Tag: data

Public Service Announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.

You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.

Anyway, point is, go do that.

Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.

Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.

(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.

EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂

On the final

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

Some good news in some nerdy graphs

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.

Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.

But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.

Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:

The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.

There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.

Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.

So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.

Nerrrrrrrdddsssssss

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching2 Comments

I didn’t make it over to school today; I woke up this morning and the thought of getting out of bed was just unimaginable, much less driving a million thousand miles away and throwing desks around all afternoon. So I get to do it tomorrow! Hooray!

Instead, today got swallowed up by, to start, (other than lazing about, I mean) some research into what it would take to add high school mathematics to my teaching license. I don’t want to move up to high school but it’s come to my attention that I have a fair number of seventh graders in my honors algebra class, which is already a ninth-grade class, which means that those kids are going to take Geometry next year, which technically I’m not allowed to teach? So I’m looking into that. I have to learn enough calculus to pass an exam, though, which … eek. I may have dropped out of Calculus 3/4 of the way through my senior year of high school and not looked at it since then; don’t tell anybody.

Tonight was eaten up by a kind of ridiculous little project; I have 152 kids on my roster so far (that number will– is guaranteed— to change) but just for the sheer hell of it I went through last year’s Student of the Month database and compared that list of kids to my class roster. I discovered that 58% of the students who won SOTM last year are in my class, which is already a nice slant, probably accounted for by the fact that I have the Honors kids, and that of those 152 kids on roster eighty-four of them won SOTM at least once last year. 55%. And it’s not like that guarantees that the other 45% are knuckleheads, either. I have a couple– literally, two– who I know to keep an eye on from last year, but it’s literally two kids. I think I can handle two Project Kids(*) during the first few weeks while I figure out who the rest of my hot spots are.

(*) This looks kinda racist. I mean Kids Who I Have Decided To Make a Project Of, not Kids From Project Housing.

I’ll post classroom pictures tomorrow, especially if I make any serious changes from how the room looked last year. The problem is with the style of desks I have and the layout of the classroom I have, putting everything in straight rows is really the only solution that makes sense, or at least the only solution that I’ve been able to come up with so far, but maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration tomorrow. We’ll see.

Also, I think that everyone who spoke up the last time I mentioned having BlueSky invites is taken care of, but I got another code today, so if you’re still out in the cold and you need one (or if I missed you last time) let me know.

Nattering on about school discipline

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

First things first, I suppose; it looks like I’m going to get what I want regarding the student from last Friday being moved out of my class, and without a fight about it, even, although I may owe the school counselor a doughnut and coffee or something. Naturally, now that I’ve gotten what I want, I’m going soft internally on the whole thing, all oh, don’t give up on the kid and give him another chance.

My inner bleeding-heart is going to sit down and shut the fuck up on this one. But he’s rattling on anyway.

We had a meeting this week where we talked about discipline data in our building– specifically the number of ODRs (basically, office write-ups) that we as a staff had been writing, and we’re having another meeting tomorrow morning where we’re going to talk about things we can do that might bring down the number of ODRs being written in our grade level, hopefully without simply saying “write fewer ODRs.” I’m going to temporarily lay aside the question of whether this is the right way to talk about this and note that the data dashboard the administration has access to now is awesome, and I’m going to beg for access to it even though I’m probably not technically supposed to have it, because I am a Data Nerd and this is my jam.

To wit: I discovered this week that, while I can’t see office referrals written by other teachers (which is fine,) I can see how many times each of my students has been written up, along with the dates of the referrals. And I got curious about a few things and did some digging.

My 3rd and 4th hour class, surprising no one, has the largest number of total referrals at 139. To be clear, this number comes from adding each student’s total referrals together, so it’s across all of the teachers and classes for each of the students. My 1st and 2nd hour is my second-highest, with just under 100, and my 5th and 6th has the least. I haven’t done anything yet like divide it up on a per-student basis to control for class size, but that’s coming, believe me. Because, again, I’m that guy.

There have been 58 days of school so far.

I also looked at how many referrals I, personally, have written for each class. 3rd and 4th hour has 35– which is interesting, because that’s nearly exactly 25% of the class total, which is exactly what you would expect given that they each are in my room for 25% of their day. I have written 5 referrals for 1st and 2nd hour and 5 for 5th and 6th, which are much smaller percentages of their total– I think I’ve written about 10% of the total referrals for 5/6 and closer to 5% for 1/2. Interestingly, the two most-written-up kids in 1st and 2nd hour have never been a problem in my room, possibly because they either aren’t awake enough or their ADHD medication hasn’t had time to wear off. I was surprised to see how many referrals they had, to be honest.

I am resisting the urge to draw any conclusions about this, because there’s no good way to distinguish between “this teacher manages his classroom well and does not need to do referrals” and “this teacher gets run over and isn’t tough enough to hold the kids to account for it.” I think if I discovered I was doing more write-ups for any of my three groups than other teachers I might be concerned about that– and I think the office might do well to see if any of their teachers are being seriously overrepresented in writing ODRs– but that’s not the case.

To circle back around, this isn’t the best metric to get at what we actually want to talk about. The problem with using ODRs, suspensions, or anything like that as a metric for building discipline is that, as I said above, it’s impossible to distinguish between a well-run school or a well-run classroom with one where the inmates are running the asylum and the staff or administration have either 1) checked out completely or 2) simply been told you cannot write anyone else up. Sure, that’ll bring your numbers down, but the problem isn’t actually that we want to write fewer referrals or have fewer suspensions. The problem is we want the kids to stop misbehaving. The two things overlap, of course, but one shouldn’t be mistaken for the other, and creating a building culture where the kids are invested in class and in learning and want to be there and aren’t simply at school because their parents need babysitters is a hell of a lot more difficult than simply reducing the number of times a certain form gets filled out.

(I’m going to suggest increased use of buddy rooms tomorrow, for example. This doesn’t do a single thing to help any particular student behave in class, it just gives them somewhere where they can either 1) cool down or 2) irritate some other teacher who then actually does the referral, and it at least increases the chance that a kid can avoid the office. Buddy rooms can be helpful, because there are kids who can benefit from 15-20 minutes to get their heads straight, and Lord knows a fifteen-minute break from some specific kid’s bullshit can help me get my head on straight– but it doesn’t really much help kids learn how to improve their behavior or keep them more invested in school.)

In which I forgot to put the headline in and now the url is gonna be all dumb and stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I have an awful lot of teacher talk types of posts sloshing around in my head right now, and I’m not a hundred percent sure if any of it is done sloshing yet. Today was one of those days where after the school day I have half an hour to get home so that I can go to a two-hour meeting, and at this meeting we were shown some data from our building that has me alarmed. Quite alarmed, in fact. Not from an instructional or a learning standpoint, but from a building culture standpoint– and, to make things worse, I have no idea whether the data we’ve been shown is actually worth a damn or not. Basically, my kids appear to believe they attend the worst school in the history of schools, and as an instructor at that school I am interested in several things:

  1. I am interested in my school not being the worst school in the history of school;
  2. I am interested in my kids having better feelings about the building they go to school at;
  3. I am interested in knowing whether they actually believe that the school is the utter, irredeemable shithole that the data is indicating they think they attend;
  4. I am interested in figuring out, if the answer to #2 is yes, why their perception the building and mine is so different; and
  5. I am interested in figuring out what role the factually inaccurate student statements play in all of this. For example: students reported overwhelmingly that they were in physical danger in school and that fights happened regularly. They simply don’t. They reported that students frequently show up at school events and at school under the effects of alcohol and drugs. Also no. They reported that students carrying guns or knives was common at school. Also no!
  6. Some responses were simply bewildering. 3/4 of the students or so disagreed with the statement “My teachers let me know when I am misbehaving.” Seriously?

Now, I actually have a ton of reasons to suspect this data is unreliable. We have responses from less than a third of the kids in the building. The surveys were taken in December, when they weren’t in school. Sixth-grade students, in particular, hadn’t even physically been to school for more than a handful of days to ascertain the building climate in the first place! A bunch of them appear to simply have gone through and hit “disagree” on everything. One of us went through and looked at the data from other schools, which we also have access to, and reported that they all look astonishingly similar, which is suspect. But, like, one figures that if the kids were invested in school in the way we want them to be, they’d probably have taken the survey seriously, right?

Is there a way to craft some sort of measure for student satisfaction at their school that they either 1) will actually be invested in reporting honestly on and/or 2) can trick them into reporting more honestly? And how much of #5 up there represents the kids’ actual perception of the school, regardless of whether it’s “true” or not? After all, it’s kind of problematic to tell someone “Yes, you do feel safe at school” when they don’t, and as long as we’re talking about climate there really isn’t much difference between the kids thinking that everyone nearby is packing a weapon and it actually being true.

Also a useful question, tying in with all the middle schools being so similar: how much of this is my building and how much of this is a combination of covid-frustration and American culture in general hating education?

And I haven’t even started talking about discipline data. Lemme give you a preview of another post that’s rattling around. The following two sentences are both true:

I have only written up black males this year; and

I have only done three office referrals this year, and one of the three was on behalf of another teacher for a situation I wasn’t involved in.

But we’ll get to that later.

In which this took all day: Sales n’ Spreadsheets #blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing8 Comments

This will be tiny and illegible, but those of you who care can click on it for a larger and actually readable edition. You still may have to scroll a bit, since I work with a 27″ monitor and this image is all sorts of horizontal:

Screen Shot 2015-01-24 at 7.17.30 PMBasically, a day of fiddling with Excel and every sales report I can get anyone to give me has convinced me that I need to start fresh and on my own with 2015, as not nearly enough of the data I have for 2014 can give me specific dates on which I made sales– or, at least, dates on which I made sales anywhere other than Amazon.  Smashwords’ date data seems to fall into a black hole after 30 days, so I’ll have to keep track of that separately and on my own if I want to be able to see it.  Thus, this Excel spreadsheet, which keeps track of each book and each venue the book is available at.  I have to manually enter day-by-day sales and then it totals everything up for me; line graphs are on the next sheet.

Interesting fact: As of last night (I had six BA sales yesterday!) I’ve sold more books in January than there are days in January.  That’s a first for me if you don’t count the couple of KDP Select free days that I gave Benevolence Archives 1 when it was on Select at Amazon; those garnered hundreds of downloads.  If I was able to make BA free at Amazon I would get a lot more visibility for it.  Select has been good for Skylights, hands down, no debate, and I suspect when BA 2 launches in April it will be on Select as well.

It remains to be seen if my nonsense is finally starting to catch on a bit, if Select is solely responsible for this, or if people just buy more books in January than they do in December.  But it’s probably worth pointing out that my January check from Amazon will probably be at least a fourth of my income from writing in all of 2014.  That’s gotta mean things are looking up, right?

And, just for the hell of it:

They’re good.  I promise!

Your Friday blogwank

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

So apparently one of the ways to get long-term attention paid to a post is to write an incredibly negative review of a critically-acclaimed, yet irredeemably terrible movie.  There’s been a weird resurgence of interest in the SNOWPIERCER review over the last couple of weeks that I find vaguely fascinating, especially since my referrer logs don’t seem to think it’s all coming from one place, and if it keeps up the post will have more views in October than it did the month it actually came out.  Have a look:

Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 12.34.24 PM