Tag: math

A small piece of good news amidst a monstrous heap of evil shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching3 Comments

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.

In which I skipped today

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

Woke up this morning with my head swimming, and while I’m not unused to occasional dizziness first thing in the morning, holy shit— this, with no other symptoms, knocked me flat on my ass for almost the entire day, and I took a four hour nap this afternoon. That didn’t really leave a lot of time for much else; I’ve been reading a book that I’m not enjoying very much, and I’m trying to decide whether I dislike it enough to review it after I finish it or if I should just put it down and not worry about it. Advice, to future writers: you are not allowed to introduce time travel as a plot element with only a hundred pages left in your book. Don’t do that. Please.

Tomorrow I go back to studying in the mornings, after taking a couple of weeks off– my test is July 1st, and I am bound and determined to pass this damned thing on the first try. I have one more practice test handy, so I’ll start going through my last remaining study guide tomorrow, and take that test Wednesday, maybe, and then use the last couple of days to make sure of things like “I know how to use the calculator” and “my computer will run the software without a hitch.” I have no reason to leave the house next week other than a handful of tasks to take care of on Wednesday, so I have plenty of time to get myself ready. I popped into my classroom for a few minutes last week, and told my boss that I was about to take the test, and she didn’t say “Oh, that class isn’t happening,” which I’m hoping means that there’s still at least a good chance.

I dunno, that’s what I’ve got. How was your Sunday?

Well, crap

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I can’t get WordPress to load from my desktop for some reason, but it’s working for my phone, so … yeah. God forbid I not post something.

(Site loads on computer)

I’m gonna take another practice test tomorrow. If I had gotten everything right that I either already knew or feel like I nailed down today, I’d have gotten a 55/66, which is a clean and easy pass. The other 11 are calculus problems and hopefully guessing will get me two or three of them. If I do well tomorrow, I’m definitely taking this for real next week.

In which it looks like I can do this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

I ended up having some spare time this afternoon, and I found a free practice test online through the same people that sold me my study guide (so I figure it’s at least reasonably reputable) so I went ahead and took it, and if I’m understanding the scoring methodology correctly … it looks like I passed, although not exactly with flying colors– I got 42/66 questions right, or 63.34%, for a final score of 163, and a 159 is a pass in Indiana. I could have gotten a 39 and still passed, so I had a three-question cushion on my first try.

Now, granted, no one is ever going to look at my Praxis score again after I’ve passed the thing, so it really doesn’t matter if I pass it by the skin of my teeth or by flying colors, but I want a little bit more of a cushion than that. I was able to go through the practice test after taking it, and I printed out two categories of questions: questions I had gotten wrong, and questions that I got right but I know good and well that I got right by being lucky. That gave me about 27-30 questions to study tomorrow; in there are a handful that I absolutely shouldn’t have gotten wrong, including one thing I’ve taught fairly recently (!!!) and one where I just flat-out calculated something incorrectly and didn’t notice it, but I figure being fully confident of over half the test is better than I expected going in. I missed nearly all of the calculus questions, of course, but I got a couple of the trigonometry ones right without guessing and there were one or two of the harder ones where I was guessing between, say, two answers instead of all four and managed to get the right one. I figure I’m going to do this twice more– I’ll study my wrong answers tomorrow and see which ones I can get comfortable with (some are a matter of just not understanding certain kinds of notation, so those will be easy points) and do another practice test on Thursday, then maybe one more over the weekend, and if my numbers move in the right direction I don’t see why I can’t move ahead with the real thing next week sometime. Which, on one hand, will wipe out one of my big plans for June, but on the other hand will let me focus more on Arabic, curricular stuff, and Spanish.

The other thing I need to make sure I understand is the actual rules for taking a Praxis from home. I know they have a proctor monitoring you but I’m not sure what the tech rules are and I suspect on at least two questions I may have broken a rule, depending on how picky they are. This organization has made me incandescently angry with them on multiple occasions so I need to make sure I’m prepared for literally anything. Hopefully things go smoothly, but I need to prepare for them not to.

In which I haven’t failed yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I was able to successfully get myself up out of bed and showered before 8:30 this morning. I had a cup of coffee and screwed around on my phone for a while, then spent an honest to goodness solid hour studying, and managed to successfully regain at least some of my knowledge of trigonometry in the process. I think what I’m going to do this week is spend the next couple of days filling obvious holes in my knowledge (“obvious” meaning “I remember knowing this, and now I don’t,” as opposed to, say, calculus, which is an entire domain of knowledge that I never really had a grasp of) and then take a practice test on Thursday. (Why Thursday? It’ll take a while, and Friday’s going to be busy. I’ll have time to study but not for an entire practice test.) If I do okay on the practice test, I may go ahead and take a shot at the real test next week and see if I can just knock it out. I only need like a 60% to pass, I think? If I do crap on it, I’ll stick with the original plan and study through June or until I can pass a practice test solidly. I don’t want to have to pay for this thing more than twice, and ideally, only once. I’ve also literally never failed a standardized test so I have some pride on the line here too.

In other news, school is out, and I’m finding that I don’t have a lot to say about that. This was a pretty good year, all told; it had its moments, like they all do, but my honors class was awesome enough to carry through the rest of the year and even my most annoying kids continue to pale in comparison with what I’ve had to deal with at previous schools. That said, I think I’m due for another round of reevaluating classroom procedures; everything I’m doing right now is still very COVID-informed and I’m seeing signs that certain policies may be starting to bite me in the ass a bit. I didn’t really try to reinvent the wheel when I changed districts, but I’m comfortable enough in the new place now that I think I can tweak some things. We’ll see.

I’ll end on a question: certain sectors of American society have been claiming that attempting to impose any sort of penalties or punishments for the obvious criminality of certain individuals was going to cause widespread civil unrest. Locally, I am aware of one (1) house that is now flying a very small (comically so, in fact) American flag outside their house, upside down. Is anyone reading this aware of any civil disobedience or protests literally anywhere other than the tiny little group that’s been outside the courthouse in New York since the trial started? Any downtowns flooded with fash lately? Trucker rebellions? Anything at all?

Summer Goals, Or: In Which I Write Fiction Again

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

With only four days of school left, none of which are really going to count for a damned thing– three days of babysitting and grade finalization and then a field day– it’s time to think about how I’m going to get through the summer without turning into a greasy lump. Since we all know I will turn into a greasy lump over the summer, let’s set some goals that I can feel bad about not fulfilling. Note that, for the most part, these are weekday goals; on weekends I still get to laze about.

  • Up by 9:00 AM every day. This actually won’t be that hard, as my body chemistry is finally starting to alter in such a way that I’m waking up earlier than this even if I don’t want to. I have tried to sleep past 8 AM for the last two days and not managed to do it. No, this is going to be the hard one:
  • In the shower within 20 minutes of waking up every day. The way my brain works, my day can’t start and I can’t do anything until I take a shower. The goal here is to have Things to Do and to Get Things Done. This means I need to bathe immediately, or close to it, every morning. I manage to do this every day during the week when school is in session and there’s no reason, or at least no good reason, why I can’t continue doing it over the summer. That said, I’ll be genuinely surprised if I manage to make it a week. Hell, I’ll be surprised if I pull it off on the first Monday of break.
  • Get licensed for high school math. This has a number of sub-goals. In case you’re not aware, I have a chance of being able to teach Honors Geometry next year, but in order to do that, I have to be certified to teach it, and as it’s a high school class and my math licensure is 5-9, I’m not. Therefore:
  • Pass the 5165 Mathematics Praxis Exam. Which I am currently not even remotely qualified for. I’m hoping to have this done by July 1. That should give me enough time to get the paperwork through the state board by the time school starts, even if I don’t pass on the first try. However in order to do that, I have to:
  • Study math for an hour a day, preferably in the mornings, after my coffee. I’m allowing myself some lounge time after getting out of the shower. Go sit in my chair in the library or on the back porch, drink a cup of coffee, idly fuck around on the web or read a book. But I want to spend an hour stuffing math into my brain each day. Right now the tentative plan is to take a practice test on the Monday after break to see just how far I have to go and see if an hour is realistic or I need more than that. That’s 20 hours of study during June for three years of high school math. One course a week plus some flex time. Sure, I can do that, right? I taught myself enough German to pass an exam in three days. I just need — heh– to be disciplined and to remember how to study.
  • Actual Arabic study, using some of the print resources I’ve purchased and haven’t paid much attention to. The apps have their place– which reminds me that I haven’t talked about an excellent vocabulary app I found– but I need some sustained grammar work and the apps genuinely don’t care about that.
  • Find some projects around the house. Stand by; we’ll see. There are tons of things I could be doing.
  • Maybe a part-time WFH job if I can find one. I don’t need more money, but if I could make enough to get this new computer completely paid for by the end of the summer that would make a lot of things easier. I need to remember that the overage pay goes away in a couple of paychecks. That’s not a problem– I was doing fine before I had it and I’ll be fine after it– but I’ll need to get a little more disciplined financially again. Luckily, summer is cheaper than the rest of the year most of the time.
  • Get the boy off the fucking couch. He will transform into a greasy lump if I let him– greasier than ever before, in fact, since he’s going to be a teenager in a few months and his Greasy Years are coming– and I should probably treat him like I’m his dad and not, like, a creepily older roommate who lives in the back office studying esoteric mathematics and languages he will never speak to anyone. He will literally spend the whole summer playing video games and watching YouTube if I let him; I should probably find a way to encourage other activities, even if that’s just making sure he has friends over every so often so that he interacts directly with people.

And, because not everything has to be serious:

  • I have video games to beat. I spend significantly less time on the PS5 since I turned off the YouTube channel, but I’ve developed this vexing habit where I play 90% of a game and then abandon it for something else, which means that I’ve got this vile backlog of games that I want to get off my plate and haven’t yet. Some of them are never going to happen– I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate III— but several of them are games I enjoyed and just got distracted by the next shiny. Literally all I have to do in the new Prince of Persia is beat the final boss! That’s, like, an hour or two! I can do this!
  • Reeeeeeeeead. Still making progress but God damn it I want the unread shelf cleared by the end of June. I can do this. I will do this. This is actually the thing on this list most likely to actually happen.

What about you? Any big summer plans?

Soon, but not yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

I am exhausted, crabby, and almost fucking done.

Oh god I’m a nerd

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.

In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.

I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.

Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.

This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.

And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.

Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:

Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.

I want a fucking raise.

The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.

If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.

This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.

God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.