The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
My favorite moment at my kid’s Spring Concert tonight was realizing I recognized a piece of music they were playing, asking my watch to recognize it basically for no reason at all, and being greeted with an error screen I had never seen before– “No Music Detected.”
No Music Detected being tossed at me during a middle school band concert is a little on the nose for a smartwatch music app, don’t you think?
… you have to be kidding, right? This week has to be over. It HAS to be.
In theory, at least, tomorrow should be easy; today’s second round of unit tests went way better than Tuesday’s did, and a lot of the kids are chomping at the bit to retake the tests they did poorly on. A bunch of them won’t be there on account of it’s the last day before Spring Break, and a bunch more won’t be there because there’s a behavior/grades reward party thing for the 3rd quarter for the last couple of hours of the day and they can’t go, so they’re just going to stay home. Classes will be about half an hour long. I can put up with anybody for half an hour.
But holy shit, this week. I may take a brain pill tomorrow morning just to limit my emotional volatility; it seems unlikely that I’m gonna get punched in the fucking face again tomorrow but if it does happen again I can’t promise I won’t seriously injure the kid involved.
One way or another, I’m about nineteen and a half hours away from Spring Break. So long as I don’t die, I should be okay. We’ll see.
You tell me what the worst part of my day was:
Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?
Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?
Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?
Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.
Forced Taught the boy to shave tonight, and his shitty little 12-year-old rat mustache is no more. He is disappointed. I have never identified more closely with my own father, who I recall having precisely the same conversation with me when he forced taught me to shave at about the same age. Also, I’ve reminded myself why I abhor disposable razors, which are even worse for a novice shaver, since he didn’t really know how to hold the razor and thus did less shaving than just shoving shaving cream around on his face.
I did not die yesterday, and in fact the boy’s team did quite well, and he managed a third place (of 23) in one of his events. The team, which is loaded with sixth graders (6-8 are eligible), did not qualify for nationals, but given that 2/3 of them had never competed before (and, oh, also, I don’t want to go to nationals) I’m pretty proud of him. That said, we got up at six and didn’t get home until about 10:30, so it was a long day, and I think all three of us feel somewhat robbed of our weekends.
Therefore: video games, of course.
We do Students of the Month in my building, awarded … well, every month, as you might expect. Each teacher gets to name one every month, and there are no rules for who you choose to nominate, or at least none that have ever been presented to me. The kids get their picture taken for a trophy case in the hallway, a small assortment of goodies, and free admission to any sports or school activities for the following month. We got the email today to fill out our spot in the spreadsheet for March, and … damn, am I having a hard time picking a kid this month.
My usual rules, or at least guidelines:
It’s entertaining to wonder about what might happen– the answer is almost certainly “nothing,” but whatever– if I just nominated the same kid every month; I doubt anyone would say anything, but I like to pick less obvious kids, even if it occasionally leads to kids who are doing great in my room hassling me about how I haven’t chosen them yet. Generally that type of kid is willing to accept “I would, but you’ve already been nominated four times this year,” and if not I can always just tell them I don’t nominate anyone who asks.
But yeah. I don’t have any obvious choices this month, and a couple that might have been good choices earlier in the year have been on my nerves lately, and there’s one kid who I’d like to reward, because he has improved, but he’s still failing all of his classes– he’s just gone from scores in the zeroes and tens to high forties and low fifties, and I’m worried that if I nominate him he’ll immediately get himself suspended.
Which is a thing that happens, more often than is statistically reasonable. Not just with my kids, but with the whole list– I’m pretty sure I could get a decent office pool going each month betting on which two or three kids from the SotM list are going to be suspended within two days of getting the award. Which, by the way, cancels your free tickets, although you get to keep your pencils or whatever and we don’t scratch your face out of the picture.
Hell, that would be kind of hilarious. A big, theatrical X over the face of every kid who got suspended right after being named Student of the Month. Even better if we didn’t explain it, since the trophy case is literally right by the main door to the building. I’d love to see the parent looking at all those pictures and then realizing that 15% or so of them have their faces marked out. Maybe we’ll put a camera in there.
At any rate, I’ve got a tentative choice, and I’ve got until next Friday to decide, but it’s taken a lot of thinking for an honor that is not exactly going to change a kid’s life. Maybe I’ll take a look at the kids who won in August and add them back into the pool. True story: my original August choice got arrested the day before SotMs got announced and I had to switch her out on short notice. This genuinely is a thing, I swear.
I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.
Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.
God. Kids these days.
The assessment I had to give this week over the Pythagorean Theorem was not written by me, nor was it written by anyone in my building, and furthermore it was split into four parts for reasons that make sense in a way but I will not be getting into here. My partner teacher and I looked at the fourth test and decided that it was much too difficult and so we decided not to count it as a test grade, but to give it anyway, since, y’know, the Lord High Muckety-Mucks want us to.
I decided to Do Science. Anyone who spends any time around teachers nowadays is fully aware of the common teacher complaint that we’ve never seen such a level of don’t-give-a-shit from our kids than we are lately, and that further the level of inability to notice things, in general, is a big problem.
You, being an adult, have likely already noticed that I wrote the fucking answers for the second assessment– yes, it was only four questions– on the board.
106 8th graders in my class completed that assignment today. 26.4% of them failed the Problem Solving portion of it, a number so close to 27% that I am considering writing John Rogers and asking him to make an addendum to his Crazification Factor. If I add in the number of students who clearly did not notice that the answers were on the board in plan and large letters– and I promise you that board is not in an obscure location in my classroom– but did not out-and-out fail, it rises to 45.3%, which is completely Goddamned insane.
One of these days, someone will figure out a way to separate kids who don’t understand something from those who simply don’t give a shit, and on that day, American education will change radically. Until then, however, I’m going to keep bitching about the notion that my job performance is evaluated by how other people act.
This week has already featured Blowjob Drama, which is not in my top five favorite kinds of drama, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is one of the very worst days to be a middle school teacher, as roughly half of the ongoing relationships in the building are going to abruptly end tomorrow, and most of them are going to end in desperately stupid ways for desperately stupid reasons. Meanwhile, I still have to teach math. Which they have even less incentive to pay attention to than usual.
Hooray!
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