Tag: students

Who are you and where did you come from

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I’ve said this before– one of the fun things about teaching middle school is the sheer diversity among any community of kids in their early teen years. Two girls can be a month apart in age; one of them is still playing with dolls and wearing a training bra and the other is a makeup whiz who can waltz into any bar in the world without anyone asking any questions until she starts talking. Boy #1 is 6’3″ and 250 pounds with a beard, the kid in the seat behind him, a month older, is 4’8″ and has not a single trace of peach fuzz anywhere on his body.

This is exemplified in my third hour, which contains both my largest and my smallest boys; I’m not exaggerating about either of them. I’m glad that the big kid is a sweetheart because if he ever decides to get into a fight, I’m not breaking it up unless I need to haul someone else off of him.

We’re going to call the little one Morris. This isn’t a clever pun on his actual name or anything; it’s just a name that popped into my head. Morris is … different. He’s never been identified for special education, but … well, to be slightly cruel, he has the look about him, and his tiny height despite legitimately being one of the older kids in my room doesn’t really help.

I have been approached by multiple different teachers about him this year, all of them saying things like “You know Morris can’t add, right?”

Yeah, I’m aware. Morris has fourteen missing assignments already and when he walked into my classroom this morning he had a 20% in my class. He got a zero on his first test. Not because he got all the answers wrong; he turned it in blank. His name wasn’t even on it. I handed it back to him the next day and he gave it back to me at the end of that class still blank. He is one of those deeply frustrating kids who appears to know absolutely nothing at all, but also refuses to try or ever do much of anything, so it’s very difficult to actually give him any help. He won’t ask, and standing over his shoulder and insisting that he do something just results in a thousand-yard stare until you inevitably have to cut bait and help one of the other two dozen kids in the room (including the big guy, who isn’t my smartest kid but works his ass off.)

We had our second test of the year today. My tests are all open-note and this one allowed calculators as well. A few minutes into the test I noticed that Morris was reading a book rather than working on his test. I will note that this was, in some ways, a positive development; I wasn’t completely sure he could read.

“Hey, Morris, we’re taking a test. I need you to put the book away.”

“What test?”

“It’s literally right in front of you. I handed it to you. Your hands are on it right now.”

“Oh.”

A few minutes later, Morris is hanging out of his seat, contorted in such a way that his head is actually directly under the seat, not the desk part. I remind him again that, hey, maybe you might do something. Also, I don’t see your notes or a calculator. Maybe get your notes out and go grab a calculator? And a pencil? I don’t see a pencil either.

I get more stern during the third warning, where I note that he has yet to write his name on the test and still doesn’t have his notes out. He is staring intently at his fingertips and occasionally dropping his pencil on his desk, trying to get it to bounce on the eraser end. The hard-ass act doesn’t work either. Fuck it, I think, resolving that two straight zeroes on tests is enough data to refer this kid for a special ed evaluation. Everyone else is done with their test already but there’s only so long I’m willing to beat my head against a wall.

With eight minutes left in class Morris brings me his test. He has written his name on it! He points at the first question, which is fairly simple:

“I need to point the mouth toward the larger number, right?” He makes an alligator-bite gesture with his thumb and index finger as he’s saying this, a gesture that I’ve made dozens of times when discussing greater than/less then. I tell him yes. He gets the answer right.

Okay, that was 50/50, if we’re being honest.

He looks at the next question, pushes some buttons on his calculator, and … gets that one right, too. He looks at #3 for a second.

“Each of these little marks is a tenth, right? And eight times 3.14 is … 25.12. So that’s like twenty-five dollars and twelve cents, so … A?”

I note that again he’s mimicking my speech patterns. I’ve been encouraging the kids to think of these decimals as money so that they don’t do things like say 25.5 is more than 25.10 because 10 is bigger than 5. But he’s right again.

This little shit ran through the entire test in eight minutes, asking a handful of questions that were entirely of the please validate my belief that this is the right procedure type– no “how do I do this?”, only “I do this this way, right?” And more than once, he phrases things exactly the way I’ve been saying them in class.

And he got every single question right, including a few that most of my students got wrong over the course of the day. The whole-class average on this test (all my 8th grade Math students, in other words) was 71%, which isn’t terrible but is lower than I like it to be. And he got a perfect score, and now I have to completely reevaluate every single Goddamn thing I know about him.

I may still do the referral. There’s something going on here. It’s just more complicated than I thought. And a hell of a lot more interesting.

I ask him, as the bell rings at the end of class, why he spent so much time screwing around and not doing anything, since he obviously knew what to do on this test.

“I was charging up my brain,” he says.

I can only hope a recharge lasts a few months.

The wrong kind of memory lane

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My wife asked me during dinner tonight if the story of two young local women who had gone missing this weekend had crossed my radar; it had not. Apparently they were found in the river today, still in their car. They haven’t been positively identified, but the clothes match and the car is registered to one of the pair.

And … damn. One of them looks very familiar, and both of the names sound familiar, but the ages don’t quite match up with when I was teaching– they would have been in middle school at least partially during my furniture years, I think, but that didn’t stop me from going through my yearbooks. Which neither of them were in. But I don’t have yearbooks from every year I taught, because there weren’t always yearbooks produced, and of course not everyone is there on picture day, and blah blah blah. So I can’t prove that either of them were mine, but any time I know anybody under 30 in this town five will get you twenty that it’s because they’re a former student, and they both ring way too familiar.

So naturally I spent an hour paging through yearbooks going “He’s dead … this one’s in jail … this one’s in jail too … also dead … murder victim … ” and now I’m not in the mood for really anything at all.

Time to admit it

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Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.

I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.

If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.

I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.

This is why I don’t leave the house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I made a quick run after dinner, to the very same grocery store that I got a senior citizen discount at yesterday, because I needed even more shit for school that I should have just bought yesterday. I pulled into a parking spot and put the car in park, and at that precise moment the car next to me and the car facing them on the other side of the aisle both started pulling out of their spots at the same time.

My sense of proprioception went absolutely batshit, and I was completely convinced my car was moving. Have you ever slammed on the brakes on a car while it’s in park? I don’t recommend it, especially if the car already wasn’t moving, because it won’t help. I had a couple of seconds of full-on panic, trying to figure out why my car was moving when I wasn’t moving it, before it clicked what was going on.

I went inside and immediately walked past a former student, who did not acknowledge me– possibly because I had her in class fifteen or sixteen years ago and she didn’t recognize me, which is reasonable. I remember liking the kid well enough, and the last I heard about her she was doing fine, but man did she look like hammered shit today. Like, possibly unhoused and with the flu. Really, really rough.

I collected my various purchases, noting with some irritation that some of them were literally twice the cost that they would have been had I gone to Target, but fuck it, I was already there. I bought everything and went back out to my car, checked my mirrors and my back-up camera and started backing out of my spot, like a normal, responsible driver, and just before I got to the point where I’d take the car out of reverse the car behind me (so on the other side of the lane) starts pulling out of their spot, clearly not looking to see if the way was clear. I slammed on the horn and came within an inch or two of getting hit, but they stopped in time and pulled back into their parking spot so I could leave.

As I was driving away, I saw a large man in a Punisher shirt and bright red shorts standing on the side of the entrance to the parking lot. A moment later I realized that this man, at 6:30 PM on a Thursday night, in broad daylight and in public, was energetically masturbating.

I once watched from my fourth-floor apartment window in Chicago as a woman squatted in the entrance to a business across the street and took a piss on the sidewalk, but I’m almost certain I’ve never seen somebody just randomly jerking off on the side of the road at passing cars before.

On the other hand, hey, it got me a blog post.

Just in case you’re bored

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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.)

(That’s not true.)

(… or is it?)

Down, down, to Goblin town

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There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.

Maybe?

That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?

Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.

That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.

Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.

(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)

(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)

(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)

I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.

Summertime, I guess

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Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

I get emails

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  1. Ain’t nobody asking to go to your room. We all know it.
  2. This is the second to last God damn day of school and everybody is done with everything. Speaking as someone who only had five kids in his room in 3rd hour because everybody left and 32 in fifth because everybody showed up, there’s not a single damn thing wrong with letting them hang out with their friends/teachers they like under these circumstances. So long as you know where everybody went there’s no real problem.
  3. There was no reason to email the whole staff about this because now the boss has to get involved and shut the whole thing down.
    • We’re gonna do it again tomorrow even though she said not to. Email? What email?
      • Also, fire me, I dare you.
  4. Shut up.
  5. Also you’re retiring in two days just shove them all out the door and relax.

We are going to the zoo for a special Nighttime Zoo Experience tonight, so this is all you get for today, since I got home and took a nap on the couch. So have a great night.