Tag: education

In which I make a decision

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

…so, apparently I like my job?

I had a Moment this weekend, or perhaps a series of Moments, where a math job opened up at the boy’s school and I jumped on it faster than I’ve ever jumped on a job opportunity in my life. And then, once the cover letter was written and the resume was updated and everything was filled out and sent off, I immediately regretted it.

And that was … kinda weird? You’re telling me, brain, that I offer you a job with small class sizes and damn near universally kids who want to learn and whose parents are invested in their education and you … don’t want it? You’re supposed to kill people to get that job. I’ve been in the trenches for over two decades at this point! I deserve a job that no one would ever refer to using the word “trenches,” God damn it!

Now, because it’s my kid’s school, it’s kind of a weird situation, because in the “who do you know who works here” section on the application, I had to write “basically everyone,” because dude has been at this school since he was larval and that’s kind of what happens. And I emailed one person at the school and gave him a heads-up that I’d put in the application, because technically I used to be his boss and I thought it was at least a little possible that someone might go ask him about that if they put together that we were at the same school at the same time. And I very specifically did not tell two of the three people I put down as references, because no one ever calls references first and if I’m not taking the job I don’t need the drama at work about whether I’m leaving.

Anyway, yeah, several days in the row of anxiety, and do I really want this, and reminding myself that I really haven’t had a lot to complain about this year, and then the person I sent all the documentation in to emailed me back and she asked “are you sure about this,” because, in her words, their pay was “woefully” lower than what I’m currently making.

So, of course, I emailed her back and asked how woeful is woeful, because that word doesn’t really suggest a number to me if I’m being honest, and Glassdoor was being really unhelpful, and she got back to me.

Twenty five thousand dollar pay cut.

So, uh, yeah, I’m staying at my current school next year. That was a fun few days, though.

I’ve completely lost it

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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.

A horrible story you don’t want to read

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.

It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”

Uh-oh.

I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.

This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.

But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.

So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.

Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.

Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.

On the final

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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.

In which today was tomorrow

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I want to read tonight, so this isn’t going to be long, but I figured it was probably worth it to point out that today was a genuinely good day, for the most part, and the first day at least of the study guide seemed to go over pretty well. I have no doubt that as some routine sets in things will get a little rougher– four days in a row of taking notes, even in guided and somewhat abbreviated form, is gonna get on the kids’ nerves– but today at least went well, so I’ll take it.

Just discovered that the wind chill is supposed to be eight below tomorrow morning, too, so watch us get a two-hour delay on a day where I definitely do not have time for a two-hour delay and an actual cancellation would be a huge pain in my ass.

(There is no chance at all of a cancellation, but still.)

Anyway. Got a book to finish.

On the unimaginable

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Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.

He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.

Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that he was still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.

The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.

Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:

I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)

Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.

68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.

I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.

(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)

I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.

Some good news in some nerdy graphs

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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.

Math-people, Pt. 2

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Okay, maybe that wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be:

Basically all I did was add the “Is the number a fraction?” step there, and we’ll have to review converting fractions to decimals a bit, but it’ll do and they need to remember how to do that anyway.

In the meantime, I actually called out sick today; my Mounjaro (I assume) got on top of me hard in the last couple of days and I spent less of last night sleeping than I generally like to do, in favor of activities that generally aren’t meant to be described in polite company. So I slept most of the day away once it passed. I may have to have a review day for my kids on Friday already, though, which feels awfully early, although if I remember right we probably had about one a month last year anyway so maybe not. We’ll see how the next couple of days go, assuming I can drag my ass out of bed.