Tag: math

This was such a good idea

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Teachers: name your calculators.

Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.

I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.

Y’all.

At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.

Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.

There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.

LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.

The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.

Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.

On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.

This was almost a politics post

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.

Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:

Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:

The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?

Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.

On vocabulary

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.

(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.

This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.

I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.

Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.

There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.

Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.

In which they’re dumb and I suck

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I dunno, maybe they just need a better teacher, but holy shit have my students been shitting the bed on tests lately. The first ILEARN checkpoint was last week, and that was a nightmare— the 8th grade pass rate is about a third of the rest of the building– and all of my classes took tests today, and … God, I wanna throw up.

I think I’m going to actually put the answers to the test in the notes for the next test. I’ve put them on the board and still had about 30% of them fail; let’s see how they do when they literally have the answers on their desks.

Christ.

In which I may be in trouble

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I may have made somewhat of a tactical error.

I’ve been actively working to increase my leadership role in my building this year after several years of stepping back from any kind of after-school or committee obligations. I’ve had my weird little gay nerd club and that’s been about it. This year I’ve joined a couple of building committees and I’m chairing another one (this one, excitingly, is actually a paid position) and I’m also starting a Math tutoring group next week.

Hey, have I mentioned that my teaching partner is on indefinite leave? As in, they might be back next week and they might not be back at all, haha don’t bother making any long-term plans about anything because who the hell knows? Because that’s happened, leaving more or less exactly half of our 8th grade students without a math teacher. They’re still writing lesson plans and (presumably?) grading assignments, but … well, I don’t know if you’ve ever written lesson plans before, but writing lesson plans for subs for more than about three days in a row is actually impossible. Not in the sense that you can’t write them, because of course you can, but everyone involved recognizes that you are actively hallucinating if you think that whatever is going to actually happen in your classroom has any real chance of matching whatever you put in your lil’ plans over there. You’re even more doomed if you expect your kids to learn anything while you’re gone, because no one is going to teach them– a shockingly (and yet, not surprisingly) high number of middle school teachers cannot actually manage eighth grade math, much less Algebra 1– and they’re not going to be paying any attention to whatever the sub is teaching anyway.

Written directions? Pfah. Witness, from my Canvas for my Math class:

See that third paragraph? For reasons that aren’t interesting, homeroom isn’t meeting tomorrow, and usually Thursday homeroom is Math IXL time. I’m making my kids do it anyway because I am a heartless bastard.

I am predicting that zero of my over-a-hundred 8th graders notice that paragraph. We’ll see if I’m right.

Anyway, point is, you can’t type a document and then expect these kids to use it to learn anything. It is to laugh. Na Ga Ha Pen.

I emailed all of the kids in my partner’s Algebra class this evening to let them know about the tutoring sessions. We’ll see if I have a roomful of kids I don’t know panicking about their grades on Tuesday afternoon.

Day 26

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Guess what my 8th graders are doing in Math tomorrow?

This hasn’t been a bad week, all told– although there was Some Shit going on today that I’m probably going to have to talk about eventually– but, man, there was a palpable loss of enthusiasm from the kids, which you can really see in the last five assignments. Today’s assignment was on paper and I haven’t entered it yet– I think most of them turned it in, but who knows.

Anyway, tomorrow is gonna have to be the first come-to-Jesus meeting of the year. I’m so looking forward to it.

EDIT: Just for the hell of it, I emailed all my parents the above image. Tomorrow’s gonna be a blast.

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching4 Comments

So we’ve got a new curriculum for math this year, and like most curricula in 2025 there’s what was supposed to be a robust online component to it. My kids took a math test last week, and I discovered while they were taking the test that a question about exponents that asked them to show their work had not provided any way to put a number into a superscript.

Which, y’know, feels like it might be a massive fucking oversight.

We’re moving into the real number system this week and they’re starting off with terminating and repeating decimals, so a lot of moving back and forth between decimals and fractions. I spent an hour beating my head against their system and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to designate a repeating fraction. Is there a help system? Of course not. Check this out:

It seems like typing in an answer, highlighting the repeating decimals and then clicking that tiny button which I had to hunt for for twenty minutes (and remember, my kids are working on iPads, which make highlighting anything a huge pain) puts the repeating decimal line– which is called a “vinculum,” by the way– above the numbers you’ve highlighted.

Take a second and stare at the options in that text box and reflect upon the fact that this is supposed to be for 8th graders. I do not have the slightest idea what probably 90% of the icons on that thing are referring to, nor do I really have any idea what is supposed to be designated by an arrow pointing at three diagonal dots.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work:

The top box is how it processed my entry. Why is there extra vinculum to the right of the seven? No idea, but it happened every time I tried. You’ll notice nothing extra is lined in the actual entry above. Why is the 27 in the bottom “correct” answer centered under the vinculum? Also no idea. I was not able to get a single answer correct involving a repeating decimal and absolutely nowhere was there any sort of help option that might have shown me what to do.

I sent an irate email to my team about how bullshit this was and I’m done for the night. I’m going to have these kids writing on the backs of shovels with coal by the end of the year. I’m so done with educational technology at this point that I can’t see straight.