Tag: oops

I’ll stop talking about school soon, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I was rudely tricked into doing classroom coverage today, when I made the mistake of walking past a classroom that did not have a teacher because she had gone home with a sudden illness. Apparently the office had not sent anyone to the room yet. I guess I’m not the type to just walk off when a kid comes out into the hallway and tells me there’s no adult in the room.

I’m sure it would have been fine.

At any rate, tomorrow will somehow be the first day of the school year with a completely normal schedule, and my lesson plans currently include a quiz about me and then a bunch of attempting to learn names. My retention rates run from 90-100% in the mornings to less than 50% with my sixth hour, so apparently I need to do some work on that. I tell the kids that I get the first two weeks of the school year for free and after that they get a piece of candy every time I can’t remember their names. I usually learn the girls’ names faster but the girls are also more likely to be the two kids in every class where it’s May and I’m still calling two of them by the same name. I think I’m also going to put my seating charts together tomorrow; that’ll help.

Also, for the first time this year I’ve decided to keep a running count on the board of 1) what day in the school year it is, 2) how much of the school year is gone, and 3) how much of the school year is left. Only I’m doing it using fractions, and I feel like if I make a biggish deal at the beginning of each class period I might do some good in teaching them how to reduce fractions, especially since there are exactly 180 days in the school year and 180 has a lot of factors. So, just as an example, since this is day 3 (and I’ve decided, arbitrarily, to consider the current day “done” for the purposes of the fractions):

3rd Day of the school year
1/60 of the year completed
59/60 of the year remaining

And tomorrow will be:

4th Day of the school year
1/45 of the year completed
44/45 of the year remaining

… and so on. I dunno, it’ll entertain me, and fully 2/3 of what I do every day is done with the explicit goal of entertaining myself.

I’d give y’all the quiz just for the hell of it, but there’s too many pictures of people I don’t have permission to post pictures of online, so it’s not going to work. It ought to be a fun day, though, which I will make up for by throwing a diagnostic test at them on Wednesday that’s going to be … discouraging. For all of us.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I damn near forgot to post today, what with doing all sorts of accident-related adulting early in the day, my son having a friend over for the whole afternoon, and then a Trunk & Treat at Hogwarts filling up my evening. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, my Arabic, and finally putting Black Myth: Wukong to bed, although I think I’m going to play for a bit longer to get the platinum on it. I’ll probably do a full review, but the short version is “It’s pretty fucking awesome and you should play it.” That said, the reports of insane difficulty on the final boss and the final optional boss are a little overstated. Erlang took maybe half an hour and The Great Sage’s Broken Shell maybe an hour, neither of which qualifies as enormous difficulty in my book, especially since the strategies needed became clear pretty quickly and it was just a matter of putting everything together.

Just, y’know, forgot the website until 9:00. Sorry!

In which I am behind

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I was hoping to have another book review ready for you today, but in order to have that written I’d have to have finished the book, and instead I’m maybe 40% of the way through it. Today was an eleven-hour day since I had to stick around to help out with a soccer game, and so I’m certainly not going to be finishing the book before writing a post, which sort of leaves me without a ton of material.

.. and my computer’s just informed me that it’s going to restart in 45 seconds to install system updates, so … see you tomorrow? Sure.

In which I get an award

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I mentioned to my first hour that I had a band and choir concert to go to tonight at my son’s school, and a moment later joked that I kind of had to go because I am still married to the boy’s mother and we still all live in the same house and it would be rather difficult to pretend that I had something else that I needed to be doing other than going to the concert.

This provoked a literal chorus– multiple kids– telling me that their dads were still married to their moms and never showed up for any of their concerts anyway, and why was I such a good dad (calling it “doing the absolute minimum” probably didn’t help) and could I be their dad instead of the actual dads that they have now.

Uh. Oops?

At any rate, middle school band anchor concert, and it’s 9:00, and we just got home, and I’ve been there for (no exaggeration) hours, so I’m gonna cut this short and go to bed now.

Busted!

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A lot of my assignments are done through Google Forms, which has the advantage of a wide variety of ways for me to ask questions and auto-grading. I ask the kids to take a screenshot of their score at the end and upload it to Canvas, and then I use Canvas’ SpeedGrader feature to basically just copy the grades and then it syncs them with the grade book. Last year I had to go through student by student (which was still faster than it sounds) and put the grades directly into the grade book so I looked at each individual score report as I was doing it. This year (or, at least, since I started at my new school midway through November) I haven’t interacted with the actual Form all that often because they’ve uploaded the screenshots and I just work with that.

Until today, when I noted that this student had reported a score of 24/24 even though I had screwed up three of the questions. Two of them did not have right answers posted, which means it was literally impossible for any student to have gotten a grade higher than 22/24 on this assignment before I fixed it– and I just fixed it a few minutes ago. Which means my good friend here most certainly did not have the 24/24 he reports here.

I went and looked at his actual score in the Forms document. 0. He’d just gone through and put random letters in as his answers and then– skillfully, I’ll admit– edited his screenshot to show a perfect score. And I’ve zoomed in on that image and that replacement is clean. Part of me is actually proud of him. I’d have noticed this eventually of course but he’s gotten away with it at least a few times.

Tomorrow I shall flay him, and display his skin outside my classroom as a warning to future miscreants.

But not until he shows me exactly how he’s doing this.

Whoops

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, life1 Comment

The day kind of got away from me– I got home from the comic shop, drank a big glass of eggnog, and took a nap, and I’ve been faffing around on the PS5 all night– so expect two posts tomorrow. I’ll do both of my book posts for the year. In the meantime, I’m still playing through God of War: Ragnarök over on The YouTubes, and you haven’t subscribed yet, so go take care of that.

I swear this story is true

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

Or: how not to speak around middle school students.

I was walking down to the office to drop off some paperwork when I saw one of the new teachers in the building having a conversation with one of her students in the hallway. Because this is relevant to the story, I will reveal that she is a relatively new teacher– second or third-year, I think– and is of an appropriate age for that, so early/mid twenties or so. Seeing her reminded me that I’ve been meaning to email her about a mutual student we have for a couple of days and I keep forgetting to do it, so I thought I’d take a moment and just talk to her in person.

By the time I got to her room, she and the student were back inside, so I just stood in the doorway until she noticed me and asked a question, using these precise words, which would prove to be her undoing: “Could I borrow you for a sec?”

You might possibly already see where this is going. To her credit, she realized mid-sentence that she was in the midst of making a terrible mistake and just … powered through it like a damn champion, not breaking stride or stammering and joining me in the hallway, where we exchanged a glance that said we will never speak of this again, other than when I run to the rest of the math team and tell them, then tell the entire internet tonight, and somehow only a small number of her seventh-grade (thank God she didn’t have any of my 8th graders in the room) class seems to have noticed.

Because the exact words that she inadvertently chose to respond to my question, in perhaps the single most awkward exchange I have ever had with a young woman in my life, were “For you, Mr. Siler, I have all the secs you need.”

Say it out loud, if you need to.

I have a silly job.

In which I snitch

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m in a Meet right now with about ten of my kids, and one of them typed a mildly inappropriate word into the chat. Not a huge deal; I just told him not to put “that word” into chat and he nodded.

And his mother was in the background, off-camera, and she heard me, and she proceeded to come over and look to see what he’d typed, and then chewed him out. I muted them almost immediately and had to decide whether I was going to temporarily boot him from the meeting or not. I ended up not doing it, but it was amazing to see the way every other kid in the Meet just froze, as if it was their moms yelling at them.

So that’s fun.