Some recent developments

Luther M. Siler

I listened to Down With the Sickness and Fuck Dying on the way home from work two different days this week.

We have recently discovered that not only is Fatima deaf, or at least very close to it (at least one ear appears to be completely bollixed, which I’m pretty sure is the medical term) but she may have been so for her entire life. How no one appears to have noticed this until now is left as an exercise for the viewer. How this will affect her ability to learn English, however, remains my problem for at least eight more days. I would love to say that I’ve been able to help these kids adapt to living in America, but … not so much, I think. If I stay in education, I do plan to spend some time this summer learning at least a little bit of Pashto, because I don’t think these families are going to stop coming anytime soon.

In other news, I covered for one of the 7th grade teachers yesterday afternoon, and without realizing I was doing it, I did myself a big favor. One of the problems with working in a school where you don’t know all of the kids (and I don’t know any of the kids below 8th grade, nor do I know all of the 8th graders, although I’d bet I’m at 90% or so) is that the only kids who are visible to you are the shitheads. I’m pretty sure I can identify at least half of the 7th grade shitheads at least by their faces, although I don’t know a lot of names. The good kids? They’re invisible, because they don’t fuck up in the hallways (they’re mostly not in the hallways in the first place) and so you never notice them. It was the same thing as when I worked at the grant coordinator at the school before I quit– I was working in the office. Who gets sent to the office? Shitheads! Whose names do you know? Shitheads! So it’s easy to assume they’re all like that.

Well, one way or another, I got lucky and landed on what turned out to be this particular teacher’s favorite class. And they were fun! It’s not like we did a lot of academic stuff or anything like that but I sat and chatted with several of them for a while and just in general interacting with all of them was pleasant. There’s always a lot of trepidation in covering kids you don’t know in a class you don’t know, because who the hell knows what kind of shit you could be getting yourself into, so this was helpful. At least I know a few who might actually be nice to have in class next year.

If, y’know, I lose my mind and come back again.

In which I don’t have it tonight

Luther M. Siler

This thing with Makyi is still weighing heavily on my head and my heart, to the point where I’m starting to wonder what the best route to getting the felony murder statute overturned in Indiana would be. I have enough mental energy to fuck around with video games on Youtube but not enough to blog coherently. So I’m taking the night off, and I’ll be back tomorrow.

On hope

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

The “South Bend man” referred to in this headline is a former student. He was a bright, inquisitive, funny and honest student when I had him in 6th and again in 7th grade; his older brother was one of my DC kids and was a member of my single favorite class of students I’ve ever had. There are still pictures of both of them on my phone.

He was just sentenced to 45 years in jail because he and a high school student planned to steal another man’s gun and then beat him up. The “plan”– and I strongly suspect I do not have anything even close to the full story– went badly sideways for them, and the man killed the high school student and shot Makyi “at least” eight times. Somehow, another person’s decision to kill a child and attempt to kill a second person rather than be robbed of a gun has led to the person who was shot being convicted of murder and sentenced to jail for 45 years, more than twice as long as he has been alive.

I am not interested in you attempting to justify the existence of “felony murder” charges, and I can guarantee you that attempting to do so will be the last thing you ever say around here. I don’t care if you think this is okay or justified. You can keep that shit to yourself. I loved this kid. He was smart. He had a chance. He should be in fucking college right now. And instead he’s 20 years old and somehow has been convicted of a murder that everyone involved in his sentencing knows that he absolutely did not commit in an incident that led to he, himself, being shot eight + times, and will be in jail until he’s 65.

I hate it here.

Well, great, nice to see you too

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

I brought my dad Arby’s for lunch today, and while I was in the drive-thru the kid at the window checked my debit card and then announced that I had been her math teacher. I didn’t recognize her, both because it had legitimately been years since I’d seen her and, well, the mask— but she threw me for a loop with what she said next.

“Yeah, you hated me.”

She’d told me her name already, but I hadn’t been able to properly process it, and frankly in the moment I didn’t remember a damn thing about her– which actually means that there’s no chance that I actually did hate her, as I assure you I have forgotten none of those kids, and in fact they haunt my dreams still. And, honestly, it really bothers me that that was the first thing she thought to say to me– because regardless of whether I did hate her or not, her perception that I did is more than bad enough.

It’s several hours later now, and I’ve managed to put together who she is. And I didn’t hate her, but I suppose I can understand why she thought I did in the moment. She is, in fact, the cousin of one of the perhaps three students who I might use the word “hate” to describe my feelings about. And I don’t remember her being a big problem on her own, but her cousin (the “I got a baby by his brother” girl in this post, in fact) was an utter Goddamned nightmare and the cousin dragged this girl into her shit a lot. So she was around a fair amount for Angry Me, particularly since the two of them sat together on the bus a lot and the bus driver actually did hate both of them, to the degree where she put it in a referral once.

(These kids will never know how much time and energy I spent defending the two of them against this bus driver, by the way, at one point going over the driver’s head to central office about the way she treated them, but that’s a whole other story that I’m not telling right now.)

Anyway. I’m more or less over it by now, since I’ve managed to put together who she was, but the whole conversation had me fucked up all afternoon.

Just curious: how many of you had a teacher who you thought hated you at the time? Any that you thought hated you when you were in class with them but don’t think that any longer?

On what passes for good news nowadays

Luther M. Siler

Is this good news? Hell, I don’t know.

We’ve been working on systems of equations in class lately. So, just as a reminder, if I tell you that y = 2x and y = x + 2, you can use those two equations to solve for both X and Y to find out that X is 2 and Y is 4. The process isn’t that important if you don’t remember it. There are three ways my eighth graders are supposed to learn how to do this– graphing, substitution, and elimination, and we’re working on substitution right now and have already covered graphing. I’m going to cover elimination later this week and I’m hellbent on knocking it out in two days because, frankly, it’s just not that damn important by any measure I’m concerned with.

But good news! Today’s assignment is out of 10, with a two-point bonus question that I thought was going to be quite a bit harder, so it’s possible to get up to 10/12 on it. And right now, with twelve minutes of class left in my final period of the day– yes, I’m blogging during school; the kids aren’t talking and if they start I’ll quit doing this– the median score is 12/10 and the average is 10.48, so the average score is actually into the realm of extra credit.

Sounds great, right?

I have 143 students and have only been able to mark 52 present today. But, hey, that’s still a pretty solid average out of the 52 who showed up and did the work!

…Oh, you say only 25 did the assignment? Ah. That’s … well, that’s seventeen and a half percent of my students.

That’s, uh, not as good.

But hey! Out of the third of my kids who bothered to show up to class today, the half who did the assignment did really well!

…except it’s not like the graphing method doesn’t work perfectly well with what are supposed to be substitution equations, and there are websites that they can use that will graph lines for them. I know they know they exist because I’ve used them in class. And that probably explains the bonus question, too … and these two kids in different classes who got this system wrong in the exact same way, which only works if you forget a negative sign on one of the numbers and then graph that …

So I really have no evidence of any kind that any but the tiniest handful of my kids who have worked through stuff with their cameras and microphones on have any understanding of how to do this.

But hey! Those three kids! They’ve got it!

I take my wins where I can find them nowadays, I guess.