In which this isn’t helping

On January 10, 2014January 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching17 Comments

2014-01-10 19.28.23 I am, generally, someone who tries to be realistic about his students. Teachers tend to run the gamut; some of them truly believe that all of their kids can change the world if they want to, and far too many succumb to cynicism and don’t give their kids credit for anything. I try to split the difference as much as I can. The simple fact– and this would be true regardless of what kind of district I worked in, and I do not work in a high-income district– a certain percentage of my kids are going to exit the world more or less as poor and ignorant as they were when they came into it. I’ve found out about three or four former students just in the last few weeks who have had babies recently; none of them have graduated high school yet, and at this point I pretty much doubt any of them ever will. The thing that keeps me going, though, is that despite all their disadvantages in life and despite an American culture that pays lip service to education but does not actually give a damn about it or value people who have it, some of my kids are going to succeed despite all the shit life has stacked against them. And here’s the thing: I cannot look at a roomful of seventh and eighth graders and pick out which ones are going to make it and which ones aren’t. It is entirely possible that a kid who I think is already fucked for life at 12 is going to find a way to escape the morass of shit he’s found himself in and lead a good life. It’s also entirely possible that my honors kid who I think I’m gonna be asking for a job in twenty years is going to have something happen to her that sends her spiraling.

I know the truth about this country; I know that education can’t actually overcome poverty, most of the time, and I have no illusions that my contributions in seventh grade math– seventh grade, the grade where any human being, regardless of any other factor, is least likely to, able to, or interested in Taking Shit Seriously For Their Future– seventh grade is generally the worst year of your life— are going to make any real difference. For some kids? Sure, absolutely. For all of them? Most of them, even? Not really. They’re gonna go do what they’re gonna go do, and maybe that’ll be Good Things and maybe that’ll be Bad Things, but the simple fact is their seventh-grade math teacher isn’t gonna make all that much difference to how things turn out.

But again: I can’t tell the difference from here. I can’t tell you which of these kids I’m actually gonna make a difference with. I can’t tell you which of the kids are actually gonna remember me (positively, hopefully) and which won’t. And given the number of kids who have told me I was their favorite teacher or mine was their favorite class who I would have thought hated me, sometimes I’m not even sure they have any idea.

(Kinda embarrassing late edit: Because I can’t see the future, I have to treat all of them as if they’re going to make it. Even if I think they’re not going to. All of them, all the time, every day. Which, weirdly, is less positive than it sounds, and frankly is frequently exhausting. That was kinda the point of this whole first part and I never actually said it.)

I’ve not even started this piece and I’m sidetracked already.

I talked earlier this week about what we’re doing in class: composite shapes, like the one in the diagram above– an actual problem in their math workbook. Here’s the thing: for good or for bad, my kids are not very good at geometry right now. They can’t quite wrap their heads around how formulas work, they don’t want to bother to remember them, and even when they do they frequently leave bits out or randomly decide that even though they multiplied pi by the radius squared the last thirty times they calculated the area of a circle they’re gonna add it this time. And, while I’m going back and forth on things, I myself bounce back and forth between “You fucking idiots have been doing this shit for three or four years now, when the fuck is it going to click?” and trying to be a bit more reasonable and recognizing that even with the smart ones learning is going to involve backsliding and making mistakes and goddammit circles were a pain in your ass when you were their age too so stop being an asshole.

Simple shapes are bad enough. Maybe they shouldn’t be; maybe I should be a better teacher and they should get them by now; maybe they should be better students and maybe just once in a while spend ten seconds studying or actually pick up a book and do some damn homework once in a while. They don’t; I know this. Doesn’t change my job. Ain’t nobody gonna blame the kids. It’s me and I know it; governors can’t get elected calling kids stupid. They’re gonna call me incompetent instead.

Simple shapes are bad enough; when you glomp three or four of them together and then don’t provide all of the measurements that they need, it gets much worse. They don’t quite understand which operations to use at any given time, most of the time; they’re terrible at anything involving multiple steps, and they cannot, cannot reason their way out of a paper bag with a bright light at one end and a rabid dragon-wolverine at the other. Composite shapes are a horrible sick combination of all of these things and plus it’s the first week back from Winter Break and plus we’ve been doing this for two days and they just. do. not. get it.

Will they get it? Yeah, probably, eventually. With me, maybe not? But maybe in eighth grade, they’ll get it. Somebody’s gotta teach this shit first, and I remember being pretty bad at long division once upon a time. It clicked sooner or later. This will too.

But back to that shape. Here, look at it again:

I’m gonna admit something: I looked at that figure for three or four minutes with one of my smarter kids today, and I’ve spent another five or six minutes looking at it now, before posting it in front of God and the internet, and I swear to you that I have no goddamned earthly idea right now how the hell I might find the area of that shape. I say this fully aware that some smartass is going to set me straight within five minutes, either here or on Facebook (let’s be honest, it’s gonna be Facebook) and I will be properly chastened at that time. But right now? I don’t even know where to start. It sorta looks like two trapezoids pushed together, which would be fine, except I don’t have the height on either of them; that angle up at the very top might be a right angle but I think it’s the only one. There’s no good way to make triangles out of it; again, I don’t have any heights to go with the bases. Parallelograms are right out because the angles don’t match.

Literally: no clue.

And my seventh-graders are supposed to be able to figure this shit out. My seventh-graders, who struggle with basic triangles, and require patient coaching to figure out the area of L shapes that are plainly and obviously (even to them!) two rectangles stuck to each other.

I don’t like having to say “I don’t know how to do that; skip it” in fucking math class. Especially when I’m spending effort, as I have to every day, trying to convince them that yes, you can do this. That yes, you do understand this. That yes, this is possible to begin with. It doesn’t fucking help when my completely grown three-college-degrees-two-master’s-degrees-twelve-years-of-teaching-experience-and-a-partridge-in-a-fucking-pear-tree ass proves unable to solve a problem that they are expected to do.

It was a frustrating day. Go ahead, point out how I fucked this up; it’s probably something obvious.

In which it’s been a long two days

On October 30, 2013October 30, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I didn’t get around to writing a post yesterday, but it wasn’t because of parent/teacher conferences. I didn’t make it to parent/teacher conferences, in fact; my mother in law had either one stroke or a series of minor strokes over the last couple of days and ended up in the hospital yesterday. She’s fine, for values of “fine” that include “had at least one stroke in the last two days;” there is little to no apparent physical damage (no drooping facial muscles, difficulty swallowing, paralysis, anything like that; she can get up and move around) but she’s having difficulty recalling words and talking– although that has improved since I saw her yesterday. I found out toward the end of the day, tossed an “I’ll call you later” sign-up sheet in the hallway and headed to the hospital.

I had already taken this morning off because of the first meeting of the probation assistance team; that meeting was supposed to be from 7:45 to, most of us thought, 9 or so, and I’d have a couple of hours where I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere in particular and then would go back to work and teach the afternoon half of my classes. Between the stress of my mother-in-law’s hospitalization and a recurrence of the “no-real-symptoms-but-exhaustion” illness I was struggling with a few months ago, I decided to go ahead and take the afternoon off too.

Half days for middle school teachers in my corporation go until 11:00; the meeting that was supposed to be just over an hour long took until 12:30. I’d have had to scramble to get sub coverage in the afternoon anyway even if I’d been planning on returning to work. I won’t get into the reasons why but we hit some unexpected snags in putting the improvement plan together and it took forever to get everything done. It’s not like any particular member of the team dragged the meeting out; we just ended up having much more to do than anyone, including the more veteran members of the PAT process, had expected for us. My first observation is next week; we’ll see how it goes.

Another good reason– not that I needed one once the meeting ran so long, but whatever– for me to take the afternoon off was my frustration level has been through the roof lately. You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned my “don’t yell at kids” policy lately; it’s because the last several weeks have represented nothing but crashing failure in keeping that goal alive. My kids are manifestly not behaving or acting worse than previous classes (particularly last year) have, but for some reason it’s getting to me a lot more this year. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but I’ve got to find a way to get over it.

Something for me to work on, if I ever manage to drag myself out of bed again.

I’m in this job for the paperwork

On October 17, 2013October 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Politics3 Comments

Random, before I start: my neighbors have big (thirty feet? I’m bad at estimating distances) columns supporting a portico (or are the columns part of the portico? I’m also bad at architecture) in front of their house. There’s an honest-to-god woodpecker at the top of one of them; I heard the bastard when I got out of my car after getting home this afternoon. He’s ~~wailing~~ whaling (bad at homonyms!) away up there. Is that something I should tell them about?

Anyway. It’s bullying awareness week, or some such bullshit. Or maybe it was last week; I’m not aware enough to be sure. Here is how most people think bullying works: A bunch of children mercilessly pick on one poor bullied student, causing him to be very sad and blah blah blah. Here is how bullying actually works, most of the time: everyone involved is an asshole and a bad actor and everyone involved is doing their best to make everyone else involved miserable as best they can, and the ones who are either the sneakiest or the quickest to file paperwork get to be the “victims” while everyone else gets to be the “bullies.” Oh, and every time the word gets used I have a legally-mandated two days to “do an investigation” and a bunch of complicated paperwork to fill out, only to find out that Suzie told Allie that Shelly said that Sammi said that Sharon said that Allie said that Sheryl was a slut, only it turns out that Shelly didn’t actually say that, Sharon said that Allie said that to Shelly but Suzie is dating Sammi’s ex-boyfriend and Sharon’s mad at her because of it so Suzie actually said that Sammi was a slut because she was defending her on Facebook and today this is a world-ending crisis and the very second I’m done with the paperwork they’ll all be best friends again and oh never mind we worked it out until they hate each other again next week.

If you think I’m exaggerating, you’re not a teacher. I have been doing this job for twelve years and I can count the number of unambiguous instances of clear bullying that I have witnessed on one hand. Everything and I mean everything else has been mostly-mutual teenage bullshit of some kind or another.

That said, one of the events I’m about to describe so far may actually be pretty clear-cut, but I haven’t done my investigation yet.

Keep in mind, by the way, that these are seventh-graders. Thirteen-year-olds.

My third and fourth hour got wrecked because of some vile combination of the following events: 1) One student suggesting to another student that she’d be open to a threesome with her ex-boyfriend and one of his friends; 2) That student reporting to the ex-boyfriend and the buddy that said threesome was a possibility; 3) Upon being asked about the possibility of said threesome via Facebook message (I’ve not seen this message, but other staff members have) the original young lady replied “No… well, maybe… LOL” and then was 4) surprised somehow when the two young gentlemen in question told everyone they knew that this was going to happen. And then during art today there was apparently 5) an attempt to get the threesome bargained down to some oral sex for the non-ex-boyfriend while the ex-boyfriend, apparently, watched. Throw in a different ex-girlfriend of the same dude doing her best to keep her nose in their business and one of the two guys deciding to try to get everyone to ostracize the second girl in the first conversation and you have eaten my entire day, as all four of the principals involved are in my third and fourth hour.

Note that, legally, this isn’t bullying, and I know this because we just had a meeting where we went over the legal definition of bullying in great detail. And also note that none of it took place in school and yet it destroyed not only my entire day but at least two other staff members’ days as well. (And while we’re noting things, note that this still qualifies as sexual harassment and it’s not being ignored.)

I’m leaving the school counselor’s office after spending the first half of my prep period with her and one of my paraprofessionals hashing all this out and making sure we’ve written down everything and notified everybody we need to notify. I’ve done no actual preparing during my prep period. I never do any preparing during prep; that’s Fireman Hour.

I walk to my room, sit down at my desk, and start composing an email. The teacher next door walks into my classroom with another kid in tow– a student who I had in sixth grade two years ago who I just last week had referred to a risk-assessment psychologist on account of she’s cutting herself. The student is being disruptive and making her job impossible and can she stay in my room for a bit? Sure, why not, this email’s gonna take me a few minutes and I’d prefer to have a good excuse to stay in my room if I can have one.

Less than five minutes later, I’m taking her back to the nurse because she’s started shrieking and ranting about how ridiculous it is that anyone thinks they can stop her from hurting herself because it’s her body and she’s gonna hurt herself if she wants to. Well, fuckin’ great, let’s go talk to that psychologist again. I go get the counselor (whose office, remember, I’ve just left) again and that eats another fifteen minutes of the only break (to do everything else I have to do but teach) that I have each day. I have just enough time to run down to my room and get something that I need to have photocopied by the morning; I make it down to the photocopier as the bell is ringing and discover that the photocopier is broken.

Well, great.

Off to the gym, where I make the seventh and eighth graders sit where they’re supposed to and call off buses as they arrive. I spot one of my (7th grade) homeroom girls, normally the sunniest, biggest-smiled kid you’ve ever seen in your life, sitting in the stands, bawling her eyes out.

No goddammit don’t ask this can only cause trouble what are you doing jesus this day is long enough don’t you NO GODDAMMIT YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHY ARE YOU WAVING HER OVER JESUS STOP IT NO NO

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

I consider simply replying “Bullshit” and don’t; there are a few buses gone by now and there are a bunch of other teachers in the gym, so I can pull her into the hallway without officially abandoning what I’m actually supposed to be doing.

We go into the hallway.

“Let’s try that again.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. Sobs again.

“Sweetie, there’s absolutely no way I’m letting you get on the bus like this. Tell. Me. What. Happened.”

“(Eighth-grade dumbfuck) won’t leave me alone. He asked me out yesterday and I said no and he just keeps asking and he’s been bugging me about it all day. I can’t get him to stop.” And she starts bawling again.

Which: again, not bullying. But is, again, at least at first blush, a pretty damn clear-cut case of sexual harassment. By some sort of divine providence, the dumbfuck in question is part of the reason that the wrist-cutter earlier got put into my classroom; the two of them were feuding about something too.

I note that he’s already left and ask her if he has her phone number and if she thinks he’ll be calling or texting or Facebooking or anything like that tonight or if he knows where she lives or if she will be quit of him until school starts tomorrow. She confirms that he has no way to get in touch with her and I tell her that we’ll talk about this tomorrow morning. I reflect that she has many older brothers (like, seriously, at least four, plus at least one sister) and consider simply making sure that they have this kid’s address.

I put her on the bus and stop in the counselor’s office on my way out, asking her if she has any room on her lap left, and (as I am mandated to do by law whenever I encounter instances of sexual harassment or bullying) notify her as to the content of the conversation I’ve just had and that I’ll be following up with my official within-two-work-days investigation during homeroom.

At least I know what I’ll be doing during seventh hour tomorrow.

OH WAIT SHIT I FORGOT THIS PART edit: I end the conversation with the counselor early because there is a parent in the office who is screaming at the attendance secretary so loudly that I can hear it halfway down the hallway through two closed doors. As it works out, both the principal and the assistant principal have been out of the building all afternoon at different meetings and so there is really no one in the office who the secretary can refer her to.

“Yeah, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I’mma go deal with that,” I tell the counselor, and leave her office, attempting to summon my Calm Face. Luckily for (very likely) everyone involved, by the time I got down there another teacher had intervened already and maneuvered the lunatic into the hallway and out of the office. As it turned out he was apparently who she was looking for anyway; I hung around for a minute until I decided he didn’t really need any help (turns out that kids who are angry psychotics tend to have angry psychotic parents; who knew?) and went down to my room to get my stuff, the music of her discontent accompanying me the whole way.

The end.

Second verse, same as the first

On October 10, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

This 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.

In which I stab my eyes

On August 8, 2013August 8, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music2 Comments

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So– hah– this post was gonna start with the words “just a quick note, since I want to be at school by 8:30” when I sat down twenty minutes ago to start writing it, before I 1) decided to look and see how much a song I heard on the radio would cost to download and 2) make sure to download a new album onto my non-3G iPad so that I could listen to it at work today. I was going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this New York testing fiasco, where they switched to a Common Core-based standardized test and, in accordance with prophecy, “proficiency” scores fell through the fucking floor.

Neither of those two things worked, though, and now I’m all “fuck everything digital” and no it has not escaped me that I’m using a computer to write that on the internet, and if you’re so clever how come you haven’t figured out a way to go fuck yourself yet?

One, the goddamn MP3 album was three bucks more expensive than the CD. And that’s bullshit, always. You cannot charge me more to Not Send Me a Thing than you do to Send Me a Thing. The digital version of a thing should always be less expensive than the Actual Thing. And most of the time shouldn’t exist. I’ve been converted to MP3s because MP3s are genuinely more useful than CDs are– yes, I really do want my entire twelve-some-odd-thousand song music collection with me all the goddamn time, because I never know what I’m going to be in the mood for, and my tastes are catholic enough that it’s difficult to even come up with a proper representative sample.

I pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, which is supposed to ensure that everything on my computer also lives in the cloud and can be accessed by both my phone and my iPad. Granted, in the case of the iPad, if I want to be able to listen to something when not in reach of a wireless network I need to specifically download it, but I knew that when I bought the thing.

So why is the fuckin’ album I want to download the only album that doesn’t seem to have shown up on the iPad, almost a week after I initially downloaded it? Hell if I know, and attempting to convince my iPad to find the damn album has unleashed hell in a manner that I don’t have time to describe. Needless to say: technology clusterfuck, and nothing has the right album covers anymore, among other more massive but less obvious problems, and THIS DOESN’T FUCKING HAPPEN WITH CDS, GODDAMMIT, AND MAYBE SOCIETY SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT A BIT? Earlier this week just about my entire (small, as I hate them) collection of books disappeared out of both devices. I had to redownload everygoddamnthing twice. Have I ever had to redownload a physical book? Nope, not once, and the total number of books I’ve lost or accidentally destroyed over the course of my life is probably twenty, most of which were lost in The Great Dog Piss Incident of 2009. It happens to digital files all the fucking time.

I fucking hate the future. Also, standardized tests, but I’ll bitch about that later, apparently.

On anger and hatred

On July 14, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I didn’t post yesterday because I was exhausted; I didn’t get home from OtherJob on Friday until after midnight. I didn’t get home from OtherJob until after midnight last night either; it turns out that when we finally get a few days of no-bullshit perfect weather people remember that it’s fun to go outside and do things, and so they do. I’m still exhausted, and my back hurts. Today will not be terribly productive.

I got home to three pieces of bad news, only one of which I’m remotely interested in discussing, and honestly I’m not even going to do that.

Because right now I feel like the first black person– no, the first person– to catch George Zimmerman outdoors and alone after dark should shoot him in the face immediately.

And I cannot trust myself to write when I’m in this state. It’s been almost twelve hours; I’m still here.

Seven or eight years ago, I would have. Seven or eight years ago I was a much angrier person; ironically, I may have lived in a better world then than I do now. Little has gotten better. But I don’t want to write this post, and I don’t trust myself to write this post, so for now, I’m not going to. If that changes, I might.

But probably not.