Free advice

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

If, after a reasonably relaxing six-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, you nearly die on the highway on the way to work because 1) somebody parked their car in a really shitty place on an offramp and oh also 2) you’re honestly fighting falling asleep for basically the entire drive, and then you get to work and, bleary-eyed and brainless, try to open your classroom door with your keycard badge, which, uh, doesn’t work on those kinds of doors, just go home. The day is not going to get better.

I also screwed up solving a problem on the whiteboard for my first hour class, only not only could I not find my error, neither could the entire class, and we sat and stared at it as a group for probably ten minutes. Turns out that, while 1.5 is half of three, that doesn’t mean that 3/1.5 equals 1/2! It equals two.

One grown adult, fifteen honors students, and it took me until lunchtime to figure out what I’d done wrong. I definitely should have given up and gone home after first hour.

On worst-case scenarios

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

I met my Afghan student today. For the purpose of posting about her I’m going to call her Fatima, which is the second-most-common Afghan girls’ name, but isn’t hers.

I suspect I’m going to be talking about her quite a lot for the next little while.

Unfortunately, pretty much everything I was worried about with Fatima appears to have come to pass. She speaks virtually no English at all; she knew “hello” but I don’t think I heard her say even one other word of English while she was in class. She can read in neither English nor Pashto, although I was able to confirm after struggling with it for a few minutes that she does speak Pashto specifically basically by trying different names for languages until she lit up. As it happens, I have students in that classroom who can speak Urdu and Arabic; she understood neither language.

I gave her this when she came into the room:

The top language is Pashto; underneath that is Urdu, as Google Translate doesn’t have Dari available. I thought about adding Arabic but ran out of room, and it looks like Urdu is more common in Afghanistan anyway. It was immediately clear that she couldn’t read either. Later in class, I had her write her name (I wrote mine, then an arrow pointing to me, and handed her the pencil) and she was able to mostly write her first name, in shaky, second-grader’s handwriting, but it wasn’t quite spelled like it is in the computer and didn’t quite line up with how she pronounced it, so … yeah. Later I wrote 3+4 on the page; she did not recognize them as numbers, as far as I could tell.

Effectively, I am unable to communicate with this kid via anything other than gestures until I discover some sort of resource– an app, a website, something— that is able to speak Pashto. I’ve found several that can translate it (with who knows what level of quality, since I’m not able to evaluate it) but she’s effectively illiterate as far as being able to communicate grade-level content or anything close to it. So we need to work on nothing but getting her up to speed in English and basic literacy. I literally can’t teach her any math right now.

You can imagine how easy it is to find something that translates written English text into the spoken version of a language that is only spoken by maybe fifty million people worldwide and only about sixteen thousand (as of 2010; the number has certainly jumped recently) in America. I can find dictionaries and auto translators; they’re useless to me if they don’t speak, unless I learn to read Pashto.

On top of that, I had to bite some heads off in the morning, from kids who should have fucking well known better, for enthusiastic and obnoxious use of the word “Ay-rab” and jokes about the kids blowing up the building. I made it clear in all of my classes today that I’m landing on anyone bullying these kids like the wrath of God. We’re putting a stop to that shit with a quickness.

So, if anyone can make some suggestions for some “learn the alphabet” types of activities that work well for ESL kids, I’d love to hear it. Because our ESL teacher? Is out with Covid right now.

2022’s awesome so far.

What I use in the battle for the mind

Luther M. Siler

Our math team had a really interesting meeting with the person in charge of math and science instruction for the corporation today. By “really interesting,” what I mean is that we knew what the meeting was going to be about before we had it, we had a meeting about the meeting yesterday, and we went in prepared to shut down some bad ideas. And … well, on our end it went pretty well, meaning that I think this poor lady walked into a buzzsaw that she didn’t even know was there before the meeting started.

The great thing was where I got to explicitly argue that the best thing we could do for math instruction in our building and in the corporation in general would be to shut down the honors academy, directly to one of the lord high muckety-mucks of the corporation. I’ve talked about this before so I won’t repeat the argument, but the really interesting thing is the way the person we were talking with didn’t appear to have considered the argument before I presented it to her. (To be fair, “the honors academy is destroying the ability of the other schools to do their jobs” is not the most obvious argument in the world.). I don’t think for a second that this is going to change anything, but it was nice to be able to say it.

… damn. I just found out Michael Nesmith died and now I need to listen to the Monkees for the rest of the night. One way or another, it was nice to just get up and go to work and do my job today without fear of some sort of digestive disaster happening. I’ve got big plans for a giant pot of chicken and dumplings this Sunday, so I need everything working right before that happens.

In which I’m still alive

Luther M. Siler

I managed to make it back to work today for the first time since, well, last Thursday, and the first two adults to lay eyes on me both told me to take my ass back home again. I failed to take that advice; one of the most confounding things about this recent bout of being sick is that it’s consistently over by noon each day, only to resurge again the next morning, and I figured that since I made it to work without throwing up I could probably make it through the day.

Correct, as it turns out, and I know you all finished that last paragraph thinking “of course he didn’t,” because that’s how these posts almost always go. But no! I not only made it through the day, it was a pretty decent day, all told. I will likely do a Math Teacher Statistics Nerd post about my NWEA scores as soon as the last couple show up for me tomorrow; I have tested all but four of my students, and as none of the four have been to school at any point in the last two weeks I strongly suspect they’re not going to be in tomorrow, which is the last Friday of the semester and the end of the testing window. I want to wait until I have all the numbers I’m going to get before I start geeking out about them, but the early version is this: the good numbers appear to have held or in some cases actually gotten better, with my first and second hour doing particularly well.

… and I’ve spent twenty minutes staring at the screen and idly websurfing, so I guess I’ve said what I have to say for tonight? We’ll see if I make it through tomorrow. I’d like yesterday to have been my last sick day of 2021 but who the hell knows.

In which it really isn’t

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Every 8th grader in the corporation takes the PSAT right around this time each year, mostly as an indicator of high-school readiness; if a kid enrolls in a high school out of district one of the things they pull as they evaluate the kid is the PSAT score. Now, we let them know early and often that this isn’t precisely the best measuring tool for this purpose (and I don’t know who made the decision to start using this test, but I’d like to have a word with them) and that, particularly on the math portion of the test, there’s gonna be some stuff they don’t know.

Now, the thing is, we’ve only been using the PSAT for a couple of years, and last year, I didn’t administer it, since I was working from home at the time. So I haven’t actually seen what the math content on the PSAT looks like since I took the PSAT, sometime in the early fuckin’ nineties. And here’s the thing: advancing your skills in reading and writing doesn’t really work the same way as it does in math. A talented 8th grader can handle a reading or language test pitched at 9th graders, because reading is still the same thing, and there really aren’t any actually novel skills taught after, like, the middle of grade school or so. Math? Math doesn’t work like that. The PSAT is basically an Algebra 1 test, and if you’re not in Algebra 1, the notation alone is going to make the thing entirely incomprehensible. Like, my kids have never seen f(x) in any capacity, and that renders even something like f(x) = X + 6 when X is 10 somewhat incomprehensible. Some of them will figure out (or, probably more accurately, correctly guess) that they can just add 10 and 6 and get 16, but the majority of them are going to look at the function notation and just fall apart, and a whole lot of the questions used function notation some way or another. There were two math tests on the PSAT, one that was meant to be done without calculators and lasted twenty minutes, and another that allowed calculators (which weren’t going to do most of my kids a bit of good) and lasted 40. I glanced through an extra copy of the test booklet (true to expectations, attendance was miserable) and found maybe three questions on the first test I thought my kids might be able to do, and perhaps 50% of the questions on the second test were possible, or at least would be by the end of the year– second- or third-quarter material, for example.

I’m not writing this to complain about the test, mind you; it’s just not going to be as useful to evaluate where an 8th grader is mathematically than it will be to evaluate where they are as readers. I’m writing this because, as a math teacher, I spent the entire test ignoring pointed glares from at least three or four students– not because they were actually mad at me, but because they decided it was funny to blame me for the math on the test being hard and a couple of them just decided they were going to spend an hour staring at me– because it’s not like they actually thought I was responsible for the questions on the Goddamned thing. I just kept telling them not to panic and didn’t worry about it’ it’s nice, for once, to have them taking something that isn’t used to evaluate me or my school in any way. All the pressure to do well was on the people actually taking the test!

Crazy, innit?