Guess what my 8th graders are doing in Math tomorrow?
This hasn’t been a bad week, all told– although there was Some Shit going on today that I’m probably going to have to talk about eventually– but, man, there was a palpable loss of enthusiasm from the kids, which you can really see in the last five assignments. Today’s assignment was on paper and I haven’t entered it yet– I think most of them turned it in, but who knows.
Anyway, tomorrow is gonna have to be the first come-to-Jesus meeting of the year. I’m so looking forward to it.
EDIT: Just for the hell of it, I emailed all my parents the above image. Tomorrow’s gonna be a blast.
This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.
Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.
(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)
Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.
I applied to teach summer school, did I mention that? I don’t know for sure that I want to do it, but I can’t decide that I do want it unless I apply now, and I have no real sense of how many jobs there are or what my chances are to get one, because for this type of thing they basically drop the teachers into a spreadsheet that sorts us by seniority and licensure and stuff like that and then spits out the teachers that get offered jobs. Plus I really only want to teach Algebra 1; I’m licensed for high school (there’s no middle school summer school this year) but I don’t want my first time teaching, say, Geometry to be in a three-week intensive summer course. Seems like a bad idea!
But yeah. I’d work four hours a day for three weeks and make a few grand (I’m paid at my hourly rate, which … I’m not 100% sure what my hourly rate is but it’d be decent money) and then I’d have all of July and the first week of August for my break, which doesn’t seem like it would be too terribly exhausting. We’ll see what happens.
At any rate, I’m done with three quarters of the 2024-25 school year, and I’m reaching the point where I’m having to admit that this has been a pretty good year so far. I’m pretty sure I’m failing fewer students this quarter than I ever have, or at least since returning to teaching after the furniture sales years, and that’s a good feeling. Then again, I had to fill this out for each of my classes, which is reliably the most annoying part of giving grades:
I know you can’t read that, but that’s a class of thirty or so students and I have had to rank each of them from zero to two on Persistence, Respectfulness, Initiative, Dependability, and Efficiency, and if you’re thinking that some of those sound like they might kinda be the same thing and you’re not entirely sure what some others mean, well, the kids never look at the numbers either so even putting enough energy into them to spread them out like I did is kind of a colossal waste of my time. This is more a measure of what kind of mood I’m in when I’m doing the grades than anything else, to be honest, and I wish the district would stop doing it. Annoying for teachers and irrelevant to students and parents is not a good combination, guys! Half of them don’t care about their actual grades, why would getting this shit matter? Plus every teacher ranks all of their kids– so I had to do this a hundred and eighty times– and so each kid gets thirty of these stupid little grades, which are just slapped into the margins next to the grade for each class in a way that is barely readable anyway.
Blech.
Today was the first day of spring– shut up, yes it was– and the way I know is that the entire building suddenly shifted to 100% playing grabass with each other all day. It’s supposed to be in the seventies tomorrow, and it’s Pi Day, which I don’t like, because there’s a building tradition that the math teachers bring pie, but I have a tradition where I pretend to forget to bring pie, while wearing the Pi shirt that doesn’t quite fit very well and I wear one day a year. And guess what? I’m gonna forget to bring pie again tomorrow! My wife and I almost stopped for pie on our way home from dinner but then we decided we were tired and I didn’t want to spend my hard-earned money on pie for however many Goddamn teachers we have in our building.
Also, I’m wearing shorts to work, because 74 or so outdoors for the first time all year will translate into approximately 190 degrees in my classroom, and that’s if they remember the heat’s not supposed to be on. I may burn to a crisp tomorrow, is what I’m saying, and that makes it even less likely that I’m going to be enjoying any pie.
I am bound and determined to get some agendaless lazing-about time in tonight, and for the first time all week I don’t have anything to do for school and therefore don’t need to struggle with my Goddamn desktop— I’m typing this on my iPad, which would have been a monstrous pain in the ass to write tests on but works perfectly fine for bloggery. I published a post at some point about the several stages of being “back” at the beginning of the school year, and I think I’ve probably reached the first stage of being “done,” or maybe the second, the first being finishing all lesson planning for the year and the second being accomplishing all teaching. As they have finals tomorrow and then three days to finish off any missing work they care to do, while I’ll almost certainly show someone how to do something on an individual basis at some point between now and next Friday, I’m done with whole-group instruction for the year.
Done with Grading will be the next step, which I’ll hit next Wednesday, and then The Children are Gone. I might need to go in the Monday after school lets out— or at least sometime that week— to finish off closing out my room, since I’m changing classrooms in the fall so the job is a touch more involved than usual. But that’s it, and I think I can probably call myself done-done once the kids are gone.
I’m caught up with my grading for the week; everything that has been completed and turned in is entered. And, as I suspected, grades are substantially improved– the fraction is kids still failing and the number afterward is the number with literal grades of zero, and (while the 11/27 and 13/28 are still a big problem) I no longer have any classes with half or more of the students failing, and all the classes together have fewer students with zeroes than sixth hour by itself before I brought my inner bastard out. This is not good enough yet, but it’s Progress. I’ll take it.
You tell me: anyone want to read a barn-burner of a shitty review of a game that came out in 2018? I’m tempted to not bother but sometimes rage-reviews can be fun.
I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.
My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.
I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.
Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.
The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.
Well, mostly. My Algebra kids had their final today and today was the last day for 8th grade Math kids to turn in late work and expect me to grade it. Tomorrow is the last day for the Algebra kids to turn in late work, so I’ll have to grade whatever that is, but that will get done during the day and not at home at my desk. So I’m done, but I’m not done-done, so to speak, but I will be by this time tomorrow.
The final went pretty well, all told. They didn’t all pass, although the large majority of them did and the kids who bombed it weren’t huge surprises. I’ll take it, especially after their performance on NWEA.
I did something this quarter that you normally can’t do in schools, and that’s using my students to perform an experiment. I have two honors Algebra classes, and I decided early in the 3rd quarter that I was going to grade most of their assignments simply on completion. In other words, I wasn’t going to go through any of them question by question and decide, okay, this one is a 9/10, or this is a 7/10, or whatever. Turned it in, and it looks like you tried? 10/10. Didn’t turn it in? 0/10. Same late work policy as the rest of my classes; ie, if it gets turned in it gets graded and I don’t care how “late” it is.
One would think, that if the only grades that were possible outside of tests were either zeroes or A+, that would really skew grades toward failing or high-A grades, and with a group of honors kids, generally more predisposed than others to turn in work, one would expect to see higher grades across the board.
One would be wrong. This policy barely moved grades at all. Most of the kids whose grades changed also turned in more work. There was no skew to the extremes, because kids inclined to failing assignments also don’t turn in a lot of work, and the amount of work kids turn in is really damn close to the scores they get on the assignments they turn in. Find me a kid who turns in every single assignment on time and I’ll show you a kid getting an A. Damn near every time.
Tests, of course, are a great leveler, and one other thing I have to pay attention to is whether test grades are plummeting, which might also be a side effect of this policy. Once kids figure out they don’t necessarily have to work super hard on classwork, because missing a question or two isn’t going to hurt their grades, maybe they don’t learn as well and that shows on the tests? All I can say is I didn’t see it, and I was paying pretty close attention. I might take one of my regular ed classes next quarter and see how well this policy works; I’m not going to try and apply it to everybody, though, at least not until I’m certain what kind of effect it’s having, and I don’t have remotely enough evidence for that right now.
(Reminder: all grading is arbitrary. Yes, all grading, even the system you have in mind right now.)
Third quarter ended today. Two weeks to Spring Break, about a month to ILEARN, and then that’s year 19 done and dusted. Amazing how fast the year has flown by since I changed schools. Just amazing.
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