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I gave my Math Lab class a paper with six equations on it today, and this one was easily the most difficult of the six. I told them that they did not need to do the equations in order and that I would be paying close attention as they worked, to their conversations with each other, and also to what questions they were asking me, and that I’d be grading them on effort more than whether they completed all six equations in class.

Fully a third of the class threw themselves at the hardest equation first. I gave them the answers; they know that the process is more important to me anyway and it’s useful for them to know if an answer is right before asking me about it. A couple of them refused to turn the paper in at the end of class, saying they were going to take it home and bring it back to me finished on Tuesday.

A lot of them came close, but they all ended up getting lost in the fractions, and one of them basically dared me to solve the question myself. I gotta admit, I was worried; one little calculation error was going to blow my credibility. But that is, in fact, the right answer, as ugly as it might be.

Nice to head into a long weekend on a high.

One thing I can be reliably counted on for is that I will massively overthink my awards at the end of the year. Each teacher in my building gives at least two; one for best student (this one is easy, because it’s objective; I look at my Algebra class, average their grades out over the entire year, and the highest kid gets it) and one for “most inspiring” student.

Y’all, “most inspiring student” is hard. There was one year where it was a gimme; the kid had walked into the building with literally no English at all midway through the first semester and proceeded to work his merry ass off for the rest of his time in the building, pulling a perfect GPA in Math and a respectable average in the rest of his classes along the way. This year I’m in the kinda weird position where I could justify a number of kids for being inspirational in theory but not necessarily inspiring to me specifically. My kid with the neurodegenerative disease who is in a wheelchair and has held down an A average, just for example. But honestly? He doesn’t work with me specifically all that much; he has a 1:1 aide and there’s also a special ed coteacher in the room with him, and he’s way more likely to talk to the two of them than he is to me. I have a couple of decent examples of the same general type of kid as last year’s winner, only none of them are as good of a student as he was and all of them had more English when I met them, plus I don’t want this to become The Smart ESL Kid award. There are a lot of kids who are amazing in a lot of ways but the word inspiring just doesn’t float through my head when I think of them. What I want is to be able to give like twelve “you are awesome” awards. Maybe a button that says I Am One Of Mr. Siler’s Favorites, Suck It Losers.

Right now I’m leaning toward a kid who is in my advisory but doesn’t actually have me for Math, which feels like a bit of a cheat; this kid is also in my weird little gay nerds club and I love them dearly so they will probably end up being the choice. But I dunno. The awards were due at the end of the day on Friday and I completely whiffed on them, but I figure I still have until the end of the day tomorrow to think about it.

Watch, both of my nominees will end up getting suspended tomorrow, for the first time ever in both cases. That’s how these things usually work.