
Positives: the light in the room is wonderful, and since I’m basically off in a corner noise level isn’t going to be as much of a problem as it is in a classroom in the middle of the hall. There’s a ton of existing storage in the classroom, which is also good. I’ve finally got real middle school desks, which I prefer to the type we were using in my old classroom.
I have a training thing to go to this week, for a subject I no longer teach. If I go, I get to put $300 in my pocket. If I don’t go, I get to spend the week working in my classroom and figuring all this out. Right now I don’t know what I’m going to do.
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