Tag: ilearn

Three weeks and three days

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I’m worried that my kids think that the rest of the school year is going to go like ILEARN time did, with short classes and minimal work. It will not. My 8th graders have two tests and a final in the next three weeks, and my Algebra class currently only has the final, but tests are seventy percent of their grade, and they’ve only had two, so I probably ought to work at least one more in there somewhere. ILEARN ate April, is the problem, so I’m behind everywhere. I told all of them we were back to work f’real f’real on Monday, but we’ll see if they seem to believe it or not.

It’s 7:30. Twenty minutes ago, every person in the house was asleep. That kind of Friday night. We’re a high-energy family, what can I say?

I may cave and just go to bed soon, or I might dive back into Khazan, which I’ve ignored over the last couple of days in favor of … whatever the hell else I was doing with my last two days. The last two weeks have kind of been a blur, if I’m being honest– I knew they’d go by fast and they did. Now it’s just a matter of seeing if the rest of the school year follows suit. Let’s all cross our fingers.

It’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

State math testing tomorrow and Wednesday, and then I’m … well, it’s middle school, so never, ever stress-free, but at least a lot less stressed than I am right now. I sat down during our team meeting with the other 8th grade Math teacher and once we went through everything we knew we had to do already for the rest of the year I realized I only really have like eight more assignments to plan.

I told them today that I was going to keep things super simple in class for the next couple of days, and that tomorrow’s assignment in particular was going to be extremely short. Like, five problems short. I have entertained myself by making those five problems insanely complicated,(*) and I’m going to put the answers on the board and not mention it to anyone. We’ll see how many of them notice! I’m going to guess roughly a quarter do not.

(*) Insanely complicated and yet within the skill set of anyone who has been actually paying attention. So, f’rex:

I may throw some extra credit at anyone who actually solves them instead of just circling the right answers. We’ll see.

On the final

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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 I want to vomit forever

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I got hammered by the digestive side effects that Mounjaro is famous for so hard this morning that I had to stay home. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the morning in the bathroom and at least once seriously contemplated taking a picture of my bodily effluvia so that I could submit it to Guinness. I have never witnessed anything of the quantity that I was producing this morning. I’ll leave it at that.

Just now, I looked up my scores for the second ILEARN checkpoint, and really, there’s no reason for me to go to work tomorrow, because my kids are clearly learning not a Goddamn thing from me this year.

And tomorrow they’re going to take a test, and then I can start preparing them for the final, which 85% of them are going to fail.

So, yeah, I hate everything, how are you?

Tomorrow

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I get to spend my entire day tomorrow giving my students standardized tests, and I mean that literally– every single one of my classes, all day, except for my 30-minute lunch, which is going to be delayed a bit from its usual time because of Reasons. I will have to read several pages of instructions six times and ask over a hundred and thirty students “Do you have a cell phone?” and hope none of them are lying to me, because I get to catch all the bullshit from everybody if we have to invalidate a test.

You’ve all heard the rants before; I’m tired and I don’t wanna. I’m going to predict my sixth-hour kids have the worst test scores I’ve ever seen, though, because giving a standardized test at the end of the day is fucking professional malpractice.

And then Thursday the process will repeat, with the ELA teachers giving their half of the test, and I’ll be in my classroom instead, trying to figure out how to keep the bastards busy and quiet for class periods that are ten or so minutes longer than usual. I’m thinking color by numbers. I’m already pre-annoyed by Thursday behavior issues that haven’t even happened yet– that ten minutes don’t sound like much but they’re going to be. My current ability to tolerate bullshit, as well as the ability of the other adults in the building, is calibrated for 53-minute blocks. There will be a lot of damn referrals during the last ten minutes of class over the next couple of days.

Also, I just ate about two thousand calories of deep dish pizza, and it was a bad idea.

The end.

I should have known

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I got to work this morning to discover a thirty foot long, 10′ wide, 8′ high pile of bullshit manure mulch piled in the fucking teacher’s parking lot outside my building. Given that we were due to start official ILEARN prep today, and that tomorrow is the ILEARN practice test– which is reliably my least favorite fucking day of the year– I should have taken the hint, and turned around and gone home. Not only did my advisory– fucking advisory– have to meet the guy who worked at Previous District, not only did I have to teach through advisory, teach the exact same lesson seven times to my other classes, but I had to cover fucking ISS on my lunch break, and God damn it, I’m exhausted.

Then I got home and found out there was another fucking school shooting today– because of course there was– and do two hours of grading, and not it’s 7:22 PM and I guess I can relax for an hour or two before it’s time for bed and I have to go in tomorrow and administer the cursed fucking practice test. Which is literally two hours of me reading instructions out loud.

You can probably imagine how much the kids look forward to two hours of having instructions read to them.

Christ and fuck, I hate standardized testing.

On standards

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I’ve done this rant before– so, so many times– so I’ll spare you the full version right now. But two pieces of information have recently crossed my radar and I thought I’d take a moment with them.

First, a report on Twitter– I’m not going to dig it up, just trust me– that half of American adults can’t read at an 8th grade level. Which … y’know, that sounds pretty alarming! 8th graders are kinda young and have a decent amount of school left to go through, so you’d hope that adults would be able to read as well as them, right?

Second, and I found this out today, that less than five percent– rather significantly less, unfortunately– of the students in my school passed the Math portion of the ILEARN last year. Lower than one in twenty, to phrase it differently. And the scary thing is, looking across my district, my school doesn’t really stand out against the scores most of the rest of the schools got.

I’m going to make two points here. Well, maybe three, depending on how you count the points. First, that if half of American adults can’t read at an 8th grade level, it stands to reason that more than half, in fact probably significantly more than half of actual 8th graders probably cannot read at an 8th grade level. Which, okay, we can all shake our heads sadly at that if we want to, and we probably should, but it brings this question to mind: what exactly does the phrase “8th grade reading level” mean in this context, and who decides what an 8th grade reading level is? Because if (to make up a number) 70% of American 8th graders and half of American adults can’t read at an “8th grade level,” I feel like it stands to reason to suggest that perhaps whatever that level is, it isn’t actually an 8th grade level. Further, that we can talk about having high standards as much as we like, but at some point does it ever make sense to suggest that the bar we’ve set for our kids is actually and genuinely too fucking high? And that if less than a twentieth of 8th grade students can’t pass what is supposed to be an 8th grade test, maybe we should blame the assessment and not the kids?

The problem is, of course, that I and every other teacher I know who has been doing this job for more than a few years are fully aware that our kids have been getting dumber, every year, for our entire careers. My 8th graders fifteen years ago make my current 8th graders look like kindergartners. They know nothing, and it’s not a demographic thing, because I’ve been working in the same kinds of communities for more or less my entire career. They get dumber every. Fucking. Year. They know less every. Fucking. Year.

Go ahead, find an educator with more than, say, seven or eight years of experience who disagrees with me. You won’t be able to do it. As soon as we started focusing on Test Scores Uber Alles a couple of years into the Bush administration, the kids started knowing less and less as every year went past, and at this point they’re so far behind that the notion of them actually internalizing 8th grade work is laughable. I can get some of them to be successful in the moment. Two weeks later none of them will remember any of it. Then there’s the third of my class that is literally in school for no reason at all, who go all day without a pencil and do no work of any kind. I never had to deal with that shit earlier on in my career. Maybe a kid or two. It’s literally a third to a half of every class now that does nothing all day. I mean that literally. Not a single stitch of work. No supplies. Nothing.

Now, this “eighth-grade level” thing is probably more a failure of journalism than it is of pedagogy; what it probably is referring to is some sort of lexile scale or something similar, where some lexile (YES AUTOCORRECT LEXILE IS A FUCKING WORD CUT THE SHIT) band has been arbitrarily assigned to “8th grade level,” and currently half of adults are below that. But you can’t tell newspaper readers that half of American adults read at lower than 1000L or whatever; it’s not meaningful information and “8th grade level” makes sense in a way “1000L” doesn’t even if the lexile level is more technically accurate.

(It’s still arbitrary, btw, but it’s nonetheless more precise.)

Anyway, long story short, I’m shit at my job apparently, and while I haven’t been able to gain access to my kids or my grade level’s results, I’m willing to bet that the school as a whole outperformed them anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to put me in a better mood.

tl;dr education is bullshit, Americans are awful and I hate it here.

Sure, this’ll work

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

This was day two of our yearly standardized testing, which we’re still being forced to administer for some reason. And, honestly, this year, my approach to the damned things is whatever, just get it done. I’m making a cursory effort to encourage the kids to do their best but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire exercise is bullshit and absolutely everyone involved knows it. These tests aren’t going to tell us one single thing about our students that we don’t already know. Not one single fucking thing.

Had a situation with a kid today that really drove it home (as if I need any more evidence) just what a poor job these tests do in measuring what they’re calling learning. My strong suspicion is that they do actually measure something related to knowledge for the kids who do well. There’s probably a real difference between a kid in the 70th percentile and a kid in the 90th. But the kids in the bottom half of that distribution?

Those kids aren’t having learning measured. For those kids, the tests are measuring two things: compliance and motivation. And that’s really it.

I’ve got this kid this year; let’s call him Che. Che is smart as fuck. But he has this pathological fear of success that is holding him back in a major way. he spent most of last year on half days and/or expelled or on long suspensions. This year, we’ve been able to mostly keep him in class, and he’s got several teachers (me included) who he knows are going to ride his ass until it falls off to keep him as close to the straight and narrow as we can, and so far he’s had a much more successful year than last year.

He’s in my room for testing. Tuesday he basically disrupted the room until I felt like I had no choice but to throw him out. And that was basically the move he chose; he was going to keep escalating until he got what he wanted, and in a situation where I’ve got other kids in the room trying to test, my tools for dealing with that type of bullshit are limited. I put him out of class and sat down with him and the principal later that day and did a combination of reading him the riot act and giving him a pep talk, and got a promise out of him that he’d behave in class today. And he did! He tossed out a couple of jokes and/or smartass comments while I was reading the (utterly unnecessary at this point and overly wordy under any circumstances) instructions, but the rest of the kids didn’t really react to him and once a couple of interruptions fell like a lead balloon he cut it out.

And … well, in the strictest sense of the term he completed the test, but this one was the written essay part, which has some number of short prompts that they want maybe a paragraph of material for and then another where they want a longer essay.

His entire essay was “I don’t know,” and he told me flat-out he didn’t read any of it.

Which tells me exactly nothing about whether he can read any of it. Che’s going to get the exact same 0 on that section as a kid who doesn’t have the slightest idea how to read in the first place would get, but Che can read. He’s not half-bad at math either when he wants to show off. And I’d say easily 60-70% of the kids in our building fall into a similar place as him, where their score on a standardized test on any given day is less a measure of their abilities than how interested they were in participating in the test on the day it was administered.

Why are we wasting all this money on these things again?