Like most teachers, I absolutely fucking hate the question “When am I gonna use this?” The answer is never. Never. You, personally, as someone whose sole concern is defending your ability to remain as ignorant as much of the world as possible, are never going to use what we’re doing, because you’re never going to use anything. You live in a country that hates education and educated people, and you’re going to be forty and still using apostrophes like they’re an early defense system for the letter S, mixing up basic homonyms you should have been getting right in second grade, and telling people that you did terribly in school but it doesn’t matter because “you did all right” while hoping your shitty car gets you home to your trailer park and wondering where you’re gonna score your next dime bag from since your weed guy got arrested last week. You barely use the alphabet. You’re not gonna use algebra.

*Ahem.*

I may be a little unreasonable in my hatred of that question, actually.

I have to start teaching transformations this week, and I fucking hate teaching transformations. I have come to terms with teaching equations of lines and slope despite the disinclination of 8th graders to learn them because they genuinely are fundamental to a lot of more advanced stuff, and the correct response to an 8th grader who says they don’t wanna learn that stuff is that you don’t give a shit and you’re not about to let their futures be determined by what they wanted to do when they were thirteen and idiots. Siddown, shuddup and pay attention, you whiny little fucker.

They’re never gonna use transformations. They’re just not. I can’t even figure out what this shit leads toward in an abstract sort of way, and it depends on spatial reasoning to really be able to figure it out, and I don’t know how to teach that, and I have never once in years of teaching math been able to explain satisfactorily how to write a rule for a dilation or a reflection or especially, Jesus, fuck these things rotations, and my kids stare at me with flummoxed and slightly betrayed looks on their faces because they’re used to me making sense at least in theory and Christ do I hate this unit more than anything else in the curriculum. Ever.

I may just make a deal with my kids that I’m not gonna teach this, and they’re just gonna miss the one question that is guaranteed to involve transformations on the ILearn, and everything will be fine anyway, and the trick is don’t tell anybody that we’re watching movies and practicing fucking addition and subtraction and fractions for the next few weeks because God fuck me dead if any of these kids can add -17 and 23 without a calculator and they don’t even know how to put 1/2 + 2/9 into a calculator, much less what it means or how to figure it out. Can we just do that instead and skip this entire fucking unit? Because it really and truly and genuinely does not matter if they don’t learn this in eighth grade.