Tag: learning

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.

In which I have to start posting earlier

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

No school again tomorrow, so we’re doing another synchronous day, and I looked at my Algebra class and realized that for the life of me I have no idea what the hell the next unit is supposed to be. One of the things that has really frustrated me about this year is that no one seems to be in control of the scope and sequence for either of my classes, and there’s been a lot of flailing around as we try and figure out what to teach when. The district hugely mistiming both of our ILEARN checkpoints so far hasn’t helped. We have a meeting tomorrow (virtual, of course, but the agenda mentions breakout rooms, so it’s going to be horrible) to try and iron some of this out, but for right now my Algebra kids are doing the same thing as my regular 8th graders tomorrow because whatever I plan for is going to change tomorrow afternoon anyway and I really don’t have the energy for this nonsense at the moment.

We’ve gotten maybe seven to eight inches of snow today— I went out and hit the driveway around 2:00, and there was between five and eight depending on where I measured, plus another inch or two since then. Hopefully we don’t get hammered overnight; I don’t want to have to schedule another driveway session in between classes or meetings.

Anyway, the call-out didn’t happen until after six, so it took me a minute to get all my shit set up, and now it’s 8:49 and I have no brain or energy left. I’ll try to post tomorrow when it’s still daylight outside. This thing where I never post before 8 PM lately needs to stop.

I’m so fucking tired of this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So for the last several years Indiana has had this thing called a Teacher Appreciation Grant, or TAG. We’ve gotten it before Christmas and it’s amounted to maybe an extra $300 or so. It’s generally gone to anyone who spent the previous year working for whatever their district is and didn’t get a bad rating on their yearly evaluations. It might have been slightly more for teachers rated Highly Effective than teachers rated Effective, but it wasn’t a huge difference.

The morons in the statehouse, who have never seen anything that wasn’t worth making worse, decided this year that the award needed to go to significantly fewer teachers and that it needed to be competitive, because there is no better way to feel appreciated than to have to fight everyone in your district for a check. They’re no longer allowed to give the grant to more than 20% of the teachers in any given district, and it has to be based on test scores.

I’ll spare you quoting the borderline-incoherent email we got from our district “explaining” how to apply for this thing, but apparently we do need to apply– God forbid the district figure out who deserved this thing on their own– and we need to provide our own evidence of how we’ve increased test scores over, presumably, the previous school year, although the email does not actually say that the data you send them has to be from the 2024-25 school year. This feels like an oversight and is not especially surprising.

I teach 8th grade. My students leave me and immediately go to high school.

You get one guess about whether I have access to any data about any of my previous students, at all, during the time I’ve been working for this district.

Shit’s due next Wednesday, so I suppose I ought to get to making shit up soon.

In which we are not making progress

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Don’t tell anybody, because I’ll deny it, but if school started tomorrow, other than needing maybe half an hour to clean up a few things and put some stuff away, my room is ready to go. It’s not finished, mind you, but it’s the kind of unfinished where if someone who wasn’t me walked in, they wouldn’t be able to tell. No one is going to look in an empty corner and go “Weren’t you planning on putting your hex lights there?”

I have two more days this week before teachers are officially back on Monday. All good. Time for something to go terribly wrong, in fact.

The problem is, the whole rest of the building is not me, and I just realized today how much trouble the rest of the building is in. There were a lot more teachers back today, and … yeah. There are a bunch of things that absolutely must be finished in a week in order to open school, and … I have my doubts. And from what I’m hearing, although this is entirely hearsay, the other middle schools are worse off than we are.

There are no functioning student bathrooms in the building, for example. The bathrooms were all completely gutted over the summer, and the sinks are in but there are no toilets or urinals, nor are there any partitions, because you need the toilets in place before you put in toilet stalls. You literally cannot open a school if none of the hundreds of students who go there have anywhere to pee. Na Ga Ha Pen. And that’s before we get to things like none of the new reconfigured classrooms have cabinets or countertops yet. Like, you can have a classroom without those things? But it’s a big pain in the ass.

Our band and orchestra rooms are not remotely functional yet; I’m not sure about the details because I haven’t seen them. But what I did see is that when they moved all of the stuff out of those rooms– and you can imagine just how much stuff is packed into your average middle school band and orchestra room– they Tetrised everything into one of our social studies classrooms. And I chose that word on purpose, because there is no room in her classroom. All of her desks are triple-stacked on top of each other against the wall farthest from the door. There was a narrow path to her desk, but you can’t do a whole damn lot to get ready in a classroom that is completely full of shit.

There are a bunch of teachers changing classrooms this year, too, and for a lot of them one of the two rooms isn’t ready yet, so none of them can go anywhere, and …

I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the middle schools have the start of school backed up by a couple of days, is what I’m saying. We can’t even do e-learning days, because none of the kids have their devices yet. We can find temporary workarounds for the classrooms– worst case, we have a lot of kids in the gym and in the library for the first few days of school, and it’s whatever; we’re annoyed but it’s manageable. But if there are any more delays to the bathrooms, we’ve got a major Goddamn problem on our hands.

On school supplies and other annoying arguments

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.

This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.

Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:

  1. Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
  2. You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
  3. If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
  4. Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
  5. There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
  6. That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
  7. In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.

Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.

On the renovation

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I could teach for another fifty years and I would not get over how comical the reaction of your average middle school kid is to change. Today was a hellaciously busy day– I got into work a good 30 minutes early, on purpose, to discover that yes, in accordance with prophecy, the renovations on my old classroom were complete and yet my stuff hadn’t been moved from the temporary classroom to my actual room. So I had to first haul everything downstairs– and the temp room is literally as far away from my original classroom as it can be and still be in the building. Then once I got downstairs I had to unpack and organize everything, and I mean everything– including finding the couple of things that didn’t come back from storage like they were supposed to and putting all my desks where they belonged. Despite leaving a note with a diagram on my teacher desk they put it back where it was originally and not where I wanted it, so I also had to flag down one of the custodians and ask them to move it before class started, then I spent the whole day throwing review worksheets at my kids and unpacking and organizing as quickly as I possibly could.

The whole room has essentially been flipped; if you look at my classroom tour from the beginning of the school year you’ll notice that my desk was in between my two whiteboards and thus prevented me from using about half of the whiteboard space in the room. So I moved everything to the back of the room where I don’t obstruct anything I could use for instruction, plus I can move the student desks closer to the board. The kids in the back of the room were really far from the whiteboards and I don’t have to worry about that any longer.

Watching the video– and I wasn’t going to do another classroom tour video, but I think I will now, so expect that later in the week– you can get a good idea of what the renovations were. A fresh coat of paint, new carpet (whee!) and most usefully, new and dimmable lights. I had to take down all of my LED lighting for the repainting, and not all of it is going back up until I’m 100% certain I’ll be back in this room again next year, but I have all the whiteboards now too, plus the ancient TV went away and I got a new projector, so the room really has improved substantially over the course of the school year. This is the second time, though, come to think of it, that they got halfway through finishing a job and then left me for the rest of it, because when they finally put the new whiteboards in (in, in accordance with prophecy, late December) they didn’t bother putting anything back where it was or cleaning up all the shards of hardened glue that went everywhere. I had to scramble the first day back from Winter Break, too.

Anyway, to circle back to the first sentence, despite having seen what the other renovated rooms looked like already, every single kid who walked into my room today had to have something to say about it, and a whole lot of them decided they didn’t like where my desk is now. “Shut up, it ain’t up to you” was my response to most of them, because I teach middle school and that’s how we roll.

(The blurred-out calendar, by the way, has everyone’s birthdays on it, and was damn near illegible in the original picture, and only had first names anyway, but … still. I’m going to continue with this in the future, though. Everybody gets a Jolly Rancher on their birthday or the nearest available school day, and the summer birthday kids get theirs on their half-birthday, which is fun because it’s always a surprise.)

Three down, one to go

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

A horrible story you don’t want to read

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.

It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”

Uh-oh.

I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.

This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.

But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.

So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.

Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.

Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.