Tag: education

I’m a loser, baby

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I considered not posting tonight; after all, if I’m going to lose one significant streak, I may as well lose more than one, but here I am nonetheless. I’ve already disappointed myself, surely I can’t follow that up by disappointing my adoring public.

Shut up, yes you are. And yes you do.

I am … superstitious isn’t the right word, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is– in exactly one way: I’m fully convinced that full moons fuck kids up. To wit, as I was leaving work today, someone mentioned that tomorrow was the full moon, and suddenly the utter fucking ridiculousness of my day just clicked. Like, oh, of course there’s a full moon. You were in that classroom. You saw those kids. And that’s the thing; when I walk into my day entirely unaware of the phase of the moon, experience the psychotic behavior from my lovely lil’ dipshits, and then find out that’s what was going on? That’s evidence, dammit. I shouted one room into twenty minutes of complete silence today. I’ve had such a good year that these kids have barely heard me raise my voice at all, so when I do lose my temper it gets a real reaction.

There are days where I simply can’t make this shit any simpler, and today was one of them. “See this number? See this number? Divide them shits. Make sure this one’s on top.” That was it. Calculating scale factors just isn’t that hard. And my third hour in particular made it abundantly clear that every second of my instruction had literally just passed through their heads like a neutrino through aerogel, leaving not a fucking trace of a mark behind. There’s only so many times I can be asked questions which I have literally just answered before I lose my shit, and asking a room full of fourteen-year-olds what three divided by one was and getting “one” and “four” as answers– this is not a fucking joke, it really happened– was the last straw.

I don’t give a damn if your parents tell you to go to school. You’re clearly already used to being a disappointment; what’s one more thing? If this is all the effort I’m going to get out of y’all, you can go. The office is down the hall. I’m not even going to write you up. Just fuck off. Go home, go to hell, I don’t care which. You aren’t entitled to my fucking oxygen if you’re not going to be a student.

Bah.

I’m so fucking tired of this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So for the last several years Indiana has had this thing called a Teacher Appreciation Grant, or TAG. We’ve gotten it before Christmas and it’s amounted to maybe an extra $300 or so. It’s generally gone to anyone who spent the previous year working for whatever their district is and didn’t get a bad rating on their yearly evaluations. It might have been slightly more for teachers rated Highly Effective than teachers rated Effective, but it wasn’t a huge difference.

The morons in the statehouse, who have never seen anything that wasn’t worth making worse, decided this year that the award needed to go to significantly fewer teachers and that it needed to be competitive, because there is no better way to feel appreciated than to have to fight everyone in your district for a check. They’re no longer allowed to give the grant to more than 20% of the teachers in any given district, and it has to be based on test scores.

I’ll spare you quoting the borderline-incoherent email we got from our district “explaining” how to apply for this thing, but apparently we do need to apply– God forbid the district figure out who deserved this thing on their own– and we need to provide our own evidence of how we’ve increased test scores over, presumably, the previous school year, although the email does not actually say that the data you send them has to be from the 2024-25 school year. This feels like an oversight and is not especially surprising.

I teach 8th grade. My students leave me and immediately go to high school.

You get one guess about whether I have access to any data about any of my previous students, at all, during the time I’ve been working for this district.

Shit’s due next Wednesday, so I suppose I ought to get to making shit up soon.

Good news/bad news

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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.

That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m gonna go die.

I can’t believe I don’t know this

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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.)

This was such a good idea

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Teachers: name your calculators.

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.

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

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.

In which I may be in trouble

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I may have made somewhat of a tactical error.

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.

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching4 Comments

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.