You’ve gotta be kidding me

On March 11, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Starting to think that there might not be school tomorrow. Follow the bouncing ball:

Five to nine inches of snow;
Starting after 2:00 in the morning;
after a period of rain (more ice)
and sleet (more ice)
coupled with 35-mph winds
peaking at two inches of snow an hour at… 6:00 in the morning.

That’s what you call a perfect storm, kids. It’s basically exactly what you need in this part of the world for snow to cancel school, combined with the guarantee that weather like that will keep a lot of kids home even if the schools don’t cancel, because it’ll be vile as hell outside. Yes, it’s ISTEP week. Better or worse: extend testing another day for everyone, or have 15-20% of all the kids in every school need make-up tests?

(For the record: same thing happened three or four years ago. They cancelled.)

In which I ain’t mad

On March 11, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

So, my kids bombed the Applied Skills, and I don’t care. I’m not legally allowed to discuss individual test items, and that’s not an issue that I care to challenge the state on, so I’m not going to. I can say the rest of this, though: I had maybe six or seven kids who didn’t even finish, which for my students is incredibly rare. (By comparison, I had only two kids out of all my current students who didn’t finish it last year, and at least three times that many in one class this year.) Every other seventh-grade teacher who I talked to, in more than one building, reported the same phenomenon: much higher than normal numbers of kids not finishing the test.

This tells me that the state way overshot the difficulty level, and they’ll adjust for that when they score. Plus, as I said a couple of days ago, I have kids who got zero points on the Applied Skills in sixth grade and still passed the test. I learned after my first year teaching sixth grade; this test always looks horrifying and tries to destroy both my own confidence in my ability to do my job and their own confidence in their ability to do their jobs (as a bonus, the hardest question was the first one again this year) and it is manifestly not worth stressing out about. They came in confident, no one gave up, and I felt like they did their best on the LA test that came second today despite getting beaten down by the math test. That’s really all I can ask for. I’m not wasting time worrying about it.

Something I am going to spend my time worrying about: remember Raymond? Unfortunately, his seizure during class a couple of weeks ago was only the first in a series of them. He’s not been in class very much lately as his parents have struggled to find the cause of the problem and adjust medications, but they sent him in today because of ISTEP testing.

He apparently had at least one seizure during the test today. He didn’t test with me because of his disabilities; he gets extra time and he has difficulty with fine motor skills like writing so he’s got a scribe with him for the test. His para told me that there was no point anywhere during the test where Raymond had any idea what the hell was going on around him or what he was supposed to be doing on the test.

I can’t get mad at his parents; they were trying to do what they thought they were supposed to do. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to raise hell to get that test invalidated, and I hope to hell his parents keep him home for the next couple of days. This is true for obvious humanitarian reasons– this test is not important enough for a kid to jeopardize his damn health to take– and slightly-more-selfish reasons, such as the fact that current ed reform theory is that there is nothing more important to student test scores than the skill of the teacher (and I’m certainly the only one who’s going to get blamed) and I suspect that fuckin’ epilepsy might have a bit to do with his scores here. I didn’t find out about all this until late in the day so I didn’t have time to talk to his parents; I’m sure as hell going to be meeting with administration tomorrow to see what we can do about invaliding the test.

I suspect that meeting is going to be fun.

Even more standardized testing nonsense

On March 7, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

…because I can never, ever stop talking about this.

You may recall, if you’ve been reading for a bit, my post where I declared all grades to be arbitrary bullshit. Yes, all grades. Go ahead and click the link for additional explanation, or just click here to get the whole three-part series. What is also arbitrary bullshit, always, is how we determine what is a “pass” and a “fail” on a standardized test.

Lemme back up.

I didn’t do any teaching today. The first round of the ISTEP test is next week. It’s what they call the “Applied Skills” portion of the test, with the multiple choice part coming in either the last week of April or the first week of May; I don’t remember. Basically, the Applied Skills portion of ISTEP is the story problems part. It’s still paper-based and the kids have to write everything out and show all of their work, which is why it’s so much earlier than the rest of the test– because it can’t be graded by a machine.

I spent all day today with The Hunger Games playing on my class DVD player, calling my kids back for what are called test talks— a brief three- or four-minute conference with me where we went over their ISTEP score from last year, their performance on the three Acuity tests over the course of this year, and– and this was a new wrinkle I threw in this year– their performance, specifically, on the Applied Skills portion of last year’s ISTEP.

It will not surprise you, I think, regardless of whether you teach or not, to discover that kids (not just mine) tend to have a harder time with open-ended story problems than they do with (somewhat) more objective multiple-choice problems. For one, you can’t guess your way through an open-ended question, and just multiplying together every number you can find– the go-to “I don’t get this” reaction– is not often the right response. I had many, many conversations today where I praised a kid on their high ISTEP score, then flipped the scoresheet over to the other side and watched their faces fall when I showed them their scores on the objective portion of the test. My reason for doing this? Those are the money points. Nearly all of my kids can substantially improve their ISTEP scores just by being a little bit more conscientious on the applied skills test they take on Tuesday. It’s literally a matter of moving some zeroes to ones. Individual points on this test count more toward their overall score than a single question on a multiple-choice test will, so if they focus on doing their best on Tuesday they’ve got a really good chance of bringing up their overall score.

Back to arbitrary bullshit: I discovered today, and I’d suspected this before but I hadn’t actually seen proof, that it is possible to pass the ISTEP for mathematics in seventh and eighth grade and get no points whatsoever on the entire Applied Skills portion of the test. I have at least two kids who pulled that off– literally zero Applied Skills points, but a pass on the overall test. No points at all for “Figure the area of a rectangle that is four feet by three feet,” but we’ll pass you if you can figure out that C, 12, is the answer if the problem is 4×3.

You tell me how useful a “pass” actually is under those circumstances.

The real reason standardized testing sucks

On March 5, 2014March 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching10 Comments

I walked past the office on the way back to my room from lunch and noticed one of my students and her older brother sitting in there waiting for someone. They’re in different grades, so it seemed unlikely that they were both in trouble, and normally she’s almost annoyingly conscientious about letting me know when she’s not going to be in school, so it wasn’t likely that they were waiting for a parent to come pick them up unless something had gone wrong.

I stuck my head in and asked what was going on. She said she didn’t know. I glanced at the older brother; he shrugged too.

“Will you be back in class?”

Another shrug. At this point I asked one of the office staff, who gave me a don’t ask right now look and said that she’d be back sooner or later. Well, okay; not worrying about it right now.

She came back with about ten minutes left in class. Changed her seat to an isolation desk (I don’t have assigned seats; the kids can move whenever they want so long as they aren’t being disruptive. I’m also free to move them when they are being disruptive) and put her head down. She’d been in a perfectly good mood when I saw her last. I was swamped with kids wanting help with various things, so I left her alone for a couple of minutes, at which point it became clear that she was crying.

I pulled her out into the hall to find out what was going on. The crying quickly turned into sobbing hysteria; the kid was completely unable to even get a word out. It took ten minutes— during which time my classes switched, and I told my eighth graders to find the next section in their textbooks and teach themselves how compound interest worked– before I could even get her coherent enough to talk. What the hell happened down there?

I didn’t get much detail, obviously, but apparently child protective services had met with the two of them for some reason (not that I’d share it if I did, but at this moment I have no idea why) and toward the end of the interview had either asked them if they thought it would be better if they were removed from their home or suggested that it might be better. And she, understandably, freaked the fuck out. And, again, I have no idea why– I’ve never seen any real evidence that this kid comes from a fucked up household, although I’ve also never met or heard from her parents, and she’s a good kid so I’ve not had reason to contact them on my own. I sent her off to the counselor on a pass once I got her calmed down and went on with my day.

This post isn’t about that. This post is about my reaction when this sobbing child who has been in my room for a year and a half, and who I’ve watched blossom from someone who insisted on either a calculator or a math facts sheet when presented with the slightest challenge to someone who is, two or three days out of the week, one of the best math students in her class, told me that the reason she was crying was because someone had threatened to take her away from her parents.

My first thought was How dare those fucking assholes do this to me the week before ISTEP.

Do this. To me. Because clearly if CPS thinks this child has a reason to be removed from her parents, that is something that they are doing to me. Because apparently there is part of my brain that thinks my fucking test scores are more important than this child’s basic health and safety.

Fuck standardized testing. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. And fuck me for a soulless bastard for even allowing that shit into my head even if I have the decency to be ashamed of it afterwards.

In which I am important and necessary

On March 3, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn TelevisionLeave a comment

Friday afternoon I got a series of emails from my principal indicating that today was going to be a little bit more obnoxious than I’d initially planned. Apparently he’d gotten an email from the Lord High Muckety-Mucks downtown (and I mean that affectionately, of course) that he and four hand-picked staff members of his choosing were to meet with them (yes, plural, all of the Muckety-Mucks, not just a couple) downtown Monday afternoon. They were paying for subs all day, though, not just for the duration of the meeting, and we were to meet in our buildings and discuss whatever seemed like it needed discussionation during the morning in preparation for our meeting in the afternoon.

No real indication of what the meeting was about, or much of anything about what we were to bring with us, other than some vague references to some information that downtown already had. This is, by the way, the week before ISTEP. I’ve already rescheduled or vocally complained about any number of things that were supposed to happen this week.

I *still* haven’t spent five work days in a row in my classroom in 2014, by the way. I should finally manage that feat next week, since nobody’s moving me anywhere during the week of the test. But yeah, I was out all day today, in meetings in the morning in the building (where we got a bit of useful stuff done and then sat around staring at each other and speculating about what the hell the meeting downtown was going to be about) and then at the actual meeting in the afternoon with the LHMMs.

There is no story about the meeting itself; as we left it we all mostly figured that downtown just wanted an idea of how good a staff our building had and wanted to see how our lead teachers reacted to being brought downtown on short notice and interrogated about our building plans. And, honestly, “interrogated” is vastly overstating the case; I’ve been in much more adversarial meetings than that one. I am not convinced that it was a good use of our time, especially the week before ISTEP, but I think we made ourselves look good and hell if I can think of another way they’re all going to meet the leadership team at once without dragging us out of the building.

Then I got back to the building and taught at Boot Camp until 5:30; we do a few days of intense after-school test prep during the week before ISTEP every year, featuring half an hour of calisthenics led by actual drill sergeants before the kids are sent back to the classrooms. It’s actually pretty fun, but that meant that today went from 7 to 5:30 and I didn’t get a prep period. So I’m tired as hell right now.

I have Walking Dead and True Detective to watch tonight. Too bad I can’t put the boy to bed now.

(I kid. Sorta.)

Here’s why standardized testing doesn’t work

On February 27, 2014February 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching27 Comments

original-1 First things first: I’m pretty convinced there’s not gonna be school tomorrow. Again. The prediction for tomorrow morning between five and seven AM has windchill temperatures in between twenty and twenty-five degrees below zero. It’s supposed to warm up quickly after about nine or ten o’clock, and be almost civilized by the end of the day, but I just don’t see any way that they’re making kids walk to school/wait for buses in that kind of wind chill. Twenty below has been the trigger for the last several school closings and there’s no good reason to assume tomorrow will be any different.

I had tests planned for today for both of my seventh grade groups but the eighth grade test was scheduled for tomorrow. I spent most of my time in the gym before school grabbing my algebra kids and saying things like “Hey, remember how I said there was a test tomorrow? I lied. It’s today.” It is either a sign that my kids really like me or that they just don’t care that much about their grades that none of them bothered to gripe about not having time to study.

My seventh graders, though, knew that there was a test today. We’ve been talking about it for a week and reviewing for a couple of days. And for both of my goddamn groups today they knew what slope was and how it worked during the first class period and then bombed the shit out of what should have been a pretty easy test during the second. And I have no idea why. I bet if I give it to them again tomorrow or Monday they’ll do goddamn fine. But not today, for whatever reason, even though I was getting correct answers to everything I threw at them during the first period of class when we were reviewing.

Lesson is: sometimes kids don’t know shit, even if they knew shit before, and you can’t always predict when those days will happen. My first and second hour kids got the worst results I have ever seen as a math teacher on their window test today. And again: it was not a hard test. That record lasted an hour and forty minutes, until my third and fourth hour kids took the same test and did even worse. If today had been ISTEP day they’d have fired me already. And the next test we take they might get the highest scores in the seventh grade. What happened? Hell if I know. They knew it and then they didn’t. And that’s just the fuck how it works sometimes.

We’ll post-mortem it on Monday, I guess. Er… well, maybe tomorrow. But I kinda doubt it.

Story problem time!

On December 12, 2013December 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Have a math problem:

A boat travels 60 kilometers upstream against the current in 5 hours. The boat travels the same distance downstream in 3 hours. What is the rate of the boat in still water? What is the rate of the current?

If you are a reasonably educated person, you should be able to make headway with this fairly quickly: the boat travels 12 km/h upstream (60/5) and 20 km/h downstream (60/3), which means that the boat’s speed in still water is the average of the upstream/downstream speeds, (20 + 12)/2 km/h, or 16 kilometers per hour, and the current is 4 km/h, which is the difference between either of the measured speeds and the average.

I spent about half an hour last night texting back and forth with a former student trying to work her through this problem and becoming more and more bewildered about what it was she didn’t get about it as the conversation went on. She got the math– the math isn’t really that complicated, right? Just division and an average.

What she didn’t get? Rivers. As it turns out, “downstream” and “upstream” are not terribly salient terms to kids who have lived in cities all their lives– and while, granted, the town I currently live in is actually called South Bend because the river bends south while wending through it, the terms “downstream” and “upstream” hadn’t managed to really ensconce themselves in her vocabulary as of yet.

This young lady is generally one of my brightest kids, mind you. I’m not mocking her at all here, although maybe she deserves it a little bit– but the entire conversation got me thinking about how incredibly easy it is to write standardized test questions that you think are questions about math but turn out to hinge on some other kind of non-mathematical knowledge. She could not wrap her head around the idea that the boat wasn’t going at its full speed “downstream” and that the current wasn’t slowing it down by (20-12) 8 km/h going upstream. Which, of course, was one of the answers, because whenever anyone with half an ounce of sense writes a multiple choice test, one of the horrible tricks you do is thinking “Now, how might the students screw this up?” and then writing answers that match what they might have gotten if they did something predictable wrong.

The math? She’s got it. The geography lesson that the writer of the question no doubt didn’t realize was embedded into being able to get the question right? Not so much.

I’ll talk more about this later; just wanted to get the thought down before it fell out of my head. This is part of the longer series of posts I alluded to the other day before hell fell on my face and knocked me out for a couple of days, I think; I’ll get back to it soon.

In which I slowly go blind

On December 7, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m spending the entire day crunching ISTEP scores and growth numbers and all sorts of other stuff, and alternately cursing myself, the Indiana State Board of Education, my boss, Microsoft Excel, human biology and math itself for the various frauds and iniquities being perpetrated on myself/my school/the state of education in general as I try and track down enough information to make what I’m doing useful to anybody.

I have discovered that the Windows version of Excel does not actually allow you to open two Excel documents in multiple windows. For system software that is actually called Windows this seems like somewhat of a curious oversight. Flipping back and forth is vastly annoying and I don’t like it one bit. I’d prefer to not have to wait until I get home to do this on my Mac– there’s a reason I’m doing it at OtherJob– but it looks as if I might have to, because it’ll take a third of the time if I can just have everything open at once on my wonderful home setup, which features two monitors, one of which is a 27-incher, and not this teensy laptop screen.

Further aggravating me is the fact that the state appears to have made slightly different decisions about who counts and who doesn’t than I did when I put my initial numbers for my own students together back when I actually got the ISTEP data in the first place. The low-growth kid who came in halfway through the year? For some reason, counts. The high-growth kid who I had for all but the first six days of the school year? Didn’t. Which shifts my overall numbers in a way I don’t like.

This don’ make no sense, and I’m wondering how exactly they decided who counts and who doesn’t, because length of enrollment doesn’t seem to be it. Which is a whole ‘nother column I need to worry about if I’m going to keep track of it– and right now I don’t want to.

On the plus side, most of my grading is done. I’m gonna take a break and read for at least an hour or so to let my eyes recover (from backlit tiny type to tiny type on paper, which… well, hopefully that’s a meaningful difference) and then I’ll see what else I can get done today.

What do people who don’t work two jobs on Saturday do on Saturday?