Tag: kids

Who are you and where did you come from

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I’ve said this before– one of the fun things about teaching middle school is the sheer diversity among any community of kids in their early teen years. Two girls can be a month apart in age; one of them is still playing with dolls and wearing a training bra and the other is a makeup whiz who can waltz into any bar in the world without anyone asking any questions until she starts talking. Boy #1 is 6’3″ and 250 pounds with a beard, the kid in the seat behind him, a month older, is 4’8″ and has not a single trace of peach fuzz anywhere on his body.

This is exemplified in my third hour, which contains both my largest and my smallest boys; I’m not exaggerating about either of them. I’m glad that the big kid is a sweetheart because if he ever decides to get into a fight, I’m not breaking it up unless I need to haul someone else off of him.

We’re going to call the little one Morris. This isn’t a clever pun on his actual name or anything; it’s just a name that popped into my head. Morris is … different. He’s never been identified for special education, but … well, to be slightly cruel, he has the look about him, and his tiny height despite legitimately being one of the older kids in my room doesn’t really help.

I have been approached by multiple different teachers about him this year, all of them saying things like “You know Morris can’t add, right?”

Yeah, I’m aware. Morris has fourteen missing assignments already and when he walked into my classroom this morning he had a 20% in my class. He got a zero on his first test. Not because he got all the answers wrong; he turned it in blank. His name wasn’t even on it. I handed it back to him the next day and he gave it back to me at the end of that class still blank. He is one of those deeply frustrating kids who appears to know absolutely nothing at all, but also refuses to try or ever do much of anything, so it’s very difficult to actually give him any help. He won’t ask, and standing over his shoulder and insisting that he do something just results in a thousand-yard stare until you inevitably have to cut bait and help one of the other two dozen kids in the room (including the big guy, who isn’t my smartest kid but works his ass off.)

We had our second test of the year today. My tests are all open-note and this one allowed calculators as well. A few minutes into the test I noticed that Morris was reading a book rather than working on his test. I will note that this was, in some ways, a positive development; I wasn’t completely sure he could read.

“Hey, Morris, we’re taking a test. I need you to put the book away.”

“What test?”

“It’s literally right in front of you. I handed it to you. Your hands are on it right now.”

“Oh.”

A few minutes later, Morris is hanging out of his seat, contorted in such a way that his head is actually directly under the seat, not the desk part. I remind him again that, hey, maybe you might do something. Also, I don’t see your notes or a calculator. Maybe get your notes out and go grab a calculator? And a pencil? I don’t see a pencil either.

I get more stern during the third warning, where I note that he has yet to write his name on the test and still doesn’t have his notes out. He is staring intently at his fingertips and occasionally dropping his pencil on his desk, trying to get it to bounce on the eraser end. The hard-ass act doesn’t work either. Fuck it, I think, resolving that two straight zeroes on tests is enough data to refer this kid for a special ed evaluation. Everyone else is done with their test already but there’s only so long I’m willing to beat my head against a wall.

With eight minutes left in class Morris brings me his test. He has written his name on it! He points at the first question, which is fairly simple:

“I need to point the mouth toward the larger number, right?” He makes an alligator-bite gesture with his thumb and index finger as he’s saying this, a gesture that I’ve made dozens of times when discussing greater than/less then. I tell him yes. He gets the answer right.

Okay, that was 50/50, if we’re being honest.

He looks at the next question, pushes some buttons on his calculator, and … gets that one right, too. He looks at #3 for a second.

“Each of these little marks is a tenth, right? And eight times 3.14 is … 25.12. So that’s like twenty-five dollars and twelve cents, so … A?”

I note that again he’s mimicking my speech patterns. I’ve been encouraging the kids to think of these decimals as money so that they don’t do things like say 25.5 is more than 25.10 because 10 is bigger than 5. But he’s right again.

This little shit ran through the entire test in eight minutes, asking a handful of questions that were entirely of the please validate my belief that this is the right procedure type– no “how do I do this?”, only “I do this this way, right?” And more than once, he phrases things exactly the way I’ve been saying them in class.

And he got every single question right, including a few that most of my students got wrong over the course of the day. The whole-class average on this test (all my 8th grade Math students, in other words) was 71%, which isn’t terrible but is lower than I like it to be. And he got a perfect score, and now I have to completely reevaluate every single Goddamn thing I know about him.

I may still do the referral. There’s something going on here. It’s just more complicated than I thought. And a hell of a lot more interesting.

I ask him, as the bell rings at the end of class, why he spent so much time screwing around and not doing anything, since he obviously knew what to do on this test.

“I was charging up my brain,” he says.

I can only hope a recharge lasts a few months.

I can’t tell this story

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got a new student today, or rather I got her yesterday but I met her today, since I managed to drag my ass back to work this morning. Her name was unique but not in a way that seemed hard to pronounce; demographic data said she was white, but “white” can still cover a whole hell of a lot of ethnicities, right? I was prepared for her to be Eastern European or any of a variety of different things, but I still felt like I wasn’t going to immediately pronounce her name wrong unless there was something genuinely weird about it.

You may or may not be aware that “Micheal” is starting to be a way that people who are dumb and bad have chosen to spell their sons’ names. If you’ve been teaching in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably encountered at least one Micheal in there somewhere, and if you’re like me, you’ve immediately resolved to never contact those parents, ever, under any circumstances.

Gentle reader, the actual pronunciation of this child’s name is so, so much worse than simply reversing the admittedly-not-entirely-intuitive vowel placement in “Michael.” It’s worse than the forty thousand different spellings of “Jasmine” I’ve encountered over the years. Now, I really can’t tell you her actual name, because it’s unique enough that if she ever Googles herself she’ll find this post. But imagine a child being named, oh, I dunno, “Sahar,” and you think oh, that’s a neat name, I’ve never met a Sahar before, and you figure it’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “Sahara,” right? Might be wrong, but surely it’s not that far off. Like maybe you think it’s Suh-harrrr and it’s Sa-hair. Wrong, but not offensively so.

And then she tells you her name is pronounced “Sarah,” and you have to immediately freeze your face and not let the words No, it fucking isn’t, you poor thing out of your mouth.

I want my Oscar, Goddammit.

Line forms to the left

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?

No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.

Dammit.

On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.

Yay, nuts!

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.

I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.

I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!

Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.

Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.

It’s official

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

I was given twelve years, nine months and twenty-two days of fatherhood before my kid became taller than me.

I’m 5’10”, by the way. He just finished sixth grade, which means he will absolutely be topping six feet before the end of seventh.

Christ, I’m old.

Well, this is new

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’m not watching youth hockey on a Friday night, YOU’RE watching youth hockey on a Friday night!

Not so much

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

We did not get a snow day, although most of the surrounding districts did. That said, it’s polar vortex time, and right now if the forecast doesn’t change I’m not expecting to return to work until Thursday, since we’re currently expecting wind chills of 20 below or colder for Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As children are idiots and show up to school without coats and wrapped in thin blankets (and this is, to be clear, often a choice, unrelated to poverty) we cannot have them outside walking to school or waiting on the bus when the windchill is 20 below. So.

And now, I am dying, and I shall sleep. We absolutely aren’t going anywhere tomorrow on account of the weather, and my plan is to spend the whole day doing as little as possible.

OK, Zoomer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories3 Comments

The following is a true fact: I am an Old. I have written before about how I’m at an age where I straddle the line a bit between Gen X and Millennials; my preferred nomenclature is the Oregon Trail Generation, but that’s not exactly what the cool kids call it. All that said, one thing I definitely am is Old. Yes, the oldest Millennials are old now. They have mortgages– some of them, anyway– and cars and kids and are starting to worry about paying for their college, and whether debt is going to be declared inheritable before they die.

Anyway. My wife and I were out doing some running around today, in two cars because one of the jobs involved bringing the last carload of stuff that we’re keeping back from my father-in-law’s apartment, and I told her that I was going to stop at a local gaming shop that is up by his place. The place is far enough away that if I drive past it I’m probably going to stop, just because I’m not up there very often. Anyway, I puttered around for a bit and decided to buy something and got behind a couple of high school-aged kids who were also checking out. Both of them, as it turns out, were buying card booster packs of some sort; Magic, I think, but I’m not sure and at any rate it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the booster packs were expensive, and I heard the cashier quote a hundred and seventeen dollars to one of the kids, who pulled a handful of twenties out of his pocket, counted them carefully, and handed them over, receiving his change in the expected fashion.

And then the whole world went sideways, as the kid looked at his friend and said “I love these things. The money doesn’t come out of my account, so it’s like I’m not really spending anything.”

There was a moment of frozen silence. The cashier, a man of about my age, made eye contact with me, as both of us realized at the same time that this young man had just used the construction these things to refer to twenty dollar bills as if they were some sort of exotic and rare form of shell- or bead-based barter, and I don’t think either of us really knew what to do for a second. The kid’s friend saw the look we shot each other and also saw that I was either having a stroke or trying not to laugh, and rolled his eyes at his friend without saying a word and ushered him out.

I walked to the counter and placed my purchase in front of the cashier.

“Credit or … these things?”, he said.

And then I ceased to exist.