I’m caught up with my grading for the week; everything that has been completed and turned in is entered. And, as I suspected, grades are substantially improved– the fraction is kids still failing and the number afterward is the number with literal grades of zero, and (while the 11/27 and 13/28 are still a big problem) I no longer have any classes with half or more of the students failing, and all the classes together have fewer students with zeroes than sixth hour by itself before I brought my inner bastard out. This is not good enough yet, but it’s Progress. I’ll take it.
You tell me: anyone want to read a barn-burner of a shitty review of a game that came out in 2018? I’m tempted to not bother but sometimes rage-reviews can be fun.
This looks terrible, I know, but the genuine truth is that it happens at the beginning of nearly every quarter, nearly every year. We are about to start the third week of the third quarter. At the end of a quarter kids get used to the idea that no one assignment is going to have a huge impact on their grades. Then they forget how averages work and suddenly they’ve missed one assignment and bam all by itself they’re down to a D or an F, because there have only been two or three assignments that went into the grade book in week two of the quarter.
And one of the things people don’t realize about teaching is just how much acting is involved. Because I know exactly what’s going on here, and I know it’s going to get fixed, but did I begin every single non-Algebra class with a five-minute “Fix this or I will end you” lecture? One where I demonstrated that if I want to terrify my students my most effective tool is not to yell at them but, rather, to lower my voice? Did I use the word “pathetic” a whole lot more often on Friday than I usually do in a typical day, much less a typical week?(*) Yep. Sure did, to all those things, and not a single peep was uttered by 96% of my students (actually, let’s do the math, since I bounced three kids to the office during the lectures … ninety-eight percent) during any of it, because in stark contrast to most of my previous schools, very few of these kids have ever seen me genuinely pissed.
Which, uh, I wasn’t.
But I’m good at this, so believe me, they didn’t know.
I’d say a third of those kids got their grades up to passing during their math classes on Friday, and another third will be up to snuff by the end of the weekend. The rest will require some more individual work. But most of my classes this year haven’t had more than one or two kids failing, and I’ve seen more than one, miraculously, where at the end of the quarter every single student was passing. So they’ll fix it. And then fourth quarter I’ll have to scare the shit out of them all over again.
(*) I have never described an individual student as “pathetic,” just for the record. I have used that word to describe specific work outputs, however, and I’m entirely comfortable with using it to describe the current grades of an entire class.
I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.
But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated.
You would be wrong.
I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.
I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.
And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.
Just had a student from last year text me asking if I could help him with trigonometry, which doesn’t make any Goddamn sense to me because freshmen who just took Algebra 1 shouldn’t be looking at trig yet, and also because holy shit have I forgotten everything I ever knew about trigonometry. I have a hazy memory of the sohcahtoa mnemonic but only the vaguest idea of what it actually means, and I absolutely cannot give you even the sloppiest description of what is going on in that graph above.
The interesting thing about me ending up as a math teacher is that I took literally no math at all in college– my SAT scores exempted me from the classes everyone had to take and then none of my majors required any additional math– and I was not, despite those test scores, especially good at math in high school either. I tell my Algebra kids every year that when I was in high school I got a D in the class that I’m teaching them now. I could probably muddle my way through teaching Geometry or (maybe) Algebra II by staying a couple of weeks ahead of the kids; I enjoyed Geometry in high school quite a lot and I figure if I can handle teaching Algebra I, I can handle teaching Algebra II. But trig is gone, and calculus was never there to begin with; the second I had a college acceptance letter in my hand I dropped the class and never looked back.
Or, at least, didn’t look back for years. I am currently sorta looking back, and have actually spent some time over the last few days musing over the idea of taking a couple of college math classes to try and regain trig and calculus so that I can get licensure to teach high school. I don’t really know if I actually want high school licensure after 20 years of teaching middle school, but I’ve been thinking about it. One thing for sure, though; I sure as hell can’t do it now.
Well, mostly. My Algebra kids had their final today and today was the last day for 8th grade Math kids to turn in late work and expect me to grade it. Tomorrow is the last day for the Algebra kids to turn in late work, so I’ll have to grade whatever that is, but that will get done during the day and not at home at my desk. So I’m done, but I’m not done-done, so to speak, but I will be by this time tomorrow.
The final went pretty well, all told. They didn’t all pass, although the large majority of them did and the kids who bombed it weren’t huge surprises. I’ll take it, especially after their performance on NWEA.
I got my evaluation back from my assistant principal today. We don’t really need to go into the details of how our evaluation system works; suffice it to say that my final score was 3.88/4, which is the highest final score I’ve ever received, and my third or fourth year in a row at Highly Effective. I will probably never manage a perfect score for various reasons so only losing twelve hundredths of a point over the course of the four classroom observations and two official goals is pretty damn good.
I also spent parts of sixth and seventh hour crunching NWEA data. I’ve talked about the NWEA before; it’s one of the standardized tests I at least kinda like– it’s over fast, it’s given multiple times a year (but still eats a lot less time than the single administration of the ILEARN does) and it focuses on measuring individual student growth and doesn’t bother with a pass/fail cutscore. It also does this thing where everybody is measured on the same scale– it goes up to like 350 or something like that but a 230 or so is about what an 8th grader is expected to get on the Math test at the beginning of the year, where a first grader might be shooting for a 180 and a high school senior a 270. Two of those numbers are made up but you get the basic idea.
Long story short, my numbers were phenomenal. I got an average of a year’s growth out of these kids between the test that was administered the week before I got there and the one I gave them a couple of weeks ago– a year’s worth of growth in basically one semester. My two Honors classes in particular posted huge gains. This is probably getting too far into the weeds, but check this out:
This is my first hour class. The plus signs are Math and the squares are LA. Now, you’d expect everybody to be to the right on the “achievement” part of the graph, since they’re honors kids, but there’s nothing about honors classes that guarantees high growth, and compare how high the pluses are to how high the squares are. It’s even more stark in sixth hour:
Only four kids from that group didn’t manage high growth. That’s outstanding. And by comparing my kids to their ownLA scores I know I’m not running into any statistical bullshittery; they flat-out improved more in Math than they did in LA, and by a pretty good margin once you pull all the numbers together. That’s as clear a teacher effect as I know how to demonstrate.
“But wait, Mr. Siler!” you might point out. “Didn’t your kids have a month with no teacher, and therefore possibly score more poorly on the second administration than they might otherwise, thus leading to high growth as they get back what they lost?”
A reasonable question, and while I’m not going to post the graphs, I also looked at how they did against the first test of the year, when a missing teacher wasn’t a problem, and the gains are still as stark. My other classes don’t look quite this good– again, the honors kids really came through for me– but they still look pretty goddamn good.
I may just have my mojo back, y’all.
Remind me of this post in three days, when I’m drained by the last week and never want to teach again. 🙂
My Algebra kids are having a test tomorrow over factoring. I gave them a study guide today which basically was composed of a list of exactly what kinds of questions would be on the test. The very last entry on the list was “I will try to make you cry. (1 point)”
They all assumed that that meant the final question was going to be exceptionally difficult. Ha. I have just written the test:
Obviously there are no wrong answers to this, provided they write anything at all that resembles an equation. But God, am I looking forward to the reactions.
I am putting together a quick and it-should-be easy assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem right now, to make up for an assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem from late last week that did not turn out to be easy. It contains this question:
There is an absolutely 100% certainty that someone will come up to me and say something along the lines of “Why are there four numbers here?” And then I will say “Can you make a triangle with four sides?” And they will say “No.” And then I will say “Well, then, can those sides make a right triangle?” And they will not know the answer, and they will stare at me, with big, cow-like eyes.
