Tag: mexico

Just shoot me, ctd.

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I did something today that I’ve never done in twenty years of teaching– I would estimate, without a shred of exaggeration, that 2/3 of the teaching I did during my fourth hour was in Spanish. It was time to sit down with my newcomers and see where they were at, and the only way to do that was to communicate with them in their own language. To wit, I generated this for them:

And then I banished about half of the class from the room, sending them with my co-teacher to her classroom, mostly to cut down on the number of other kids who might want to talk to me and also to prevent a certain student from getting Valentine’s Day-related harassment, and sat down with the kids and went through a bunch of problems with them. I’m hoping that document is translated well from what I typed; based on my meager Spanish it looked okay, and the kids didn’t have questions. The boy read through it, smiled at me, and proceeded to get nearly a perfect score on his assignment with only a small number of questions, all of which, I’m proud to say, I understood; the girls are a little bit behind for 8th grade but not enough that I’m terribly concerned about it. I have English-speaking kids who, based on this one assignment, have bigger problems than they do. One of them does seem to rely kind of heavily on the other, who did most of the talking and also appeared to do the lion’s share of the work, but we’ll see how that shakes out in a couple of weeks.

You may notice, even if you don’t read Spanish, that the actual Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t appear anywhere in that document. That’s entirely intentional; I generally deemphasize the formula itself in favor of the process of figuring out a missing leg or a missing hypotenuse. They know the formula, but I treat this as mostly calculator work, and I drill the phrases “square-square-add-square root” and “square-square-subtract-square root” into their heads until they’re repeating them in their sleep. Since I didn’t have any real idea where these kids might have been in terms of their math skills I decided I’d leave it out entirely for now.

We are taking it easy tomorrow, across the board. I kinda feel like I’ve worked the kids (all of them, not just the new ones) like dogs this week, and between talking a lot more than usual and the added stress of teaching in a foreign language today, I’m ready for a day where I can wave them vaguely in the direction of a Quizizz or something else that has a chance of being fun rather than being at the board or hunched over someone’s shoulders all day. They’re picking this up pretty well so far so I think if I have a calm Thursday before a four-day weekend God will forgive me.

In which my throat is sore and my brain is melted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.

Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.” 

The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations. 

Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.

What was the reason???

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

It’s not just that this smarmy, slimy little weasel is a liar, it’s that he’s so unbelievably bad at it. I liked politicians more when they went to at least a little trouble to make sure their lies were a tiny bit credible, but this motherfucker just says whatever the hell comes to mind, and he lies like a middle schooler whose mother caught him with his pants around his ankles and porn on his monitor. It’s all panic and trying to hide your dick, any shred of reasonable thought out the window, and little man, we’ve seen that before and we’re not any more impressed by it now than we ever were.

In case you haven’t been following the news today (or you’re me, looking at this post in a year,) Texas is currently going through absolute hell. The entire state is covered in snow and in a deep freeze and huge power outages, caused by the state’s inefficient, out-of-date and unregulated power grid, have led to people literally freezing to death in their homes. In, again, Texas.

And this motherfucker didn’t think it would be a problem if he and his family fucked off to Cancun for a week in the middle of all this shit, rather than, I dunno, trying to do something to help. I mean, he’s a Senator, even though no one can figure out why. Senators have some influence in how governments allocate money, I’ve heard. But nah. Off to fucking Cancun, where they sure as fucking hell don’t want Ted Cruz around right now.

Oh, and the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere, either, and he’s already had coronavirus once so you’d think he would know better, but nah.

And do you know what he did when he got caught? He tried to blame the entire thing on his daughters, who are ten and twelve years old, claiming that they’d asked him to take a trip to Mexico and, well, we definitely let sixth-graders decide to make us take international trips in the middle of multiple overlapping enormous crises, right? That’s a thing people do. He also lied about whether his house had power, and the real bullshit here is that I know that he lied but I don’t know what the truth is, because in the last 24 hours he’s both claimed that he had power and that he didn’t.

The real bullshit of all this is nobody would have thought twice had he gotten his family out of town, so long as they stayed in the States. It literally wouldn’t even have registered. But nah; we’ve gotta fuck off to Mexico, and then pretend it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and blame it on our minor children, because that doesn’t make it look like all of your possessions need to be confiscated and redistributed to better people, and then we’ve got to pretend that returning after less than a day was the plan all along, ignoring that people can figure out that you bought a new ticket this morning. It’s all painful, stupid, obvious lying, and lying about something that could have been completely avoidable had they just stayed in America.

He’s gotta go. I don’t care if he gets recalled, or if he resigns, or if someone carefully places him in a glass jar and puts that glass jar on a shelf somewhere for eternity, or if he’s simply allowed to slither back into the ocean from whence he came. But I can’t hear anything else about this spineless little traitor ever again. I’m tired of him and he needs to go the fuck away, so that his family can abandon him and he can die alone in a cheap motel room in a couple of years. Fucking enough.

Review: THE BONE FLOWER THRONE

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews6 Comments

18336300#WeNeedDiverseBooks and a few other related hashtags have been trending on Twitter lately among the circle of people I follow; mostly writers.  The impression that I’ve gotten is that the hashtag is primarily directed at literature for very young readers and pre-readers, but there’s no reason it has to be; all segments of literature benefit from diversity– diversity of authors, diversity of publishers, and diversity of subject material.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you T. L. Morganfield’s The Bone Flower Throne, the only book I have ever read set in tenth-century Mexico.  And not for lack of trying– this book was a blind order based on a Big Idea piece at Scalzi’s blog, so it was ordered based on the setting, the cover, and a maybe 500-word introductory piece by the author.

Check this one out, folks.  The Bone Flower Throne is on my shortlist for best books of the year right now; it’s got it all– compelling characters, a fantastic setting, interesting villains, errythang.  I’m generally not a huge fan of historical fiction but when I like it I tend to like it a lot; Morganfield either did an immense amount of research into Toltec society or did a magnificent job faking it, which for my purposes is functionally the same thing.  There are two more books coming in the series and they’ll be day-one orders when they show up.

My only complaint is not really a complaint, more of a warning: names in this book tend to be… tricky.  To start, most of the characters have two or three of ’em: an Aztec name (such as Quetzalpetlatl or Topiltzin), a translated name (Little Reed or Smoking Mirror) and sometimes they have nicknames or ceremonial names or their names change at pivotal parts in the story.  It means that keeping track of everybody can be more than a little bit challenging at times, especially since the Aztec names are all going to be long and complicated and hard to pronounce for a lot of people.  Also, to keep you from needing Wikipedia: a tlaxcalli is a tortilla.  🙂

Five stars.  Check it out.