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.
I am not a digital artist, as you can probably tell, and I put this together in Sheets, which is certainly really far from the best way to do it, but it gets the job done. Here’s the question: how do I best include the existence of fractions? Fractions are always rational, but depending on what the fraction is, it can be any of the rational number sub-categories as well. I could just include an instruction after the first question to convert fractions to decimals, but 1) that feels inelegant, and 2) it sort of introduces another source of error, but that source is there anyway, I suppose– a kid that doesn’t recognize 1/3 as a repeating decimal is probably also not going to realize that 12/4 is a natural number.
Can you figure out a way to work fractions into this without adding a ton of qualifiers and disclaimers or extra questions? One or two is fine but I don’t want this to get much messier than it already is.
Holy shit, y’all. I applied for my high school math licensure literally yesterday and I got an email today that my addition had been approved and my license was updated. This from, remember, sending them test results from a test that took forty days to get official score results on, and in what is almost certainly their busiest time of the year.
I’ve talked my fair amount of shit about the IDOE during my time working here, but they’re absolutely on point with getting licenses up to date. Damn.
And, yes, that’s seven different content areas I’m licensed for. I really should get my science licensure just for the hell of it.
Adding to the level of today’s miraculousness, of three meetings I was expected to attend today, two ended early– one by forty-five minutes, and that was the one I was fully expecting to eat every single second of its allotted time– and the third took within a minute of precisely the time it was planned for. Tomorrow is going to be a crazy-long day because it’s parent-teacher night, and I have to dress like a grown-up and everything, but Wednesday should be pretty chill and then on Thursday the children arrive.
We are still missing two math teachers– a department that should be five people is only three– so I got another overage approved today. It went fine last year, so unless this group of kids is markedly more evil than last year’s– cross your fingers– I should be able to manage it just fine. I would always rather have an overage and soak up the enormous amount of extra money you get paid for it than be constantly getting phone calls to cover random classes during my prep period anyway.
That said, because I’ll be at work for twelve hours tomorrow, expect a video update at best. I will be in full no-brain-only-sleep mode by the time I get home, especially since I got no meaningful sleep at all last night and am kind of running on fumes already.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that it was legal to bribe them and today ruled that the President can legally order them killed, so I’m investigating just how the fuck I can get out of this miserable fucking shithole that we’re pretending is a functioning country. I’m going to do the paperwork today to get my passport renewed; my wife and son need theirs for the first time, and I’m going to have to talk my dad into getting his as well.
I think I can apply for German citizenship via descent from German nationals, and it has not escaped my notice that fleeing to Germany to avoid the Nazis is … somewhat ironic.
Anyway, the good news is that I unofficially passed my Praxis test; the score was 182/200, which is a quite comfortable margin. Higher than both of my practice tests, too; I was especially pleased to discover that several of the questions I specifically made sure to review had analogues on the official test, so I absolutely picked up some points during the studying process.
Oh, and in the process of showing off my drivers’ license to my online proctor I discovered that it was expiring in four days, and I went and got it renewed at the DMV in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.
The bad news — because of course there’s more bad news — is that despite the entire test being multiple choice, my official score report won’t be available until August 9, because ETS is the scum of the Earth. There is literally no reason this should take more than a couple of hours. It’s fucking 2024. This means that it’s unlikely that I’ll have the licensure in hand by the time school starts. Will that matter? Maybe, maybe not; the class I’m getting the licensure to teach in the first place hasn’t been confirmed yet, so all of this may have been for nothing. Right now I’m not stressing about it.
Oh, and check this fuckshit out:
Now: those two supplementary monitors are disconnected from the computer, because it won’t let you start the testing software if it detects that you have more than one monitor running. Was that good enough for my proctor? No! I had to point them away from me and cover them with towels. The disconnected monitors, which were not capable of receiving a signal from my computer. I also had to show the camera my glasses and confirm that I wasn’t wearing earrings, because … I guess I might have been wearing Google Glass and had secret spy earrings or some shit.
Don’t miss the whiteboard there; you aren’t allowed to use paper while taking the fucking test. I blatantly violated two of these assholes’ rules; one, I made no attempt whatsoever to disconnect every device in the house other than my computer from the internet, because give me a fucking break, and two, I discovered in the fine print of the rules I was agreeing to in order to take the test the requirement that if I was in a room with a door, that the door must not only be closed (fine) but that the computer I was testing on be placed in such a way that the closed door was visible to the proctor at all times.
Which would require wholesale rearranging of my office, and again, was not a requirement that anyone told me about prior to five minutes before taking the test. I was fully prepared to lie about this one if necessary, and had he given me any bullshit about it, I’d have removed the fucking door from the hinges. Christ, I fucking hate ETS. Like, the Supreme Court ruled today that the President is a king and I still think I hate ETS more than I hate them.
That said, it’s legal for Biden to order Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito executed and Trump sent to Guantanamo Bay now, and I think he should strongly consider it.
Monthly Reads is still coming later today, if (yeah, right) you’re waiting for it.
It took over three hours to write my two practice tests– seven and eight questions– tonight, because my computer is a sonofabitch. Tomorrow is the last day of prep and their finals are Thursday.
From the “I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice” department: Between Kyne Santos, who wrote this really awesome fucking book, and a simply outstanding TikTok account called Carrie the One, I follow two different math-based drag queen accounts on social media, or at least I did before I killed off my TikTok account. I say an awful lot that you already know from the title and the cover whether you want to read this book or not, but let’s be real here: a book about math written by a drag queen might be the ultimate “you already know if you want to read this” book, and to be honest this is less of a review than a notification that this book exists, and you might have missed it, and if the notion of reading this book rustles your jibblies in literally any way at all you should go spend money right away.
This book is part memoir, part textbook (simultaneously of mathematics, the history of gay culture and the drag movement, and of the history of mathematics) and part adorably unhinged geek-out about how fucking cool math is. You probably need to be at least comfortable with algebra to be able to fully appreciate it, if only because it’s kind of hard to talk a lot about math without getting at least a little bit into the weeds, but Kyne’s going to be explaining what ℵ0 is at some point and if that terrifies you you should at least take a deep breath before jumping in. It’s only 233 pages, though, so even if you have a rough time with it it’s not terribly long.
Each chapter takes on some aspect of mathematics– there’s a chapter on infinity, a chapter on algebra, a chapter on what “proof” means in a mathematical context and what the difference between numbers and numerals are, and so on, and Santos interweaves their own story and the history bits into the more technical (but again, not super technical, so far as it goes) math-focused parts. I picked up a couple of things that I am absolutely going to be bringing up in class, or at least with my Algebra kids– I have my lesson plans for Monday done already, and they’re directly from an anecdote in this book about imaginary square numbers that absolutely set my brain on fire– and Santos is one of those people who can carry a lot of what could be a slog just by sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. Again, if you’re even the least bit curious, absolutely give this a shot. It’s well worth it.
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