Tag: oops

Door number 3

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I had two different possible plans for tonight’s post, and I’m putting both of them away for the time being– one of them because, well, it’s a book review and because of a family event tonight I haven’t finished the book yet (and, to be honest, I may need to ruminate on this one for a minute before writing it anyway) and the second because there is another related family event in a couple of days that might be a more appropriate venue for it.

Unfortunately, that leaves me with “Damn, it was hot today! One more day of school! I’m weirdly anxious about summer school!” and I kinda wrote most of that three times this week. I told the kids I had a game planned for tomorrow, one where I was going to let them throw things at one another, and it didn’t hit me until late in the day that overseeing kids throwing things at one another was going to make getting all of the end-of-the-year shit that I have to do done a bit more complicated. So that will be interesting, and I’m expecting a late night tomorrow night.

I did get confirmation that they are definitely planning on me teaching two grades at once for summer school. So that’ll be interesting.

Anyway, I gotta go find a bunch of activity pages for the sub on Friday before I can sleep. So I’ll catch y’all tomorrow.

Fail!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I had a plan to present you with the third book review of the last three days tonight, but … um … it turns out I haven’t finished the book! I mean, it’s the fourth book in the series, and I liked the first three, and I’ve liked the first 250 of its 340-some-odd pages, so I could probably guess where my opinions are gonna go, but that seems kind of unfair. So I’m gonna go read, and y’all just hang out for a while. If you want, go buy the first three books in the series so that maybe you can be caught up by tomorrow.

I mean, do that anyway. They’re good.

Back later.

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

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.