Tag: math

It’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s gonna be fine it’s

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

State math testing tomorrow and Wednesday, and then I’m … well, it’s middle school, so never, ever stress-free, but at least a lot less stressed than I am right now. I sat down during our team meeting with the other 8th grade Math teacher and once we went through everything we knew we had to do already for the rest of the year I realized I only really have like eight more assignments to plan.

I told them today that I was going to keep things super simple in class for the next couple of days, and that tomorrow’s assignment in particular was going to be extremely short. Like, five problems short. I have entertained myself by making those five problems insanely complicated,(*) and I’m going to put the answers on the board and not mention it to anyone. We’ll see how many of them notice! I’m going to guess roughly a quarter do not.

(*) Insanely complicated and yet within the skill set of anyone who has been actually paying attention. So, f’rex:

I may throw some extra credit at anyone who actually solves them instead of just circling the right answers. We’ll see.

And here we go

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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.

Three down, one to go

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I applied to teach summer school, did I mention that? I don’t know for sure that I want to do it, but I can’t decide that I do want it unless I apply now, and I have no real sense of how many jobs there are or what my chances are to get one, because for this type of thing they basically drop the teachers into a spreadsheet that sorts us by seniority and licensure and stuff like that and then spits out the teachers that get offered jobs. Plus I really only want to teach Algebra 1; I’m licensed for high school (there’s no middle school summer school this year) but I don’t want my first time teaching, say, Geometry to be in a three-week intensive summer course. Seems like a bad idea!

But yeah. I’d work four hours a day for three weeks and make a few grand (I’m paid at my hourly rate, which … I’m not 100% sure what my hourly rate is but it’d be decent money) and then I’d have all of July and the first week of August for my break, which doesn’t seem like it would be too terribly exhausting. We’ll see what happens.

At any rate, I’m done with three quarters of the 2024-25 school year, and I’m reaching the point where I’m having to admit that this has been a pretty good year so far. I’m pretty sure I’m failing fewer students this quarter than I ever have, or at least since returning to teaching after the furniture sales years, and that’s a good feeling. Then again, I had to fill this out for each of my classes, which is reliably the most annoying part of giving grades:

I know you can’t read that, but that’s a class of thirty or so students and I have had to rank each of them from zero to two on Persistence, Respectfulness, Initiative, Dependability, and Efficiency, and if you’re thinking that some of those sound like they might kinda be the same thing and you’re not entirely sure what some others mean, well, the kids never look at the numbers either so even putting enough energy into them to spread them out like I did is kind of a colossal waste of my time. This is more a measure of what kind of mood I’m in when I’m doing the grades than anything else, to be honest, and I wish the district would stop doing it. Annoying for teachers and irrelevant to students and parents is not a good combination, guys! Half of them don’t care about their actual grades, why would getting this shit matter? Plus every teacher ranks all of their kids– so I had to do this a hundred and eighty times– and so each kid gets thirty of these stupid little grades, which are just slapped into the margins next to the grade for each class in a way that is barely readable anyway.

Blech.

Today was the first day of spring– shut up, yes it was– and the way I know is that the entire building suddenly shifted to 100% playing grabass with each other all day. It’s supposed to be in the seventies tomorrow, and it’s Pi Day, which I don’t like, because there’s a building tradition that the math teachers bring pie, but I have a tradition where I pretend to forget to bring pie, while wearing the Pi shirt that doesn’t quite fit very well and I wear one day a year. And guess what? I’m gonna forget to bring pie again tomorrow! My wife and I almost stopped for pie on our way home from dinner but then we decided we were tired and I didn’t want to spend my hard-earned money on pie for however many Goddamn teachers we have in our building.

Also, I’m wearing shorts to work, because 74 or so outdoors for the first time all year will translate into approximately 190 degrees in my classroom, and that’s if they remember the heat’s not supposed to be on. I may burn to a crisp tomorrow, is what I’m saying, and that makes it even less likely that I’m going to be enjoying any pie.

I’ve completely lost it

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I walked into my house after getting home from work with a good idea for a post in my head, did a couple of quick around-the-house tasks, and then promptly completely forgot what the hell I wanted to post about, and despite spending several hours since then trying to reconstruct my thought process, it’s completely gone.

So screw it, I’m going to complain about my job instead. Have you ever been asked your opinion on something and immediately realized from the way you were asked about your opinion that there was no way on God’s green earth that anyone was going to actually pay attention to what you thought? We had a teacher inservice day yesterday, and the math department’s big job in the morning was to go through a bunch of vendor kits for next year’s new textbook adoption. There were, I dunno, nine of them to go through? All of them with, bare minimum, 7th and 8th grade teacher editions and copies of whatever materials the students got, some with access to websites and digital tools and pacing guides and various and sundry other things that I won’t get into because they’re probably a touch too inside baseball for a non-teacher crowd. Many of them also included 6th grade materials and Algebra 1 as well.

Now, this is actually a pretty decent use of an inservice day, don’t get me wrong. There was no world where any of us were going to have time to do this on our own– remember, every math teacher in my building is on an overload right now because we’re so understaffed, so all of us teach for every second of the day except for our lunch breaks. (And I generally have a dozen students in my room during lunch, too, but that’s another story.)

Basically what we were doing was taking 20-30 minutes for each publisher, looking through the books and making notes. My notes were mostly bullet points. Some publishers were out immediately, sometimes for reasons having little to do with the actual quality of instruction– for example, one of them was not only organized in a way that made absolutely no sense to any of us and didn’t really seem to conform to Indiana standards, but had seven different thick consumable workbooks (250-300 pages each) for the kids, one for each major unit of study.

Now seven different workbooks is already impossible even before you get to the ridiculousness of the idea that you’d get through even one 300-page workbook in a single school year. I have about 175 students right now, total. 175 students times seven workbooks is 1225 workbooks. Each was, conservatively, an inch thick. That’s a hundred and two linear feet of workbooks.

Where the fuck am I supposed to keep all of that? Giving them to the kids is not an option. I will never see them again. Furthermore, since nothing is in the right order, we might be in Workbook 1 this week and then need Workbook 5 next week and Workbook 3 the week after that.

I don’t need a lot of notes for this one! It’s literally a physical impossibility. It’s a non-starter. The second I see seven workbooks per kid where everything is in an order that doesn’t match what the State of Indiana needs, I’m done.

You can imagine the shit fit that was thrown when our department head found out later that afternoon that we– as in each of us– were supposed to complete a seventy item rubric for, not each publisher, but each grade level for each publisher.

That’ll be the last animated .gif, I promise, but it felt appropriate. Not only were the rubrics huge, but they were Google forms, and they were written in eduspeak so ridiculously arcane that none of the three of us, nearly seventy years of teaching experience among us, could really parse what the hell some of the items were actually asking. And to do that for all grade levels for nine different publishers? Fuck you. Fuck you a lot. Two days of work, bare minimum. We had three hours, and by the time we saw the rubric the three hours were already over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a complicated Google form looks like when it spits out its results, but it’s a completely ridiculous spreadsheet. They’re terrible, and they’re user-unfriendly as hell. So to come back around to what I asked earlier in this post, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to attempt to look at what we were doing, because not only does no one have any time for that shit– remember the three teachers at our school are not the only ones being asked to complete this task– but it’s being generated in a way that makes pulling useful information out of it virtually impossible.

We all suspected the board was just going to order the cheapest curriculum anyway. So we sent in our notes and a tiered list of the ones we liked, the ones we were indifferent to, and the ones we actively didn’t like. If the people in charge want more than that they can find all of us subs for a couple of days.

I fully anticipate being told to find somewhere to put 1200 workbooks this fall.

Not a good sign

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January 2025 has been a long year, and I am way too tired for Sunday night right now, especially given that I was literally in bed by 8:00 last night and made it eleven hours before I even woke up to pee. I didn’t actually get out of bed until 9:30 or so, and other than taking the Christmas tree down, doing some reading– I am going to finish Wind & Truth tomorrow– and writing an assignment for tomorrow, I really haven’t done much. This image is prominent in tomorrow’s assignment:

This is going to be one of those annoying assignments that conceptually isn’t actually that difficult– you have two numbers in your coordinates, and you have to manipulate them in one of three ways to get your second set of coordinates, and those manipulations only involve making them their opposites or possibly putting them in reverse order– but it’s gonna break some brains anyway, because the sensible way to do this is to write down the coordinates of a point, look at the rule, then rewrite the new point, but my kids don’t want to write anything at all ever, and they’re going to try to remember the coordinates instead, and that’s … not gonna work.

Then I’m gonna get a chorus of “this is too hard!” and have to resist the urge to reply with “no, you’re just too lazy to do it right,” which is true, but … unhelpful. Also, if I’m tired, I’m gonna start making mistakes myself. So yay.

I hate teaching this unit. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that or not? But I hate transformations. I really do. I think Pythagoras is next, and that’s a little bit more fun.

Maybe I’ll go to bed early again tonight.

This may as well happen

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Oh, I know, you just had a Friday, but did you have a “the assistant superintendent of the entire district pops in for an entirely unexpected surprise observation during your worst-behaved class” Friday?

BECAUSE I DID.

Sure, I can do that

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

Spent the last half hour talking a high school sophomore off the ledge, which is what you expect to happen when you teach 8th grade. She’s in Algebra 2 right now, which technically I’m legally allowed to teach, and I can absolutely handle both the mathematics behind and the explanation of that second inequality up there, but she swears up and down they haven’t been working with quadratics at all. That’s the second question of the two she asked me about, and the first of the other pair of inequalities looks like this:

…which is a reasonably tricky PEMDAS problem (a parenthetical with an exponent and a multiplier on it is the stuff of 10,000-comment internet videos) even before you get to graphing quadratics by hand, which I’m capable of with intense concentration but may not be great about explaining very well at the moment. Both pairs of inequalities have a simple linear inequality and a quadrilateral, and long story short, I’m not convinced her teacher gave her the assignment that he meant to. On an e-learning day, no less? You serious, man?

This isn’t a kid who’s going to forget that they just spent a month on quadratics or something like that, by the way. She’s bright. And she took a picture of one of her assignments from last week, which was graphing absolute values. The leap in difficulty from graphing absolute values on a number line to graphing systems of inequalities where one inequality is linear and the other is a PEMDAS nightmare that turns into a quadratic is … stark. There’s gotta be something else going on here.

Anyway, we’ve got the day off tomorrow again, which was the right decision. It’s been 20 below or worse all day, and it’s supposed to warm up significantly tomorrow, but at 8:00 in the morning it’s still going to be 20 below, and even after a two-hour delay it’s still going to be fifteen below– the temperature isn’t going to be conducive to human life until after noon, and you don’t make kids walk to school in subzero wind chills, especially when a lot of them don’t have coats. We will not lose Thursday or Friday, as it will be regular Midwest January cold and not the kind that has you cursing God.

The kids will, of course, find a way to make Thursday and Friday feel like a long week.

A horrible story you don’t want to read

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.

It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”

Uh-oh.

I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.

This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.

But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.

So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.

Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.

Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.