Tag: lesson planning

I’ll stop talking about school soon, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I was rudely tricked into doing classroom coverage today, when I made the mistake of walking past a classroom that did not have a teacher because she had gone home with a sudden illness. Apparently the office had not sent anyone to the room yet. I guess I’m not the type to just walk off when a kid comes out into the hallway and tells me there’s no adult in the room.

I’m sure it would have been fine.

At any rate, tomorrow will somehow be the first day of the school year with a completely normal schedule, and my lesson plans currently include a quiz about me and then a bunch of attempting to learn names. My retention rates run from 90-100% in the mornings to less than 50% with my sixth hour, so apparently I need to do some work on that. I tell the kids that I get the first two weeks of the school year for free and after that they get a piece of candy every time I can’t remember their names. I usually learn the girls’ names faster but the girls are also more likely to be the two kids in every class where it’s May and I’m still calling two of them by the same name. I think I’m also going to put my seating charts together tomorrow; that’ll help.

Also, for the first time this year I’ve decided to keep a running count on the board of 1) what day in the school year it is, 2) how much of the school year is gone, and 3) how much of the school year is left. Only I’m doing it using fractions, and I feel like if I make a biggish deal at the beginning of each class period I might do some good in teaching them how to reduce fractions, especially since there are exactly 180 days in the school year and 180 has a lot of factors. So, just as an example, since this is day 3 (and I’ve decided, arbitrarily, to consider the current day “done” for the purposes of the fractions):

3rd Day of the school year
1/60 of the year completed
59/60 of the year remaining

And tomorrow will be:

4th Day of the school year
1/45 of the year completed
44/45 of the year remaining

… and so on. I dunno, it’ll entertain me, and fully 2/3 of what I do every day is done with the explicit goal of entertaining myself.

I’d give y’all the quiz just for the hell of it, but there’s too many pictures of people I don’t have permission to post pictures of online, so it’s not going to work. It ought to be a fun day, though, which I will make up for by throwing a diagnostic test at them on Wednesday that’s going to be … discouraging. For all of us.

And here we go

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I would typically expect to be Sundaying pretty hard at the end of Spring Break, but that’s not what’s happening. I’m not stressed at all. That said, I’ve had one hell of a time figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my students this week, and more specifically what I’m going to do with them tomorrow, and I finally settled on a super basic, 20-question paper assignment with a mix of stuff from the last quarter on it. I’m titling the assignment “I Hope You Remember Math.” They’re all going to be lethargic and asleep tomorrow anyway so I think trying to start anything new (and the next unit is probability) is probably going to work against me. Then Tuesday through Friday on the basic principles of probability, skip the test, and two weeks of ILEARN review? Sure. Why not.

And after that … well, I chose the image up there for a reason. Right now I don’t even know what classroom I’m supposed to be in tomorrow (I was supposed to be back in my original room, but the weekly staff bulletin says otherwise, but the weekly staff bulletin also shows significant signs of having been copy-pasted from the last weekly staff bulletin) and that makes it really hard to plan. So tomorrow is going to have to be the last gimme day for a while, but that’s fine. It’s all fine. It’ll all be fine.

Unless the world blows up or something, but I’m gonna try not to worry about that too much.

On the most minor of milestones

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I have no further lesson planning to do for the 2023-24 school year. I know exactly what my students will be doing each class period for the rest of the school year.

Now, granted, “what they will be doing” on some of those days is nothing.

And I have some practice finals I need to write this weekend. Like, I know what days they’re doing them, but they don’t actually exist yet.

But the planning? That’s done.

Hmmmm

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… nah, I got nothing. I’ve planned out lessons for tomorrow and Tuesday and I think that’s all I can manage right now. No brain; only PS5. And book.

Today really got away from me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.

My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.

I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.

Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.

The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.

A miracle

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I have written lesson plans– well, okay, I have planned– well, okay, I have determined subject matter— for every day of school between now and Winter Break, which — especially the way I’ve phrased it– may not sound like the miracle that it is.

That was a very complicated sentence and I dare you to diagram it.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this job long enough that for the most part the difficulty in “lesson planning” is just deciding what to do, and the actual doing is all muscle memory by now even if I’m doing a lesson I’ve never done before, or changing up an old one. I can spin a couple of sentences of “plan” into a 47-minute lesson with next to no difficulty at all, but the actual process, the this-before-this-and-don’t-forget-this of it all is the difficult part. I’ll need to devote some time to actually writing the assignments for tomorrow for both my Algebra and Pre-Algebra classes, which will take a few minutes, but that calendar on Canvas? That shit’s filled out. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

I might even put it all up on the wall for the kids tomorrow so they can look at it. I went out and bought some stuff for the classroom today, as I’ve got most of my setup done and it’s time to turn my attention to the walls. The room’s feeling more like me with every passing day, although the lack of windows still hurts my soul, and I need another lamp. One more lamp in there and I can start turning the lights off while they work and rely on the LEDs and the lamps to keep the room lit enough that my ancient-ass eyes can see. Right now I’m still just too blind for it.

In which I experiment

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I decided today that I’m not writing up any more Black boys this school year. I’m still kind of processing the decision, honestly, but I’m sticking to it. It’s not as if there are a ton of school days left, I think I can probably find alternate ways to deal with classroom disruptions for six days. I’m also exempting suspension-level stuff; if somebody gets into a fight or steals something or something like that I’ll still do the referral. And this does not mean that I’m going to ignore misbehavior, either; I’m just going to find other ways to deal with issues for the last few days of class.

(Why only Black boys? Because I’ve literally only written up Black boys since I’ve been back. This still amounts to less than a half-dozen referrals. But a pattern is a pattern, and I don’t like this one. The fight I broke up the other day was between two white girls, but I didn’t do the referral for that so it doesn’t count.)

I also found out today that the rumor that we were moving back to blocked classes next year is true, so instead of my current setup where I have six groups for 41 minutes, I will have three groups for an hour and a half or so. I am vastly entertained that I have managed to hold down a single job for three years, something I haven’t done in a while, and I’m still going to have to reinvent my instruction again next year, even though I’m going back to a model I’m used to. That means I’ve had the same job for three years running and I’ve had to completely reinvent how I do it for each of those three years.

Christ.

Not much tonight, I know, but end of the year teacher tired is real, y’all. It’s 7:16 and I could go to bed right now.

In which this is exactly what I didn’t want

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching11 Comments


job-huntSpent the whole day behind the 8-ball, because on my one day off this weekend I went to the zoo with my wife and my son instead of spending all of it planning for this upcoming week of classes.  We had a stellar time at the zoo, too, probably the best visit to that particular zoo that I’ve ever had.  And now I’m sitting on the couch coughing up a quick blog post rather than researching methods of teaching measurement and conversion between units (because we have an entire four-week unit coming that I have no material for, which is going to be awful,) which is what I probably ought to be doing, and also instead of hanging out with the aforementioned wife and son, which is what I want to be doing.

I have absolutely got to find a new job.  I don’t want to teach anymore; I don’t want any of this– not the lesson planning, not the grading, none of it.  I haven’t called a single parent this year, because fuck it.  I can only think of two or three occasions during my entire career where it made any damn difference and it’s not going to this time either.  I need to sit down and seriously crunch some numbers and figure out just how much of a salary cut I can handle and still stay solvent, because I can’t do this anymore.  I need a goddamn job that I can leave at work and not bring extra shit home to do every single day.  Enough of this crap.