Tag: schools

Venting; ignore

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

My students have broken me already, and it’s only Tuesday. I try to be Mr. Positivity over on TikTok, and I’m also trying my damnedest to be as realistic as possible about what’s going on in my students’ lives. I put up a video the other day that basically boiled down to some of you are going to have to accept that your students have more important things to worry about in their lives right now than school, and you need to stop taking their grades personally. They’re not failing because they hate you.

And … like, I still think that’s true, or I wouldn’t have said it? But fucking hell, children. I have 143 kids and less than 30 did today’s assignment. About 35 have done yesterday’s. And that includes a handful of kids who faithfully do every single assignment…

… within a minute of me posting it …

… by putting in completely random numbers for every single question. Every day.

Why the fuck are you bothering.

I just posted this to my Google Classroom announcements:

The thing is, while I can not let myself be this way while dealing with specific kids, the simple fact is that a number of my students aren’t struggling with the pandemic, they’re living their ideal fucking lives and playing video games all fucking day. They could do the work, they just don’t want to, and no fucker in their house is about to make them because their parents are lazy dumbshits too. And while I struggle with this part of myself every single day, there is very much a part of me that is absolutely fine with these kids deciding they’ve had enough education halfway through seventh grade (because that’s where they were when we went into quarantine) because, fuck it, life’s gonna catch up with them eventually, and we’ll see what they can do to feed their damn selves when they’re adults who can’t Goddamned read.

I had a kid today who did her assignment and got a 0/10 on it (important: I use Google Forms a lot, so the assignments get graded automatically) and immediately asked me if I could reset it so she could try again. I looked at it and discovered that she had the right basic idea but had forgotten to reduce all of her fractions– so, in other words, she’d put 25/100 but I wanted to see 1/4, for example. So I coached her through how to do that (she, an 8th grader, didn’t remember how) and she redid it. I told her to share her screen with me before submitting it so I could check it over again, and she’d gotten, like, three of them wrong. So I coached her through those, showing her how to do them right–

–and then she hit submit and turned the assignment in without changing any of the wrong answers. And, like, why did I just waste that time, then, if you weren’t going to bother taking the four seconds you needed to adjust those answers? And she signed out immediately afterwards, so she knew exactly what she was doing and knew I was going to say something about it if she’d stayed in the Meet.

Multiply that interaction by fifty or so and you have my last couple of days. I am right fucking there. I am in front of a computer fucking up my eyes and my back eight fucking hours a day so that I can answer questions and help kids and I will have kids who were present for instruction put in randomly chosen numbers and turn in their assignments. Yesterday we were doing something that I knew was tricky and so I actually did the first two questions on the assignment– an assignment that only had five questions to begin with. I pointed that out. I said “I am doing the first two for you, so you should get these right,” and then recorded myself saying that to them, along with the right answers. And I had kids who were in that Meet while I was doing that get the first two questions wrong.

I just …

…

Fuck.

In which developments fascinate

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Everybody seemed to be in a good mood today; none of the usual Monday-morning crabbiness. I wonder why?

In other news, my partner teacher has Covid. They emailed me last night to let me know, and I got an official notification from the principal today that a staff member had tested positive but that I was not considered a “close contact” of the person and therefore had no need to quarantine. Which, duh, this is exactly why I’m working from home, a decision that is now 100% vindicated. As of right now, I’m not clear on how many people in the building are currently quarantining, but I pay attention to the emails we get, and several staff members don’t appear to have been in the building for a while. My partner said that they had contracted the disease at school in the email, but wasn’t specific as to where that certainty came from.

No word also on how many students are expected to quarantine. I would think a good portion of our mutual students would count as close contacts, and I’d have to hear about it from them, as the office isn’t especially likely to tell me what students they’ve sent home. That said, the guidance the district is using is bullshit, so it’s entirely possible they’ve determined that none of the students are close contacts. I’m sure we will know quickly if that was the right decision to make.

Meanwhile, this is what the county looks like:

And this is what the state looks like:

School started just after that huge spike in the county data, which was Notre Dame sorting through the mess of their first few weeks. They came back just before we did.

I’m sure everything will be fine.

On educational equity and classroom decoration

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I encountered an argument today that I thought was interesting and also kind of caught me by surprise, and I wanted to talk about it here both as a means of wrapping my head around it a little bit and to see if anyone else has any thoughts on it.

Every year I spend, conservatively, several hundred dollars on my classroom– either for basic supplies like pencils and paper, wall decorations that will probably last through the year, and on occasion more long-term, expensive items like my laser printer. Some years are more expensive than others, of course– any year where I change classrooms or subjects is gonna be bad– and even this year, when I’m not actually in the building yet, I still shelled out a chunk of change for items to improve the lighting in my office, a new mic stand, and a few similar things.

(I have a classroom wish list, which I’m pretty sure does not expose my real name; I link to it not because I want you to buy me things right now but so you can get an idea of what sorts of things I’m talking about.)

This teacher’s argument was that we should not be spending our own money on items for our classrooms. That, in and of itself, I’ve heard before and thought before, plenty of times, and the basic reasons for it are obvious. No other job, or at least none that I’m aware of, expects employees to pay for the basic services and tools necessary to do that job. My job is supposed to make me money, not cost me money, and blah blah whining about teacher pay.

No, her argument was different: that we should not be spending money on our own classrooms, because it creates an equity issue among the staff and among the students. So if Teacher A can afford whatever they want to put in their classroom and creates a magical learning wonderland by spending a bunch of money, and Teacher B is a new teacher who is struggling with student loans and isn’t getting paid jack, Teacher B’s students are going to get a lesser learning experience through no fault of Teacher B’s, when the fact is the state should be funding the rooms properly in the first place and making every classroom a magical learning wonderland. This is particularly an issue at the primary level, where there might be three fourth grade classrooms and the kids are with the same teacher all day.

And I’ll admit, part of me wants to dismiss this idea immediately and part of me thinks it has some merit. As a math teacher that every 8th grader in my building is going to see, it’s less of a concern for my situation, because all of them will be in my magical learning wonderland for a class period a day regardless of whether I spend a ton of money or not. But I can see this mattering at the elementary level. Then again, there is already going to be a certain level of educational inequality from classroom to classroom simply because of the composition of the classes and the skill and experience level of the teacher. We’ve all wanted to be (or have our kids) in a certain class with a certain teacher or h ad one who for whatever reason we’d rather avoid, and sometimes that’s the breaks.

This is, I think, less an argument against the actions of any one specific teacher and on stronger footing as an argument against the system itself. We all know the arguments about the ways we fund schools and what, as a society, we prioritize and what we don’t, and the simple fact of the matter is that the wealthy teachers shouldn’t need to use their money to spruce up their classrooms, particularly in a situation like we’re seeing now, where we see that some teachers are literally creating carrel desks out of plexiglass so that their rooms are safer from the plague. So we’ve got teacher income inequality leading to situations where, at least in theory, students are literally physically safer than in others.

That is bullshit, as I think we can all agree, and I’m not going to fall into the usual rant about how little America actually values education beyond paying barely-understood lip service. Throw a rock on this website; you’ll probably find one. But does the argument in general have merit?

Some, I think, but I still need to think about it more. What say you, commenters?

In which no one could have guessed

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I’m mostly just putting this here for the sake of posterity, but Notre Dame today announced, after reporting twice as many Covid-19 cases yesterday as the entire rest of the county, that they were going to lock everyone in their dorms for two weeks (that’ll go well) and that off-campus (this will also go well) students should not come onto campus while they do virtual learning. If, within two weeks, the numbers aren’t better, they’re sending everyone home.

They’ve been back for, like, two weeks, max, and — get this — tested every single student before allowing them back on campus. And this still happened.

Go ahead. Put some money on what happens next. I dare you.

On planning and the lack thereof

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A week ago, my school district was telling all of us that we were back to in-person learning on the day school starts. There have been a couple of School Board meetings since then and hundreds of teachers (myself included) have been burning up the internet sending irate emails, and now the plan appears to be that we’re starting with e-learning, but only for two weeks, and then phasing everyone back into the building in early September, except that at least three Board members appear to believe that we need to lose the entire first nine weeks, the plan hasn’t been voted on, and they do not have remotely enough time to hire the people that they are going to need to make any existing plan beyond “keep everyone home” work.

I made this specific point at one of the board meetings, actually; every plan that does not involve keeping us all home requires hiring more people, or if it doesn’t require that immediately, it will start requiring that the very second people start getting sick. We are not at full staffing as a district right now and in the last twelve years we never have been. There is a board vote scheduled on August 3rd, but remember, school supposedly starts on August 12. There is not enough time in nine days to do anything.

The superintendent has sent out three or four separate surveys trying to figure out who both wants to and/or has a medical need to be home beyond “I don’t want to die.” Each time they’ve had to pull the survey because of health privacy violations. They’ve made no decisions about who might be home to teach the kids whose parents don’t want them to enter the buildings and as of right now they don’t have time to, because every teacher that gets pulled out of a classroom means they need to put another body in that room.

(I was very pleased to discover that both obesity and high blood pressure put me in high-risk status for Covid, and no, that’s not a typo; I was pleased. I do not want to return to classroom teaching right now, and it’s nice that for once being a giant fat man is working for me and not against me.)

In addition, the county health department … person— I don’t know if he’s a chairman or what the hell his title is, but one way or another he was at one of the board meetings too. He stated in front of Jesus and everybody that he thinks the county needs to be at or below fifteen new infections a day before he’s comfortable reopening schools. We are currently at about three times that many, and I don’t see that number falling into safe range anytime in August at all, much less September.

A number of things have been clear to me for a while, and at this point I’m basically just waiting for everyone else to face up to reality and make the necessary intelligent decisions: we are not going back to school for at least nine weeks and I suspect we are probably done for 2020. Sports– professional, high school, college, whatever– are not coming back this year. They may have started some practices, but the seasons are going to get cut very, very short if they even get started at all. This has only gotten worse since March, and it’s not getting better until the current US government is mostly replaced, so we’re looking at probably February before we can see any any chance of actual useful positive movement, and if the Republicans aren’t voted out of office in every imaginable capacity in November and then probably forced out of certain government buildings in Washington at gunpoint on January 20 we are dead. I’m not ready to say we’re going to lose the entire school year yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it happened. Not one tiny bit.

None of this had to be this way, but … y’know. Emails.

In which I make this simple

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I wrote this Tweet last night:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1283186601112338432

I had a hard time getting to sleep last night– those damn eye shields really are a pain in the ass– but beyond that I was busy writing this post in my head, starting with the kids waiting outdoors for the bus and going through to the end of the day. And, yeah, it was going to be long as hell. Like, Star Wars movie review levels of long.

And then I thought about it this morning, and it occurred to me that this doesn’t really need to be complicated.

We cannot reopen schools yet.

We cannot reopen schools because there is no way to make 34 people crowded into the same room safe, masks or otherwise. It is not possible given perfect compliance from everyone involved, and we will not get anything even vaguely close perfect compliance from everyone involved. And that, really, is the end of it. I can talk all I want about hand sanitizer and bathrooms and hallways and passing periods and discipline and lunch and breakfast and, dear God, band and choir,(*) but it all keeps boiling down to the fact that in my classroom I will have 32 kids and another adult beyond myself and that is not safe. Period.

I would be more willing to give this a shot if my district was setting things up in such a way that I saw half of my students each day. But even then, that model only holds up until someone gets sick, which is inevitable. Once we start talking about contact tracing and quarantine all hell breaks loose, and the one place where I am willing to literally point and laugh at my district leaders is when they claim that there will be enough subs to cover sick and/or quarantined adults.

This is an utter fantasy. No, there will not. There aren’t enough pencils and paper, for God’s sake, there will not be enough hand sanitizer and there will not be enough masks and there sure as hell will not be enough subs. There haven’t been enough subs for years. It’s not going to get better when the subs have to shove their faces into a petri dish to go make their little $100 a day, and once a single sub gets sick we have now potentially infected multiple buildings in the course of just a few days.

We can’t do this. We might try and do it anyway, because if you ever thought that maybe Americans weren’t utter idiots the last six months have rather definitively proved you wrong, but we can not do this.

I also keep seeing people throwing up their hands and pretending to panic about What Parents Will Have to Do if their kids remain home. I have said this before, and I will reiterate: first of all, your kids have been home since March, so let’s not pretend that this is a new problem. Your kids are home right now, because it is summertime, and there is no magic switch that flips in August and makes whatever child care scenario you have going right now somehow magically impossible. Keep doing whatever you’re doing right now. It might suck! I agree! I have a kid too, and I’ve been at home with him since March as well!

I agree. I just don’t care. Because your child care problems are not a reason for me to endanger my health and my family’s health. Your child care problems are not a reason to make what is already uncontrolled spread of a highly contagious and incredibly dangerous disease massively worse. Because that’s what will happen.

There are going to be teacher strikes in a few weeks if this isn’t settled better, folks. We aren’t going back. Nobody’s going back. Best get used to it right now.

And yes, this was absolutely the short version.

(*) I have many friends who are band and choir teachers. I am very sorry, but your classes are just going to have to go away this year. Your classes generate so many droplets that band instruments have special valves that are used to drain the spit out of them. It’s just not possible to do this safely right now, even in comparison with other classes. I love y’all, but … no.

Just a stray thought

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I still don’t know what my district’s plan for this fall is. Supposedly there’s going to be some sort of announcement on Wednesday, and as of right now the start of school is still six weeks or so away. This is what Indiana’s current numbers look like:

…so it looks like we might be starting to trend upward again, but we just hit the typical weekend drop, and today will be on the lower side too. We’ll see how this week looks.

At any rate, that stray thought: school discipline is going to have to be a lot stricter in a lot of ways this year than what we are used to. Specifically, in terms of removing kids from the building, assuming we’re physically back at all. Because while I am willing to return to the building (at least in principle; we’ll see how the details go) in order to teach math, I’ll be damned if I’m going to risk my health and my family’s health to babysit some dipshit who is only in my classroom because his momma doesn’t want him around and he wants to clown with his friends.

Anyone who is not there to learn this year needs to get sent the hell home and needs to stay the hell home. Those kids can fail on their couches instead of failing in my classroom. I’m not dealing with anybody this year who is just in my room to act like a disease vector. Forget it.

Like I said, stray thought. More later, possibly.

Some local election musings; also, math

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I did vote by mail– several weeks ago, in fact– but I did not get a sticker. They shoulda included one in the envelope with the ballot, dammit.

Also, the bike has just arrived, so there will probably be another post tonight as I break it trying to put it together. And then I will ride it for the first time– and hell no, that’s not being recorded, I don’t love you enough– fall off, and break a leg, and then we can all agree never to talk about this foolish decision again.

Anyway, Indiana had a primary yesterday. I haven’t talked about it a lot on the blog, because most of my audience isn’t in the Michiana area, much less South Bend specifically, so it wouldn’t be terribly relevant, but there were two local referendum questions on the ballot specifically to raise money for the school district I work for. I have been pretty well convinced for the entirety of this process that we were going to lose; amazingly, it looks like we have won on both counts.

(This is the part where I do math. Skip what’s in between the dividers if you don’t want to see it, but I’d appreciate someone checking my thought process.)

The vote has been stuck at 83% reporting since maybe 9:00 last night; I suspect because absentee ballots account for the remainder of what needs to be counted and that’s going to take a bit longer. However:

So, for question 1, there have been 18,413 ballots cast and Yes currently has a lead of 3,237 votes. I’m going to make the assumption that precincts are roughly the same size, which may not be especially reasonable, which suggests that there are (18413/83 = 221.84, x 100 = 22,184 -18413 = 3,771) 3,371 ballots still left to be counted. I find it highly unlikely that only 134 people who voted absentee voted Yes on question 1, so I think it’s fair to say this passed.

Question 2 is a bit hairier, but using the same process: 18,325 ballots cast, suggesting 22,078 total votes, meaning 3,753 votes are left to be counted against a margin of 2,117. So the vote-by-mail folks would have to break 56-44 against the referendum when all in-person voting was 56-44 for the referendum. That’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely, so I think 2 probably passes as well, but with a lower margin of victory and a higher margin of error.

This is good news! There has not been much of that in 2020 so far. All sorts of fucking awful shit was going to happen in my district without this money. There is still room for plenty more awful shit to happen over the summer, but at least this particular avenue for awfulness looks like it’s probably been closed off.

In other might-be-interesting news: 8% of Republicans voted for Bill Weld, and 76% of Democrats voted for Joe Biden. I was not among them; I sent in my primary ballot before it became sufficiently clear that Tara Reade was not to be trusted, and for that and several other reasons (primary among them being I wanted her to win) I voted for Elizabeth Warren.

For at least the second time in a row, my Congresscritter Jackie Walorski couldn’t break 80% in her primary, even though her opponent’s only qualification for the job was having a penis. I could have sworn I’ve talked about this here in the past but can’t find the post; she’s had basically an invisible primary opponent in the last couple of elections, somebody with no fundraising and no real presence anywhere, and both times that guy has gotten 20%+ of the vote, meaning that Republicans literally shrugged and voted for someone they knew nothing about other than that he had a penis. This guy at least has a website, and the fascinating thing about it is that if you read his Issues page you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s a conservative Democrat. So they not only voted for someone who they knew nothing about, they voted for a fuckin lib‘rul, too.

He literally announces elsewhere on the page that he will accept no donations of any kind for this run, so he’s either richer than any man with that facial hair should ever be or he’s a moron. Not sure which.

Speaking of conservative Democrats: there will no doubt be some links to my posts about the last time Jackie Walorski ran for office, where the Democrats managed to run someone who had no interest in actually being a Democrat for the job. By the time the actual election rolled around I hated Mel Hall with a fairly passionate intensity, and I ended up writing in the name of my primary choice, Pat Hackett. I am very pleased to announce that Pat has won her primary and we will have an actual fucking Democrat running for office in IN-02 this year. Redistricting has made this district an uphill climb regardless, but I still think she has a chance of snatching up the seat. We’ll see. At any rate, I’ll be upping the donations I’ve been making to her campaign.

Wait, shit, is that two pieces of good news? Wow.

More later, as I unbox and then destroy the bike.

12:31 PM, Wednesday, June 3: 1,835,681 confirmed cases and 106,312 Americans dead.