The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:
I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and
I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.
To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.
I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.
Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?
I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.
I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.
(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)
Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.
I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.
Y’all.
At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.
Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.
There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.
LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.
The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.
Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.
On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
I’ve been actively working to increase my leadership role in my building this year after several years of stepping back from any kind of after-school or committee obligations. I’ve had my weird little gay nerd club and that’s been about it. This year I’ve joined a couple of building committees and I’m chairing another one (this one, excitingly, is actually a paid position) and I’m also starting a Math tutoring group next week.
Hey, have I mentioned that my teaching partner is on indefinite leave? As in, they might be back next week and they might not be back at all, haha don’t bother making any long-term plans about anything because who the hell knows? Because that’s happened, leaving more or less exactly half of our 8th grade students without a math teacher. They’re still writing lesson plans and (presumably?) grading assignments, but … well, I don’t know if you’ve ever written lesson plans before, but writing lesson plans for subs for more than about three days in a row is actually impossible. Not in the sense that you can’t write them, because of course you can, but everyone involved recognizes that you are actively hallucinating if you think that whatever is going to actually happen in your classroom has any real chance of matching whatever you put in your lil’ plans over there. You’re even more doomed if you expect your kids to learn anything while you’re gone, because no one is going to teach them– a shockingly (and yet, not surprisingly) high number of middle school teachers cannot actually manage eighth grade math, much less Algebra 1– and they’re not going to be paying any attention to whatever the sub is teaching anyway.
Written directions? Pfah. Witness, from my Canvas for my Math class:
See that third paragraph? For reasons that aren’t interesting, homeroom isn’t meeting tomorrow, and usually Thursday homeroom is Math IXL time. I’m making my kids do it anyway because I am a heartless bastard.
I am predicting that zero of my over-a-hundred 8th graders notice that paragraph. We’ll see if I’m right.
Anyway, point is, you can’t type a document and then expect these kids to use it to learn anything. It is to laugh. Na Ga Ha Pen.
I emailed all of the kids in my partner’s Algebra class this evening to let them know about the tutoring sessions. We’ll see if I have a roomful of kids I don’t know panicking about their grades on Tuesday afternoon.
So we’ve got a new curriculum for math this year, and like most curricula in 2025 there’s what was supposed to be a robust online component to it. My kids took a math test last week, and I discovered while they were taking the test that a question about exponents that asked them to show their work had not provided any way to put a number into a superscript.
Which, y’know, feels like it might be a massive fucking oversight.
We’re moving into the real number system this week and they’re starting off with terminating and repeating decimals, so a lot of moving back and forth between decimals and fractions. I spent an hour beating my head against their system and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to designate a repeating fraction. Is there a help system? Of course not. Check this out:
It seems like typing in an answer, highlighting the repeating decimals and then clicking that tiny button which I had to hunt for for twenty minutes (and remember, my kids are working on iPads, which make highlighting anything a huge pain) puts the repeating decimal line– which is called a “vinculum,” by the way– above the numbers you’ve highlighted.
Take a second and stare at the options in that text box and reflect upon the fact that this is supposed to be for 8th graders. I do not have the slightest idea what probably 90% of the icons on that thing are referring to, nor do I really have any idea what is supposed to be designated by an arrow pointing at three diagonal dots.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work:
The top box is how it processed my entry. Why is there extra vinculum to the right of the seven? No idea, but it happened every time I tried. You’ll notice nothing extra is lined in the actual entry above. Why is the 27 in the bottom “correct” answer centered under the vinculum? Also no idea. I was not able to get a single answer correct involving a repeating decimal and absolutely nowhere was there any sort of help option that might have shown me what to do.
I sent an irate email to my team about how bullshit this was and I’m done for the night. I’m going to have these kids writing on the backs of shovels with coal by the end of the year. I’m so done with educational technology at this point that I can’t see straight.
I was rudely tricked into doing classroom coverage today, when I made the mistake of walking past a classroom that did not have a teacher because she had gone home with a sudden illness. Apparently the office had not sent anyone to the room yet. I guess I’m not the type to just walk off when a kid comes out into the hallway and tells me there’s no adult in the room.
I’m sure it would have been fine.
At any rate, tomorrow will somehow be the first day of the school year with a completely normal schedule, and my lesson plans currently include a quiz about me and then a bunch of attempting to learn names. My retention rates run from 90-100% in the mornings to less than 50% with my sixth hour, so apparently I need to do some work on that. I tell the kids that I get the first two weeks of the school year for free and after that they get a piece of candy every time I can’t remember their names. I usually learn the girls’ names faster but the girls are also more likely to be the two kids in every classwhere it’s May and I’m still calling two of them by the same name. I think I’m also going to put my seating charts together tomorrow; that’ll help.
Also, for the first time this year I’ve decided to keep a running count on the board of 1) what day in the school year it is, 2) how much of the school year is gone, and 3) how much of the school year is left. Only I’m doing it using fractions, and I feel like if I make a biggish deal at the beginning of each class period I might do some good in teaching them how to reduce fractions, especially since there are exactly 180 days in the school year and 180 has a lot of factors. So, just as an example, since this is day 3 (and I’ve decided, arbitrarily, to consider the current day “done” for the purposes of the fractions):
3rd Day of the school year 1/60 of the year completed 59/60 of the year remaining
And tomorrow will be:
4th Day of the school year 1/45 of the year completed 44/45 of the year remaining
… and so on. I dunno, it’ll entertain me, and fully 2/3 of what I do every day is done with the explicit goal of entertaining myself.
I’d give y’all the quiz just for the hell of it, but there’s too many pictures of people I don’t have permission to post pictures of online, so it’s not going to work. It ought to be a fun day, though, which I will make up for by throwing a diagnostic test at them on Wednesday that’s going to be … discouraging. For all of us.
I was asked after posting about my boneless sofa to remember to post a video next time. Today is next time! I now have a boneless sofa and a boneless chair in my classroom for my kids to sit in while they read.
They don’t read, mind you, but whatever. I’m an optimist, dammit.
Also, I’m not entirely sure why iMovie decided to change the aspect ratio of the video, but I’m not concerned enough about it to go back and fix it.
Meanwhile, I have survived my first full day of work for this school year without any particular drama or stress, although I do think the 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting we had this afternoon was, in a lot of ways, the wrong faculty meeting. In particular we had a dreadful half-hour or so where we got way too deep into the weeds about a hall pass policy that the seasoned teachers took one look at, realized it would never work, and immediately resolved to ignore; the less experienced teachers asked two hundred and forty thousand “well, what about this?” questions, causing no small amount of suicidal ideation among those of us who have been around the block a couple of times.
(We have new APs, and two of them are new-new, not just new to us; this has all the hallmarks of an idea put forth by someone with their heart in the right place but no sense of how an initially-reasonable-sounding plan might scale to a building with hundreds of kids and dozens of teachers. It’s kind of cute, in its way, and I can imagine our principal pushing back mildly against it a bit and then shrugging and saying “Give it a try and we’ll see,” knowing full well that a bunch of us were … well, gonna take one look at and resolve to ignore it. I’m not mad about the plan, necessarily, just that it led to a half hour of increasingly obvious hypothetical questions. Y’all have been in meetings, you know how it goes.)
Anyway. My wife and son both had to go out of town today to take my brother- and sister-in-law somewhere, so they won’t be back for a few hours; I’m gonna go play Wuchang: Fallen Feathers until they get back. I really will post classroom pictures tomorrow, I promise.
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