Tag: math

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

In which I’m not doing it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m not, God damn it. I refuse to do it. I am not dedicating another blog post or another minute of time with my precious mind on trying to make sense of ILEARN results and how it has been several years since they have correlated in any way at all with my perception of my students’ abilities.

That way lies madness. That way also lies comparing my results to the other 8th grade Math teacher and trying to come up with reasons why our scores might be different, and that madness is even worse madness than normal madness. I’m gonna walk away from this fucking computer and go read a fucking book, and I’m not thinking about school or the internet or teaching or math or fucking test scores for one more single second tonight because it is not worth it.

Bah.

I’m a loser, baby

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I considered not posting tonight; after all, if I’m going to lose one significant streak, I may as well lose more than one, but here I am nonetheless. I’ve already disappointed myself, surely I can’t follow that up by disappointing my adoring public.

Shut up, yes you are. And yes you do.

I am … superstitious isn’t the right word, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is– in exactly one way: I’m fully convinced that full moons fuck kids up. To wit, as I was leaving work today, someone mentioned that tomorrow was the full moon, and suddenly the utter fucking ridiculousness of my day just clicked. Like, oh, of course there’s a full moon. You were in that classroom. You saw those kids. And that’s the thing; when I walk into my day entirely unaware of the phase of the moon, experience the psychotic behavior from my lovely lil’ dipshits, and then find out that’s what was going on? That’s evidence, dammit. I shouted one room into twenty minutes of complete silence today. I’ve had such a good year that these kids have barely heard me raise my voice at all, so when I do lose my temper it gets a real reaction.

There are days where I simply can’t make this shit any simpler, and today was one of them. “See this number? See this number? Divide them shits. Make sure this one’s on top.” That was it. Calculating scale factors just isn’t that hard. And my third hour in particular made it abundantly clear that every second of my instruction had literally just passed through their heads like a neutrino through aerogel, leaving not a fucking trace of a mark behind. There’s only so many times I can be asked questions which I have literally just answered before I lose my shit, and asking a room full of fourteen-year-olds what three divided by one was and getting “one” and “four” as answers– this is not a fucking joke, it really happened– was the last straw.

I don’t give a damn if your parents tell you to go to school. You’re clearly already used to being a disappointment; what’s one more thing? If this is all the effort I’m going to get out of y’all, you can go. The office is down the hall. I’m not even going to write you up. Just fuck off. Go home, go to hell, I don’t care which. You aren’t entitled to my fucking oxygen if you’re not going to be a student.

Bah.

Today’s blogwanking WTF moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

Why, yes, I’m writing two posts back-to-back.

Today is, by a wide margin, the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog. Even when In which I tell you how your religion works was blowing up on its way to amassing over 100,000 views, the biggest single day was 12K. To get an idea of how ridiculous those numbers are, I had more pageviews today than all but three months in the twelve and a half years I’ve been writing here. We aren’t halfway through February just yet and it’s the third-highest traffic month in that entire time. February is on pace to beat entire years.

Nearly all of those views (around 17K) are from the US. Another thousand from Australia. None from China, which is where I was getting a lot of my traffic during the last few months of 2025. And they’re spread out— look at the difference between uniques and pageviews. In which the kids are fine, shut up has about 1500 views. How your religion works is adding another 750. The rest of the hits are all over the place.

Three likes and zero comments.

I feel like I ought to be elated— who doesn’t enjoy it when their writing is getting noticed?— but the absence of any clear reason for the spike has me suspecting bots, even though I don’t have any real idea how that would be happening either. Very few referrals are showing up. Google’s telling me I have 378 active users right now, and I’m watching that number climb as I’m typing. I have no idea what’s going on.

If you’re new around here, please let me know what brought you to the site. I mean, I appreciate it, but the curiosity is killing me. I’ve had 400 hits while I’ve been typing this and the active users number is up to 482 now:

Send me some money, damn it. 🙂

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.

Yep, it’s cold

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking5 Comments

We haven’t gotten any substantial snow yet, but I think the idea is it’s supposed to mostly roll in tomorrow and Sunday, so we’ll see what happens. My classes went fine today; turns out that if you tell kids you’ll give them extra credit if they show their pets (or any nearby object they’re willing to pretend is a pet) on camera, they show up for Meets, and then they even stick around afterwards.

There’s a fairly high risk of school being cancelled Monday as well, depending on how shit the next couple of days go; I’m really hoping if that happens they just cancel school and add a day to the end of the year. Today went well but I feel like two synchronous days on either side of a weekend are not both going to go well. We’ll see, I suppose?

After a big traffic spike for the last few months of 2025, including a lot of traffic from China and Singapore (but also elevated traffic from the US) I’ve been struggling to hit 100 page views lately. I’ve finally got access to Google Analytics– which, weirdly, happened the same day the traffic fell through the floor– and I’m struggling to understand what I’m looking at, to be honest. Like, right now, Google is telling me I’ve had 9 “active users” in the last half hour, but my hits on WordPress Stats haven’t moved? Ultimately I’m aware that none of this matters since the site isn’t monetized at all, but just for my own shits and giggles I’d like to know how these things overlap and intersect, y’know? Analytics isn’t super forthcoming with definitions, unfortunately.

Also, I thought I was supposed to be able to see what search terms were leading people my way, and what referrers, and so far I haven’t been able to dig that information out. I feel like it should be have been simple. Like, what the hell does this mean?

Sixteen thousand “engaged sessions,” of zero seconds of engagement time each, but … less than a hundred “page views”?

Somebody just download this shit into my brain so I don’t have to work to understand it. I’m tired, dammit.

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.