Tag: fractions

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.

I’ll stop talking about school soon, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

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 class where 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.

On being 1/90 through the year

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

New_Mutants_Vol_1_90

My kid started first grade today, and I finished the second day of the school year.  He’s gonna lose a tooth this weekend, I think.  So: milestoney?  Grammarly doesn’t think that’s a word, but I don’t have to care what Grammarly thinks.

I have received three hundred and fourteen emails since Monday, and I have responded to or properly dealt with every single one of them.  

I am sleepy as hell.

I will make cogent observations over the course of the weekend, I think.  There is also a Patreon story coming and quite possibly also a new installment of Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews, because holy shit, this new show the boy just found.

Also: the image to the right is one of the results when you GIS the fraction 1/90.  Pickings are kinda slim for that, as you might imagine. But Rob Liefeld and his starburst crotches and complete lack of understanding of perspective (my god) and anatomy can embiggen the smallest post, right?

Go have a Friday night, y’all.

EDIT:  I can’t stop staring at that goddamn picture, and the longer I look at it, the more terrible things I see.  Here, have it enlarged:

New_Mutants_Vol_1_90

My God how did this man get paid to draw?  

Arithmetical exegesis

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

20131011-180914.jpg
This one’s interesting. Same kid as last time; he’s actually got it together a little bit more at the moment, most likely because I glued myself to his side the second he got to the board and coached him through when he needed it. The problem in question is 8 5/12 + 11 1/4; note a few things:

1) Correctly adds eight and eleven to get nineteen. This represents progress!
2) Recognizes that 1/4 needs to be converted to twelfths in order to add the two fractions, and– amazingly, to my mind– that he needs to multiply the numerator AND denominator by three to achieve this, and then does so correctly;
3) Successfully adds five twelfths and three twelfths to get eight twelfths.
4) Spells “mark” as “mork.” Can’t win ’em all.

Then an interesting thing happened. I asked him if he needed to do anything with 8/12 and after thinking for a second he came up with the word “reduce.” However, despite having just multiplied three and four to get twelve, he absolutely could not figure out that he needed to divide by four, nor could he successfully divide either eight or twelve by four. Note on the far left of the picture, where he’s tried to divide it, figured out that four goes into eight twice, written the eight underneath the other eight without actually putting a “2” at the top of the problem, subtracted eight from eight to get zero– and then informed me that eight divided by four was zero.

(gets interrupted by customers, promptly makes a subtraction mistake while redeeming tickets)

Harder to read is at the bottom of the picture where he tries to divide twelve by four. He first thinks the answer is two (but doesn’t write it up again) then borrows from the ten digit so that he can make the ones digit… twelve, again, which is where I stopped him and pointed out that he’d already gotten that answer by multiplying.

Note also the rogue seven near the last division part. I don’t know why that’s there, but it’s intentional; he said “seven” when he wrote it.

Clearly we need to work on long division a bit. It’ll be interesting to see how many other issues that ends up clearing up.

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

AvI_0yPCAAII5dDThis has been kind of a frustrating week, and I can’t quite put my finger on why– for all I know, it’s the meat shakes again.  Or maybe it’s fractions, which are apparently the most difficult mathematics in the history of time and are certainly rapidly becoming the most frustrating to me.  I got a heavy dose of “we’ve never seen this shit before” from third and fourth hour today, including one kid who, when adding mixed numbers, had to be harangued for five solid minutes before admitting that he knew what two plus seven was.

This is a seventh grader, and this is emphatically not a fucking joke or hyperbole.  Two plus seven.  He spent five minutes insisting that he didn’t know and that math was hard and why am I bothering him and god I don’t know and I don’t get it and once I finally got an answer out of him immediately switched to insisting that he’d been telling me the answer was nine for “the whole time” and that I was just hassling him.  This kid’s ideal day at school is one where no teacher ever talks to him and he does nothing whatsoever; he will do literally nothing if someone is not hovering over him making absolutely certain that he is doing work for literally every second of his day.  It hasn’t sunk in yet that that shit’s not gonna fly in my classroom, and I’m sure as hell not ever going to let someone get away with “I don’t know” when the question is fucking seven plus two.

But if he doesn’t pass ISTEP, it’s my fault, for not bringing enough fucking balloons and firecrackers into class and keeping him entertained.

I let them get into my head too much, I think.  I have a kid who is currently signed up for the Washington, D.C. trip later this year who is, while not the worst behaved kid I’ve ever had, easily in the top ten– and that’s in twelve years of teaching, so we’re dealing with a sample size in the low four figures by now.  I should have kicked him off the list immediately; there was never any chance that this kid was going to be able to pull his behavior together well enough to convince me to take him eight hundred miles from home for four days.  Never.  But I didn’t cut him off last year because kicking him off a trip he’ll take as a seventh grader when he was in sixth grade didn’t seem fair.  So far this year he literally hasn’t made it through a single week of school without at least a day or two, sometimes more, of either in-school suspension or out of school suspension.  This week he was here Monday, absent Tuesday, in class yesterday and today, and then by the end of the day today he’d managed to land in the office three times from three different teachers, including getting called out of my class for something that didn’t have anything to do with me– so that’s four times in the office, actually– and he’s in ISS for the next three days for the cumulative effects of all of that.

If there’s ever been a time to pull the trigger, it’s now; my principal okayed me to kick him off last year.  And I still keep not wanting to do it because maybe he’ll get it together.  I keep throwing questions at this other kid– in private, mind you; it’s not like I’m calling him out in front of the whole class– hoping that sooner or later the math will click.  And it’s not gonna.  For either of them.  And I keep banging my head against the wall, because banging my head against the wall until the wall breaks down is my goddamn job.

I need a goddamn cheeseburger.