A game I enjoy playing every year: on one of the three days before longer breaks (Spring, Thanksgiving, Winter) I hand the kids a word search called Famous Mathematicians. It’s their names. I usually do a few of them and split the classes up or sort of randomly spread them around, and this year I decided to pack everyone’s names into one 35×35 grid. There are 119 student names on that grid, and yes, some of them are backwards.
Ordinarily I don’t use anyone’s real names on the blog, but I don’t intend to provide you with a key, which means some of these names are absolutely not going to be uncovered, and I figure finding out that out of my 119 8th graders, one of them is William and another is Sarah is probably not actually any real breach of confidentiality, especially when they’re all embedded in an image and not actually in searchable text. (The “Sara” in the bottom row is an accident! I do not have a Sara.)
At any rate, I can’t come up with any way this could bite me in the ass, so if you’re really bored over the long weekend I hope you have coming, feel free to print this out and see if you can find 119 human-sounding names in there. If I come up with a way this could cause me trouble, I’ll throw the post behind a password, but I don’t think it’s too likely.
(My bank password’s in there too, just for the hell of it.)
I got a new student today, or rather I got her yesterday but I met her today, since I managed to drag my ass back to work this morning. Her name was unique but not in a way that seemed hard to pronounce; demographic data said she was white, but “white” can still cover a whole hell of a lot of ethnicities, right? I was prepared for her to be Eastern European or any of a variety of different things, but I still felt like I wasn’t going to immediately pronounce her name wrong unless there was something genuinely weird about it.
You may or may not be aware that “Micheal” is starting to be a way that people who are dumb and bad have chosen to spell their sons’ names. If you’ve been teaching in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably encountered at least one Micheal in there somewhere, and if you’re like me, you’ve immediately resolved to never contact those parents, ever, under any circumstances.
Gentle reader, the actual pronunciation of this child’s name is so, so much worse than simply reversing the admittedly-not-entirely-intuitive vowel placement in “Michael.” It’s worse than the forty thousand different spellings of “Jasmine” I’ve encountered over the years. Now, I really can’t tell you her actual name, because it’s unique enough that if she ever Googles herself she’ll find this post. But imagine a child being named, oh, I dunno, “Sahar,” and you think oh, that’s a neat name, I’ve never met a Sahar before, and you figure it’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “Sahara,” right? Might be wrong, but surely it’s not that far off. Like maybe you think it’s Suh-harrrr and it’s Sa-hair. Wrong, but not offensively so.
And then she tells you her name is pronounced “Sarah,” and you have to immediately freeze your face and not let the words No, it fucking isn’t, you poor thing out of your mouth.
Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.
I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.
Y’all.
At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.
Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.
There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.
LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.
The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.
Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.
On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.
It wasn’t a bad day, really, but everyone was Super Extra today, and I resolved out loud more than once that going back to furniture sales (or, at one point, used cars) couldn’t be that bad. My first hour couldn’t stop giggling and making dumb noises, and they’re usually my super chill and/or sleepy group. I knew right then and there it was going to be a long day. And I couldn’t get my head on straight all day, not in an angry or emotional sense but in that I felt half a step behind where I was supposed to be all day long and had way more trouble remembering things than I usually do. You’ve got to be able to keep ninety things straight at the same time to be able to do my job correctly, and at my best today I was handling fifteen.
Tomorrow we have a billion teachers out. I’m covering three classes during the day. It’s gonna be super fun. I’m gonna decompress and kill some ronin now.
Raise your hand if any of your students got expelled yesterday for trying to sell a gun to another one of your students and his brother, who also got expelled.
No? Just me? Just checking.
Ooh, I’ve got another one! Raise your hand if, while discussing the gun seller, you discovered that part of the reason he’s the way he is that his dad shot his mom in the head and then killed himself right in front of him when he was six years old.
We took a field trip today, to a manufacturing plant, and got a tour and little presentations by a dozen or so different people over the course of the trip, and … man. Maybe talking to kids is a lot harder than I think it is? Not teaching, mind you, just talking to kids. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these folks, and there’s something to be said for trying, and everyone was really nice, but it was really, really clear that these folks have been embedded in manufacturing-speak and boat-speak for forever and that they had no idea how much of the vocabulary they were using would be completely opaque to adults outside the field, much less actual children. Like, maybe when you’re talking to a bunch of kids, don’t use a lot of acronyms? I’m a grown-ass man with two Master’s degrees and I don’t know what the hell a BMA could possibly be, and the context isn’t helping me at all because I don’t know shit about manufacturing or boats. I could follow along with the IT guy’s spiel, on account of being a big nerd, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the room, and he’d probably have gotten a lot more engagement out of the kids if he’d talked about the giant gutted server blade that was sitting on the desk in front of him. Instead, he just kept talking about blades, and my kids were looking around for swords.
Here’s everything I know about boats, in fact:
Sigh.
I mean, whatever; the trip ended with my group getting to climb all over a couple of very expensive looking boats, and they enjoyed that, and at least we didn’t go to the box factory? One group got two hours about boxes. Boats are better than boxes.
In other news, and I don’t think this is me being mean or inappropriate but if you disagree let me know and maybe I’ll delete it, but I encountered this man on my way home yesterday and he is the angriest … banjo? Ukulele? Mandolin? Let’s go with mandolin, it looks like it’s got eight strings– player I’ve ever seen. Like, prior to observing him for a minute or two at a red light, I would not have believed that you could play a mandolin at someone, much less at passing cars, but holy hell. I don’t know what he was upset about, but every ounce of it was getting poured into that instrument. I kinda wish I could have heard him.
I dunno, maybe they just need a better teacher, but holy shit have my students been shitting the bed on tests lately. The first ILEARN checkpoint was last week, and that was a nightmare— the 8th grade pass rate is about a third of the rest of the building– and all of my classes took tests today, and … God, I wanna throw up.
I think I’m going to actually put the answers to the test in the notes for the next test. I’ve put them on the board and still had about 30% of them fail; let’s see how they do when they literally have the answers on their desks.
It wasn’t necessarily a bad week, mind you; it just feels like it was a thousand years long. There are somehow only two weeks left in the first quarter, which means that in the main this school year is blazing by, but … man. We got a surprise two-hour delay today when dense fog briefly rendered most of northern Indiana impossible to travel in, which was nice; the combination of the delay, Friday, payday, and doughnuts in the staff lounge this morning had most of us speculating that it might somehow be all of our birthdays.
And then I have spent the vast majority of the three and a half hours since getting home with a cat asleep on my lap (awesome) and alternately browsing TikTok (less awesome) or struggling to stay awake. Dinner was a bunch of grapes. It is 8:14 as I’m typing this (on my phone, with a cat in my lap) and being entirely asleep by 9:00 is not at all an unwelcome thought.
