Tag: curriculum

On school supplies and other annoying arguments

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.

This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.

Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:

  1. Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
  2. You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
  3. If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
  4. Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
  5. There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
  6. That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
  7. In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.

Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.

I may need school to start

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

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’ve completely lost it

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I walked into my house after getting home from work with a good idea for a post in my head, did a couple of quick around-the-house tasks, and then promptly completely forgot what the hell I wanted to post about, and despite spending several hours since then trying to reconstruct my thought process, it’s completely gone.

So screw it, I’m going to complain about my job instead. Have you ever been asked your opinion on something and immediately realized from the way you were asked about your opinion that there was no way on God’s green earth that anyone was going to actually pay attention to what you thought? We had a teacher inservice day yesterday, and the math department’s big job in the morning was to go through a bunch of vendor kits for next year’s new textbook adoption. There were, I dunno, nine of them to go through? All of them with, bare minimum, 7th and 8th grade teacher editions and copies of whatever materials the students got, some with access to websites and digital tools and pacing guides and various and sundry other things that I won’t get into because they’re probably a touch too inside baseball for a non-teacher crowd. Many of them also included 6th grade materials and Algebra 1 as well.

Now, this is actually a pretty decent use of an inservice day, don’t get me wrong. There was no world where any of us were going to have time to do this on our own– remember, every math teacher in my building is on an overload right now because we’re so understaffed, so all of us teach for every second of the day except for our lunch breaks. (And I generally have a dozen students in my room during lunch, too, but that’s another story.)

Basically what we were doing was taking 20-30 minutes for each publisher, looking through the books and making notes. My notes were mostly bullet points. Some publishers were out immediately, sometimes for reasons having little to do with the actual quality of instruction– for example, one of them was not only organized in a way that made absolutely no sense to any of us and didn’t really seem to conform to Indiana standards, but had seven different thick consumable workbooks (250-300 pages each) for the kids, one for each major unit of study.

Now seven different workbooks is already impossible even before you get to the ridiculousness of the idea that you’d get through even one 300-page workbook in a single school year. I have about 175 students right now, total. 175 students times seven workbooks is 1225 workbooks. Each was, conservatively, an inch thick. That’s a hundred and two linear feet of workbooks.

Where the fuck am I supposed to keep all of that? Giving them to the kids is not an option. I will never see them again. Furthermore, since nothing is in the right order, we might be in Workbook 1 this week and then need Workbook 5 next week and Workbook 3 the week after that.

I don’t need a lot of notes for this one! It’s literally a physical impossibility. It’s a non-starter. The second I see seven workbooks per kid where everything is in an order that doesn’t match what the State of Indiana needs, I’m done.

You can imagine the shit fit that was thrown when our department head found out later that afternoon that we– as in each of us– were supposed to complete a seventy item rubric for, not each publisher, but each grade level for each publisher.

That’ll be the last animated .gif, I promise, but it felt appropriate. Not only were the rubrics huge, but they were Google forms, and they were written in eduspeak so ridiculously arcane that none of the three of us, nearly seventy years of teaching experience among us, could really parse what the hell some of the items were actually asking. And to do that for all grade levels for nine different publishers? Fuck you. Fuck you a lot. Two days of work, bare minimum. We had three hours, and by the time we saw the rubric the three hours were already over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a complicated Google form looks like when it spits out its results, but it’s a completely ridiculous spreadsheet. They’re terrible, and they’re user-unfriendly as hell. So to come back around to what I asked earlier in this post, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to attempt to look at what we were doing, because not only does no one have any time for that shit– remember the three teachers at our school are not the only ones being asked to complete this task– but it’s being generated in a way that makes pulling useful information out of it virtually impossible.

We all suspected the board was just going to order the cheapest curriculum anyway. So we sent in our notes and a tiered list of the ones we liked, the ones we were indifferent to, and the ones we actively didn’t like. If the people in charge want more than that they can find all of us subs for a couple of days.

I fully anticipate being told to find somewhere to put 1200 workbooks this fall.

Things I don’t know about tomorrow

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Well, today, actually, since I’m writing this at 10 PM on Wednesday to post Thursday morning:

  • What I’m wearing
  • What I’m bringing for lunch (these two things are stressing me out more than they should)
  • How I’m handling distributing 25 lockers to 27 kids
  • Whether any of the six no-shows in either class are going to show up
  • How I’m going to handle 33 kids in a class if they do
  • What the IEPs for the thirteen special ed kids I suddenly have in my PM class look like
  • What I’m teaching tomorrow, in any of my classes
  • What I’m going to do for the extra forty minutes that I have my morning group since we’re not doing Success just yet
  • Whether I’m even going to have the same kids or whether they’ll have to rearrange the special ed students again
  • How I’m going to handle writing lesson plans for Friday (more on this later) when I have team plan during one prep and a parent conference (ALREADY!!!!) during the second
  • Seriously, I can fake math, but I have no idea what the hell I’m doing for Science, and I haven’t had time to look through the giant box that they just delivered, and seriously, could maybe just once you guys get these things to us before school starts?

I am tired as fuck.

Griping and grippe

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

todlerShowered and dressed and errythang, for the first time in two days.  If I had a sensible job, like most normal people do, I’d probably have gone to work today– but if I had a sensible job I’d be able to get to a bathroom when I needed to, which means… uh-uh, we stay home another day.

Are there any jobs, other than teaching– and I know there have to be, I just can’t think of an example right now– where a job of “substitute X” exists, whose only function is to fill in for actual practitioners of career X who for whatever reason aren’t at work today?  I mean, I know buses get driven and mail gets delivered and all that stuff, but that’s done by other actual bus drivers, right, who drive buses for a living, and other mail-people, who are deliverers of mail that are picking up an extra shift?  Not by people with a pulse and a bare handful of college classes who are tossed willy-nilly into the seat and told “Just so long as nobody’s bleeding, you did fine today?”

Like I’ve said in the past, I have a silly job.  I had no idea when I left work on Tuesday that I wasn’t going to be at work on Wednesday or Thursday, because this thing hit me like a bolt from the blue– an hour before I was dying, I was fine.  So not only did I not really bring anything home from work with me, I didn’t really leave my classroom in any sort of condition for a stranger to be able to wander in and take over.  My teacher editions?  I don’t really use them, they’re somewhere.  My “official” lesson plan book?  Is filled out for my seventh grade classes, but not for 8th, which I hadn’t actually figured out a week’s worth of stuff for the last time I opened it.

I try to leave detailed lesson plans, including bits like helpful students (and who to keep an eye on,) locations of important information, emergency procedures– hell, there was supposed to be a storm drill this week, hopefully that didn’t happen in the last two days– and any number of other things that might be useful to someone new to the building.  My lesson plans are generally two or three pages long, single spaced.  I’m not able to do that when I’m not aware in advance at least to some degree that I’m going to be out.  Tuesday’s lesson plans weren’t bad, but I literally had to write lesson plans for today that said something along the lines of “I think I want you to do (activity), but I’m having the teacher from down the hall come check to see what (activity) actually is, and if she says to do something else, do what she says.”

There are also numerous caveats to the effect of “I don’t remember this information off the top of my head, but check (this place) in the classroom to find it.”  I got a call from the other teacher this morning telling me that she had in fact changed my lesson plans, which is good, because the last thing I need is for a substitute teacher to actually try to teach anything.

Which is a damned shame, really.  But it has to be this way– I have to write my lesson plans in such a way that a trained monkey should be able to execute them, if indeed the trained monkey bothers to read my lesson plans– there have been more times than I can count that it was painfully clear that the lesson plans were not even glanced at throughout the course of the day.  I have no assurance that the person in my classroom is actually able to perform seventh-grade mathematics, much less the towering intellectual juggernaut known as 8th grade honors Algebra– much less teach it to anyone.  As such, lesson plans generally boil down to “Give them this, and hope they don’t kill each other, and it’s probably good if they’re at least mostly doing the work.”  Which I will throw away as soon as I get back to class, because I may as well just lower everyone’s grades by 3-5% rather than go to the trouble of grading work that was given by subs.

Mind you:  I wouldn’t do this job for all the tea in China, and the job pays substantially less than what I imagine tea in China might cost.   There are plenty of good subs out there; I’ve had those too.  But the problem is I can’t count on getting those subs, and even if someone I know and like is scheduled to be in my room there’s no guarantee that the office won’t make a switch once they see who is out on any given day.  So I have to write lesson plans for the lowest common denominator– and the lowest common denominator in this case includes, just to choose from the subs I’ve seen in my building in the last few weeks, religious nuts who derail an entire lesson on Islam with their psychopathy, people who I have used the phrase “clear and obvious lunatic” on official review paperwork to describe what they did to/in my classes, and people so addled and confused that they’re barely able to find the classrooms they’re assigned to, much less effectively teach in them.

It sucks.  But, again, because of how my job works, I’m actually (and unfortunately) more likely to call in sick than I might be if I had some other position.  If I worked in an office, I’d be at work today.  But I don’t.  I work in a place where there are three-minute passing periods and the nearest adult bathroom is two and a half minutes away at a brisk walk if I don’t have to stop to talk to any students along the way, and not to get too TMI on you but there have been digestive issues lately and I haven’t always been getting a lot of warning if you know what I mean.  So I’m home, mostly feeling fine except for the three or four minutes out of every hour where I feel terrible.

Argh.