Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.
Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.
But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.
Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:
The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.
There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.
Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.
So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be:
Basically all I did was add the “Is the number a fraction?” step there, and we’ll have to review converting fractions to decimals a bit, but it’ll do and they need to remember how to do that anyway.
In the meantime, I actually called out sick today; my Mounjaro (I assume) got on top of me hard in the last couple of days and I spent less of last night sleeping than I generally like to do, in favor of activities that generally aren’t meant to be described in polite company. So I slept most of the day away once it passed. I may have to have a review day for my kids on Friday already, though, which feels awfully early, although if I remember right we probably had about one a month last year anyway so maybe not. We’ll see how the next couple of days go, assuming I can drag my ass out of bed.
With only four days of school left, none of which are really going to count for a damned thing– three days of babysitting and grade finalization and then a field day– it’s time to think about how I’m going to get through the summer without turning into a greasy lump. Since we all know I will turn into a greasy lump over the summer, let’s set some goals that I can feel bad about not fulfilling. Note that, for the most part, these are weekday goals; on weekends I still get to laze about.
Up by 9:00 AM every day. This actually won’t be that hard, as my body chemistry is finally starting to alter in such a way that I’m waking up earlier than this even if I don’t want to. I have tried to sleep past 8 AM for the last two days and not managed to do it. No, this is going to be the hard one:
In the shower within 20 minutes of waking up every day. The way my brain works, my day can’t start and I can’t do anything until I take a shower. The goal here is to have Things to Do and to Get Things Done. This means I need to bathe immediately, or close to it, every morning. I manage to do this every day during the week when school is in session and there’s no reason, or at least no good reason, why I can’t continue doing it over the summer. That said, I’ll be genuinely surprised if I manage to make it a week. Hell, I’ll be surprised if I pull it off on the first Monday of break.
Get licensed for high school math. This has a number of sub-goals. In case you’re not aware, I have a chance of being able to teach Honors Geometry next year, but in order to do that, I have to be certified to teach it, and as it’s a high school class and my math licensure is 5-9, I’m not. Therefore:
Pass the 5165 Mathematics Praxis Exam. Which I am currently not even remotely qualified for. I’m hoping to have this done by July 1. That should give me enough time to get the paperwork through the state board by the time school starts, even if I don’t pass on the first try. However in order to do that, I have to:
Study math for an hour a day, preferably in the mornings, after my coffee. I’m allowing myself some lounge time after getting out of the shower. Go sit in my chair in the library or on the back porch, drink a cup of coffee, idly fuck around on the web or read a book. But I want to spend an hour stuffing math into my brain each day. Right now the tentative plan is to take a practice test on the Monday after break to see just how far I have to go and see if an hour is realistic or I need more than that. That’s 20 hours of study during June for three years of high school math. One course a week plus some flex time. Sure, I can do that, right? I taught myself enough German to pass an exam in three days. I just need — heh– to be disciplined and to remember how to study.
Actual Arabic study, using some of the print resources I’ve purchased and haven’t paid much attention to. The apps have their place– which reminds me that I haven’t talked about an excellent vocabulary app I found– but I need some sustained grammar work and the apps genuinely don’t care about that.
Find some projects around the house. Stand by; we’ll see. There are tons of things I could be doing.
Maybe a part-time WFH job if I can find one. I don’t need more money, but if I could make enough to get this new computer completely paid for by the end of the summer that would make a lot of things easier. I need to remember that the overage pay goes away in a couple of paychecks. That’s not a problem– I was doing fine before I had it and I’ll be fine after it– but I’ll need to get a little more disciplined financially again. Luckily, summer is cheaper than the rest of the year most of the time.
Get the boy off the fucking couch. He will transform into a greasy lump if I let him– greasier than ever before, in fact, since he’s going to be a teenager in a few months and his Greasy Years are coming– and I should probably treat him like I’m his dad and not, like, a creepily older roommate who lives in the back office studying esoteric mathematics and languages he will never speak to anyone. He will literally spend the whole summer playing video games and watching YouTube if I let him; I should probably find a way to encourage other activities, even if that’s just making sure he has friends over every so often so that he interacts directly with people.
And, because not everything has to be serious:
I have video games to beat. I spend significantly less time on the PS5 since I turned off the YouTube channel, but I’ve developed this vexing habit where I play 90% of a game and then abandon it for something else, which means that I’ve got this vile backlog of games that I want to get off my plate and haven’t yet. Some of them are never going to happen– I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate III— but several of them are games I enjoyed and just got distracted by the next shiny. Literally all I have to do in the new Prince of Persia is beat the final boss! That’s, like, an hour or two! I can do this!
Reeeeeeeeead. Still making progress but God damn it I want the unread shelf cleared by the end of June. I can do this. I will do this. This is actually the thing on this list most likely to actually happen.
It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.
In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.
I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.
Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.
This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.
And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.
Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:
Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.
I want a fucking raise.
The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.
If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.
This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.
God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.
(My life has just changed; while checking to make sure that I was using the right color to cross out the Busuu app, I discovered that new friend Salman in that famous picture is the guy on the left, not the guy on the right, and for some reason I can’t handle that.)
But anyway. The last time I rattled on about Arabic apps on here I was already starting to sour on Busuu, but things have gotten rather worse since then, and since I’ve also found a decent third Arabic-language app (I will never stop collecting them) I figured it was worth another post. Now, it’s worth pointing out: I’m only discussing the app’s approach to Arabic, as I’ve not tried it with any other language, and Arabic is fucking hard, so I can imagine writing an app about how to teach it is also pretty fucking hard.
But nonetheless. I’m not actually giving up on the app, because the (effectively) dictation sections are genuinely useful, but I don’t think it’s teaching me anything any longer. For example, yesterday’s unit was called “Making Plans.” It taught me the words for:
Plans;
To Be Free (one verb form);
“do you fancy”…
“let me know”
“give me a call”
“How about…”
Shall
“I’d love to,”
“Do you mind,” and
“Sorry, I can’t.”
It breaks these down into groups of three or so, and after each few words it’ll repeat one and I need to click on the definition. After a couple of groups will be one of the listening exercises I mentioned in the post above, and then it’ll go through all the words and I’ll have to pick the translation from three possibilities. A lot of the time a good test-taker with no Arabic could get these right; for example, if a phrase ends in a question mark, and only one of the answer choices is a question, that’s the right one.
And I figured out the other day that this last flurry of multiple-choice questions will be in the order the words were presented, which … makes the whole exercise useless, frankly. And then there’s the social media functions, which I’ve abandoned entirely, because no one who has been using this app could possibly complete these exercises, particularly the written ones. You can record a few seconds of silence to get past the “record yourself talking about making plans with a friend” prompt, but if you write something it wants several sentences, which I am incapable of without literally typing them into Google Translate and copy-pasting what it gives me back.
Oh, and the community feedback had potential to be super useful, except for one little thing: the helpful people out there who want to work with me on improving my Arabic largely don’t speak English. Giving me pronunciation tips or correcting my grammar in Arabic isn’t actually helpful!
So, yeah. I’ll keep fucking with it because I paid for it, but fifty days into Round III of Learn Arabic I’m no longer stressing about this app.
That said, let’s talk about Lingodeer, which sounds dumb but which is the current big winner among my Arabic apps. Wanna know why? Here’s why:
You know what that is? That’s a fucking spelling test. Wanna know the best way to get me to learn to read this language? It turns out that it’s spelling tests. Every letter and vowel and pronunciation mark in that group needs to be used– as of right now, they haven’t started throwing distractors at me yet– and Lingodeer deliberately overpoints everything, focusing on teaching pronunciation much more than any of the other apps would. Many of those characters don’t even appear in standard (?) Arabic– I’m still not a hundred percent certain how the dialect differences work, and this app really wants lots of -un endings on words, but when I type “My sister” into Google Translate I get أختى, which has a few less vowels than they give me up there.
You might have to stare at it for a moment to figure out my mistake here; the Arabic masculine word for “British” is, roughly, biriitaaniyyun. That squiggle that looks like a W above the letter on the left indicates a doubled letter, and I put it in the wrong place– I wrote it as biriitaanniyun.
(Why the doubled vowels? Because there are three long vowels in there. In most cases a long vowel is represented as a doubled vowel when transliterated. Where Lingodeer gets weird is insisting on also including a short vowel every single time a long vowel appears, which it does several times here.)
Anyway, there are thirteen individual characters that needed to be put in the right order to get that right, and I only missed one of them, which felt awesome. And then it hit me with the feminine version, which is even longer, and I got it right:
I give you biriitaaniyyatun.
More hotness? I want lots more of this. Rub it on my face:
Every single section has stuff like this, that gets way into the weeds, and is fucking awesome. Even if I don’t look at it on every unit, the fact that it’s there is magnificent.
This is, slowly but surely, actually teaching me to read. I’m making progress here. Which is awesome. And is why Lingodeer is my new best friend.
Go ahead. Ask me questions. I might be able to answer them.
ETA: I just jumped back in and did some more spelling exercises. I’m proud of this, dammit:
I pulled this from my post the other day about the conversation quizzes. Remember, the way this works is I get sentences one at a time, spoken by what sure sounds like a native speaker, and some of the words are blanked out. I get a word bank to choose from to fill in those blanks.
Let’s get into a few explanations, and I’m not looking any of this up right now— I’m typing this on my iPad while watching John Wick 3, so I’m not going to take the time to nail down the details. Basically any of the dots on those letters are for differentiation between different letters. So the difference between a d and a z or an s versus a sh might be how many dots are on the word. Some base letters have as many as three variants. I don’t think there are any with four (no dots, one, two, and three) but I might be wrong.
The little circles that show up here and there indicate a letter that does not have a vowel after it. This was never explained in Duolingo and has never been mentioned in Busuu; I had to look it up.
Dashes indicate short vowels. A dash under a letter indicates a short I, a dash above a letter indicates a short a, and there’s a little curlicue-lookin’ thing that appears above the letters that indicates a short u. I don’t see any of those in this sentence but that might be a font thing.
Here’s the problem: there are a bunch of symbols in those words that haven’t been explained in either of the apps, and I have no idea what they mean. The double-line above the vertical letter on the far left? No idea. The double line underneath the leftmost letter of the second word from the left? No idea. The symbol on the rightmost letter of the leftmost word? No idea.
I can’t read these words if you don’t explain what these symbols mean, guys, and while some of them are vowels, occasionally I feel like maybe some of them represent multiple letters together, or are maybe a contraction of some kind? I can’t just figure this out. Stop fucking with me.
I think it’s probably time to admit that if I want to take a serious shot at learning Arabic I’m going to have to 1) spend time with textbooks and 2) probably suck it up and take a class. I was pleased with the way Busuu introduced the alphabet, but it went from that directly to “Okay, you know this now, and you’re ready for entire sentences in this tiny-ass font, right? Plus a bunch of symbols that we never really discussed in the alphabet section? You won’t be able to make half of them out anyway so don’t worry about learning them.”
Like, guys, language learning apps should explain shit, and I don’t understand why they don’t. Busuu’s approach to anything that isn’t the alphabet has been to give a handful of examples that may or may not generalize, not explain them, and then just … move on. Like, my last unit was on comparatives and superlatives? It gave me bad/worse/the worst and, I dunno, maybe good/better/best and that was it. I liked the “pull words out of this conversation” feature the first time I saw it, but I just don’t know enough to be able to do that easily and I can’t read well enough to go from spoken word to one of four different words that may not differ from each other all that much. Especially when, again, I don’t know all of the vowels and diacritics. Every so often it will show me a picture and ask me to say something about it for one of the social media features, and, Christ, I don’t even know where to start.
There also might be a dialect difference between it and Duolingo, and I can’t figure that out either. Lots of the nouns end differently (-atun seems to get added to a lot of them, and sometimes just -a) and I can’t figure out what the ending means, or why Duolingo’s vocabulary never bothered with it, and gendered endings seem inconsistent, and … gah. I’m smart enough to learn this shit, but I’m not smart enough to figure it out, especially given limited examples and the weird fact that that ending doesn’t seem to be properly represented by the actual letters at the end of the word, which is probably a function of one of those symbols I never got an explanation for.
And, for the record, if you happen to understand Arabic, don’t worry about explaining how all of this works. Like, I have access to other sources of information, and to a certain extent this is a function of my own laziness. I want there to be an app that explains this at the depth and quality that a textbook would, because I want to learn Arabic five minutes at a time while sitting in a comfortable chair in my living room or my library, and not hunched over a textbook or sitting in a classroom that I have to pay tuition for. I shouldn’t be surprised when I can’t find that.
There were another couple of sentences beyond this, but you get the idea. This induced panic at first– I am nowhere near being able to translate any of this shit, but after a second what I realized is that this is actually a drill at parsing individual words out of a sentence. The underlined ones– for some reason Paul didn’t have one in his last sentence– were blank, and I was given five or six options for the word the person said to choose from. I managed to 100% it, then did it again when I decided I was going to make a blog post out of it, so … yay me.
Also, this is much bigger than the screen of my actual phone, and Christ, I’m going to need to start doing this on my iPad or something just to be able to read the letters. This font is a bitch.
I spent the rest of the evening writing practice tests for tomorrow. My day is set for the next couple of days of school, then easy intro to Pythagoras on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be an easy week. He said.
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