In which awwwwwwwww

On November 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

So, the cat.

Remember the cat? The same cat whose continued existence and life on Earth I generously agreed to prolong, just last week, by virtue of spending one thousand dollars of American money which I had worked hard to earn? That cat?

Little fucker’s feeling better, because he decided that no one in the house had any fucking reason to want to sleep last night and spent the whole goddamn night yowling. A week ago I literally spent over a week’s salary to keep him alive. Now I’m thinking about feeding him to the dogs.

Let’s tell a nice story for once.

I have this girl in my class; let’s call her Paprika, which is close to her actual name in a fashion that has me cackling just a little bit right now. Paprika was one of my kids last year, too. She’s not special ed, but she’s low– low enough that she probably got tested for special education at some point and just missed the cutoff. I like the kid; she’s a sweetheart, if perhaps a bit too obnoxious at times, but she’s never going to be a Rhodes scholar.

Last year, at the beginning of the year, this kid literally refused to do any math at all without a calculator next to her and a pregenerated math facts list. Flatly refused. She didn’t get it, she didn’t know, she’s never been taught that before, every excuse you can imagine. I worked and worked and worked with her on basic math facts last year to the point where by the end of the year she was occasionally forgetting to ask for her crutches– and I was rewarded with one of the higher ISTEP gains I got out of my kids last year. She still didn’t pass, but she did a lot better.

She broke a couple of fingers this week– I’m not sure how, but her writing hand is wrapped to hell and back and she’s got at least one solid brace in there, but she’s got some pincer mobility with her thumb and index finger– the affected fingers are the middle and ring fingers on her right hand.

We were doing some calculations today and she called me over to ask a question. I answered it for her and then literally instructed her to “check that with your calculator” to make sure it worked as we expected.

She, with a broken hand and a calculator sitting three inches away, pulled out a piece of paper and solved the problem manually.

Every so often– not often enough, unfortunately, but every so often– they make me proud of them.

Arithmetical exegesis

On October 11, 2013October 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

This one’s interesting. Same kid as last time; he’s actually got it together a little bit more at the moment, most likely because I glued myself to his side the second he got to the board and coached him through when he needed it. The problem in question is 8 5/12 + 11 1/4; note a few things:

1) Correctly adds eight and eleven to get nineteen. This represents progress!
2) Recognizes that 1/4 needs to be converted to twelfths in order to add the two fractions, and– amazingly, to my mind– that he needs to multiply the numerator AND denominator by three to achieve this, and then does so correctly;
3) Successfully adds five twelfths and three twelfths to get eight twelfths.
4) Spells “mark” as “mork.” Can’t win ’em all.

Then an interesting thing happened. I asked him if he needed to do anything with 8/12 and after thinking for a second he came up with the word “reduce.” However, despite having just multiplied three and four to get twelve, he absolutely could not figure out that he needed to divide by four, nor could he successfully divide either eight or twelve by four. Note on the far left of the picture, where he’s tried to divide it, figured out that four goes into eight twice, written the eight underneath the other eight without actually putting a “2” at the top of the problem, subtracted eight from eight to get zero– and then informed me that eight divided by four was zero.

(gets interrupted by customers, promptly makes a subtraction mistake while redeeming tickets)

Harder to read is at the bottom of the picture where he tries to divide twelve by four. He first thinks the answer is two (but doesn’t write it up again) then borrows from the ten digit so that he can make the ones digit… twelve, again, which is where I stopped him and pointed out that he’d already gotten that answer by multiplying.

Note also the rogue seven near the last division part. I don’t know why that’s there, but it’s intentional; he said “seven” when he wrote it.

Clearly we need to work on long division a bit. It’ll be interesting to see how many other issues that ends up clearing up.

Second verse, same as the first

On October 10, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

This has been kind of a frustrating week, and I can’t quite put my finger on why– for all I know, it’s the meat shakes again. Or maybe it’s fractions, which are apparently the most difficult mathematics in the history of time and are certainly rapidly becoming the most frustrating to me. I got a heavy dose of “we’ve never seen this shit before” from third and fourth hour today, including one kid who, when adding mixed numbers, had to be harangued for five solid minutes before admitting that he knew what two plus seven was.

This is a seventh grader, and this is emphatically not a fucking joke or hyperbole. Two plus seven. He spent five minutes insisting that he didn’t know and that math was hard and why am I bothering him and god I don’t know and I don’t get it and once I finally got an answer out of him immediately switched to insisting that he’d been telling me the answer was nine for “the whole time” and that I was just hassling him. This kid’s ideal day at school is one where no teacher ever talks to him and he does nothing whatsoever; he will do literally nothing if someone is not hovering over him making absolutely certain that he is doing work for literally every second of his day. It hasn’t sunk in yet that that shit’s not gonna fly in my classroom, and I’m sure as hell not ever going to let someone get away with “I don’t know” when the question is fucking seven plus two.

But if he doesn’t pass ISTEP, it’s my fault, for not bringing enough fucking balloons and firecrackers into class and keeping him entertained.

I let them get into my head too much, I think. I have a kid who is currently signed up for the Washington, D.C. trip later this year who is, while not the worst behaved kid I’ve ever had, easily in the top ten– and that’s in twelve years of teaching, so we’re dealing with a sample size in the low four figures by now. I should have kicked him off the list immediately; there was never any chance that this kid was going to be able to pull his behavior together well enough to convince me to take him eight hundred miles from home for four days. Never. But I didn’t cut him off last year because kicking him off a trip he’ll take as a seventh grader when he was in sixth grade didn’t seem fair. So far this year he literally hasn’t made it through a single week of school without at least a day or two, sometimes more, of either in-school suspension or out of school suspension. This week he was here Monday, absent Tuesday, in class yesterday and today, and then by the end of the day today he’d managed to land in the office three times from three different teachers, including getting called out of my class for something that didn’t have anything to do with me– so that’s four times in the office, actually– and he’s in ISS for the next three days for the cumulative effects of all of that.

If there’s ever been a time to pull the trigger, it’s now; my principal okayed me to kick him off last year. And I still keep not wanting to do it because maybe he’ll get it together. I keep throwing questions at this other kid– in private, mind you; it’s not like I’m calling him out in front of the whole class– hoping that sooner or later the math will click. And it’s not gonna. For either of them. And I keep banging my head against the wall, because banging my head against the wall until the wall breaks down is my goddamn job.

I need a goddamn cheeseburger.

On intimidation

On August 13, 2013September 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

And suddenly, now, with just barely over a week left until school starts, I’m stressed out.

The worst teacher I ever had– by such a margin that the title is not even in question– was my freshman honors Algebra teacher. I got a D in his class during the third quarter; I don’t remember the grades in the other three, because the D was so shocking– it was not only the only D I got in my entire academic career, I’m almost certain that there weren’t even any Cs to keep it company.

After every test, he would change the seats. He’d arrange everyone by grade, with no attention paid to any other aspect of seat arrangement– such as, say, whether you could see the board or not. The lower your grade got, the closer you were to the front of the room. The very worst grade in the class was reserved for the front row, right by his desk.

He let you retake tests for a better grade. The retake test would be from a different textbook, though, and if you were retaking Chapter Four’s test, you’d better hope that Chapter Four from that other textbook covered the same material or something you could handle, because if not, too bad– he averaged the two grades together, meaning it was entirely possible to pull your grade down for the retake. Weirdly, most of the kids in his class hadn’t figured out how he was coming up with these new tests; I think most of them just thought either he was really hard or they were stupid. No, he was stupid. And lazy, and destructive.

One of my finer moments in my freshman year– and, honestly, there weren’t many; most of my freshman year memories are painful in some way or another– was figuring his game out halfway through a test retake that I was utterly bombing and, instead of turning the thing in at the end of the hour he’d given us after school, ripping the thing to shreds and throwing it away instead. Minor rebellions, obviously, but it felt good: I figured out your game, John, and you can go fuck yourself.

I hated that fucker. Now, twenty-two or so years later, I’m teaching his class– my honors 8th graders are taking freshman-level Algebra. I have the textbook right in front of me. Now, mind you, I know this shit. I made it through the year and I have repeatedly demonstrated over the course of the intervening years (if nothing else, by passing the PRAXIS; I was in the ninth decile somewhere) that I can handle this material.

But man, am I suddenly sweating teaching it.

Flipping through the book has been intermittently terrifying in the way that flipping through math textbooks is always terrifying; looking over what I’ll be covering in the first six weeks revealed a couple of vocabulary words that I didn’t immediately remember the definitions of but produced an “Oh, that” type of reaction when I found the definitions. Most of it really isn’t so far from the math I’m teaching. But I don’t want to be adequate about this. I want to already be the best Math teacher these kids have ever had, and by the end of taking their second Math class with me I want to be even better.

Terror! Whee!

One other thing that’s hammering on me, here, is the teacher I had for sophomore year math– Geometry, in other words. At the time, he was the best Math teacher I’d ever had, and one of the best teachers, period. Then I had him again for Calculus senior year. And it wasn’t the same. I don’t know what changed, really; if I just had really bad senioritis and I wasn’t prepared to take his class as seriously as it deserved (I was also taking Physics, which was kicking my ass just as hard as Calculus was, but I was excelling in Physics despite the workload) or if he didn’t feel as confident about the material, or if he was trying to Hold Us to a Higher Standard and it just wasn’t working out, or what. But it wasn’t the same. If I’d only had him for Calculus, I’d have forgotten his name by now, and honestly my goodwill toward his class would have worn out a hell of a lot sooner. I only made it as far as I did because I’d liked him so much sophomore year.

These kids loved me when they had me in sixth grade. (Something like 30 of the 33 kids were in my class that year; this isn’t an exaggeration.) Now they’ve got me two years later, for what should be a much harder class. This isn’t exactly a shaky analogy I’m constructing here.

Not only do I have to do better than one of the worst teachers I ever had, at the material he was supposed to teach me, which is intimidating enough, I have to outdo one of the best teachers I ever had, by being better than he was the second time around.

I ain’t saying I’ve bitten off more than I can chew; I don’t think I have. But damn, does my mouth feel full right now.