learned helplessness – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

“Dipshit groyper in it for the lulz” was not one of the identities I had considered for the shooter.

I need to figure out what it is about the first test of the year that causes all my kids to turn their brains off. Because I’m pretty sure I’m four, maybe five years deep where after the first test I wanted to quit my job and go pick onions for a living. My next classes are going to be yet another one of those situations where I have to struggle to keep the words fucking idiots from escaping my lips. Tell me, gentle reader, what do you think about this statement:

Any number to the power of 0 is 1.(*)

I feel like that’s pretty unambiguous!

Can you explain to me why, in a question about the power of zero, where the notes stated that any number to the power of zero is one, some students said that no, this number wouldn’t equal one, or worse, that some of the example numbers would only sometimes equal one? Gentle reader, can you give me a single example in mathematics of the word sometimes showing up when we’re talking about something equalling something else?

Christ, I’m tired.(**)

(*) For the purposes of this conversation, remember this is 8th grade math, and we’re going to ignore the fact that there’s debate about whether 0⁰equals one or zero. They’re not going to get asked about that in 8th grade. Literally every other fucking number equals 1 when raised to the power of zero, and I’m willing to tolerate a tiny inaccuracy in what I thought, again, was a clear and unambiguous statement.

(**) I have had this exact conversation, multiple times: “The rule is any number to the power of zero equals one. What’s three to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s twelve to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s three hundred to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s negative four to the power of zero?” “… negative one?” “The rule is any number to the power of zero is one.” “Oh, one.” “What’s point five to the power of zero?” “… point five?”

Any means fucking any, God damn it.

It actually wasn’t a bad day at all; I just really wanted to use that picture. I have officially survived the first day back without, really, anything of note to gripe about; anytime I get through a day with no disciplinary intervention more serious than having to swap a couple of seats, it was a good day.

Sadly, I had to watch my third and fourth hour class pull their “We’re brainless!” move, which is absolutely my favorite thing as a teacher; we got through the first class period okay and then I just-about-literally watched their brains leak out of their headholes as we moved from basic geometry (areas of circles, triangles, rectangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids) to composite shapes. Composite shapes are, just for example, an arrow or “house” shape, where there’s a triangle sitting on top of a square or rectangle, or an L shape composed of two rectangles. The idea, basically, is that the kids take basic planar geometry and extend it by recognizing simpler shapes inside of a complex one and know to add them together, or sometimes subtract out a shape that is designated as a “hole,” along with sometimes having to reason out what the length of an initially unknown side is.

My kids– especially my special ed ones– are generally not very good at this, and they’re sure as hell not going to be good at it on the first day back from winter break, and they’re surer as hell not going to be good at it when the first day back from winter break is the first day I cover the material. But third and fourth hour, particularly, were playing the Moron Game, where we pretend that we don’t understand shit that we literally just did three minutes ago, and where we can’t find an answer that is on the board and I’m pointing at, because we don’t want to think and we think if we filibuster long enough the teacher will give up and call on someone else.

This strategy never, ever, ever works on me– believe it or not, after twelve goddamn years of working with recalcitrant middle schoolers I can tell the difference between a kid who legitimately doesn’t understand what I’m talking about and a kid who is being lazy. It’s a real good way to get my dander up if dander is what you’re looking for, though; the good news is that they pulled it during the ten minutes before lunch and managed to pull their shit together before they came back into my room. So, yeah. If tomorrow is as good as today I’ll call the week a win, I think.

Sidenote: On the “more good news” front: You can imagine that demolishing my bathroom created a lot of garbage last week, and there was more than a bit of negotiation with the city over how said garbage was to be packaged and hauled away from my house, negotiations that got a bit more complicated once the blizzard destroyed the ability of streets & san to actually get around to everyone in a timely fashion. There are a lot of things about my town that I’m not terribly fond of, but I’m happy to report that other than one board with a bunch of nails in it that I was thinking about keeping for zombie duty in case of TEOTWAWKI every last scrap of drywall and tile disappeared from my driveway this morning. Yay!