Tag: students

In which I find a way to mention sriracha again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews, TeachingLeave a comment

20131108-174700.jpgI have, conservatively, and depending on how much I push down on the stack prior to measuring it, between four and six inches of poorly-organized and no doubt deeply depressing grading to wade through this weekend. I am not remotely in the mood for it right now; I think pulling together next week’s lesson plans (and, uh, this week’s lesson plans) is probably about as ambitious as I’m planning on getting tonight. I have a blog post to write, the last 40 pages of a relatively entertaining book to blaze through, and Baldur’s Gate. I think that’s probably enough to get me through a three-hour shift at OtherJob.

Three of my favorite kids (and the sister of one of the three, who I haven’t actually ever had in class due to her age but I’m fond of) all transferred out today. It’s got me in a deeply pessimistic mood about my job during a month that has already seen much, much more than its share of pessimism, and I caught myself looking at job listings at private schools again yesterday. There’s a tiny silver cloud in that one of the two Kids Who are Always Suspended was spreading the word that he was transferring schools on Monday as well, but he apparently has given two different schools out for where he’ll be landing so I’m not holding my damn breath. Naturally, even in that situation, he’s the one of the two who I actually kind of like despite his constant attempts to derail my classroom; the nicest thing I can say about the other one is that the world would be a better place had he been a blowjob.

So, yeah, that’s where my head’s at right now. Also, since I apparently review commercial food items now, I had what Subway is calling their “Sriracha Chicken Melt” for dinner tonight. While it was tasty (and spicy enough that, half an hour later, my nose is still sorta running) there are little advertising placards all over the store that describe the sriracha as “creamy.” Sriracha is a lot of things, but creamy is none of them. Something else sriracha isn’t: orange. So I don’t know what the hell I was eating on that sammitch, but it wasn’t sriracha.

Mmmm, sriracha.

On being smart

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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One of the things that’s really hitting me with my Algebra kids this year is just how unused they are to having to work in class.  These kids are smart, right?  And they’re used to being the smart kids, and with only a couple of exceptions they’re used to thinking of themselves as smart kids; it’s part of their self-identity; something they’re proud of.

Smart kids are supposed to get stuff.  School’s not supposed to be hard for smart kids.

Literally the first thing I said to these kids when they walked into my room on the first day of school was “Welcome to high school.”  I’m walking a fine line here; I’m trying to push them as far and as fast as I can without breaking any of them, and it’s an interesting and delicate dance to be involved in.  I’m thinking about this because I graded a mid-chapter quiz today, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the kids who didn’t do well– some of them are clearly smart kids (remember, I’ve had everyone in this group before except for about three of them) who are so unused to having to ask questions in class that I think they’re actually ashamed to have to do so.  I gotta work on that.  By and large, considering the volume of stuff I threw at them in the last three weeks, they did well.  It’s just the handful that didn’t that I need to figure out how to handle.

Getting a new student on Monday.  I can pronounce neither of her names, and I only know she’s a she because I looked her up. My wild-ass guess is that she’s Kenyan.  This should be interesting.  (Kenyans speak, what, English and Swahili?  With maybe French as a distant third?  Hopefully there’s not a language issue.)

So, yeah.  Smart kids.  Then there’s whatever is going on in that picture there, which I took in my classroom on Friday after a student volunteered to do that problem on the board.  Now, this is my special ed group– don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way trying to make fun of this kid, just to give you an idea of the range of abilities I see throughout the day, because after this kid leaves my room I get the Algebra kids, a group that contains a kid who got a perfect score on his math ISTEP last year.  I was trying to demonstrate the various algebraic principles; the problem on the other side of the one on the board is 4x(6×5) and the idea is that they’re supposed to notice that both equal 120 regardless of where the parentheses are.  Note that this does not represent multiple attempts to solve the problem.  He did the green part first, where rather than multiplying four by six (or adding it six times, which would have been fine) he raised four to the fourth power.  Then he switched to a blue marker, getting into an argument over whether it was “his” marker in the process, added six to itself four times and got 24.  What caused him to privilege the 24 over the 32, I’m not sure, although this kid is prone to giving me multiple choice answers on assignments– he’ll literally write “3 or 30 or 4 or 17” next to a problem.  The blue squiggle next to the 2 under the actual problem is supposed to be a 4; there are also huge handwriting issues.

Then he switched to a red marker and tried to multiply 24 by 5.  Note that he’s first tried to add it, but only four times, and that the presence of a tens digit has utterly confounded him– he’s added the two pairs of fours to get two eights, then added those and gotten six instead of sixteen.  This isn’t forgetting to add a digit; I was standing behind him watching this performance and he actually said “four plus four is six” while he was writing.  He then turned around and told me that the answer was six, at which point I took this picture, erased the whole mess, and walked through everything with him.

I do this often, by the way– letting a kid dig himself into a hole can frequently be useful because it gives me insight into how they handle mathematics.  Unfortunately, for the second time this year, I’m looking at this and getting the “holy shit, I can’t fix this” vibe that I get from writing sometimes.  The kid can’t handle basic multiplication on his own, and even with other adults in the room I can’t get around to them often enough to help him with everything he needs help with.  Luckily, he has involved parents; I can’t imagine what he’d be like otherwise, as this is what he is like with help at home.

I’ll figure it out– I’ll figure him out, I always do– but Christ, do I have a headache right now.

I had a busy day; here’s a sandwich

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

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I didn’t get around to making Reubens last night; we went over to my parents’ place for chili instead– so we made them tonight.  This was after another excessively long Monday where the kids spent the whole day doing their best to convince me that they were stupid– only to then turn around and pass the first Acuity test of the year (there are three; it’s primarily used as a measure of growth) by more or less flying colors.  All but two of the kids in my first class passed, 60% of my mostly-special-ed class passed (which is pretty damn good; just trust me on that), and all of my kids in Algebra passed– which they’d bloody well better have if they wanted to live.  This, though, from kids who literally ten minutes before the test were trying to convince me they’d never seen long division before.

Two pounds of corned beef and a pound of Swiss cheese made it a bit better.  Along with some rye bread and some sauerkraut and some homemade Russian dressing.  Mmmm.

This, by the way, is the shit that makes me wonder what the hell we’re doing in education in this country.  Should I be judged if a kid who has been taught long division by four different teachers four straight years tries to act like he’s never seen it before?  Am I just that shitty at my job, along with whichever different teachers these kids had before me?  Or can we actually blame the kids for willfully embracing dumbassery?

I really don’t know the answer.  Maybe we all just suck at this and everything they’re saying about American public schools is true.  I don’t know what to do with a kid who has been told the rules of punctuation by every teacher they’ve ever had in their entire lives and still can’t figure out that sentences begin with capital letters and end with some form of punctuation.  Or who treats apostrophes like they’re an early warning system for the letter S.  After every teacher they’ve ever had showed them the right way to do it.

At some point, it has to be their fault.  Or maybe not!  Maybe I’m just that bad at my job– and I, supposedly, am one of the good ones.  Bad teachers must literally suck knowledge out of the heads of the young scholars in their classrooms.

And then they go and pass the Acuity test, which is either a sign that the Acuity isn’t really measuring anything or that they were fucking with me all morning.

Either way, I’m losing my ability to put up with it.

Anyway, I’m gonna go watch the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother, a show I still watch only because I’m a masochist.  I expect it to annoy me; that’s what it’s for nowadays.

tl;don’t r

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized1 Comment

In accordance with prophecy, the post that instructed you to not read it if you respect me (which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wrote last night and delayed until noon today) has received a full day’s worth of traffic already.  I hate you all.

I spent all day today putting out fires, and right now I’m split between basically writing a short-ish “YAAR EXHAUSTION” type of post or going exhaustive and giving you a moment-by-moment breakdown of the horror that was my day.  I think I’m leaning toward exhaustive– after all, I’m at OtherJob, my lesson plans are already done, most of my grading is already done, and it’s been raining all day so there really isn’t much else to do.

It is entirely possible that this post will end abruptly with “fuck this, you get the idea” or something similar; please don’t hold it against me.  After all, you already got a post today, right?

BEFORE SCHOOL:  I wake up on time, but somehow going into the office to check and see if my paycheck came in and my union dues got paid takes half an hour.  I have no idea where the time went; I rush through my shower and manage to forget to eat breakfast before leaving the house.  I do manage to pack a lunch, which is an unimportant detail except insofar as it indicates that I was in the kitchen while I was forgetting to eat.  I manage to make it to work on time.

AT SCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS:  As I’ve mentioned previously I cover the gym in the morning.  There are a couple of other adults in there with me by the time the lion’s share of the kids are at school but it’s not uncommon for it to be me and two hundred kids.  Today, our assistant principal (new to the building this year) comes in and asks me in a rather pointed fashion what the building policy is on cell phones.  Note: she is fully aware of the answer to this question, which is that the kids basically aren’t supposed to have them, ever, and if they do they’re to remain in backpacks until such time as they are placed in lockers, and at all times they are to be off.

I explain to her that my policy on cell phones is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None; I ignore anything that is plainly related to listening to music, force phones to be put away when anything that could involve taking pictures is taking place, and tend to react reasonably, but harshly, to kids who are actually talking on them– which is rare.  The main reason is that every second kid in the gym has a cell phone with them and if I start taking cell phones away (which I am fully empowered to do by district policy) I will do nothing but take phones away and fight with kids every morning, all morning.  I fully understand why this is the policy in class but it is virtually unenforceable when the ratio of kids with cellphones to teachers doing something about them is literally a hundred to one.  I am not interested in that fight every day, and kids who are being reasonably discreet are going to be ignored.

She does not appear happy with this explanation until I look around and find five kids who are quietly listening to music and ask her which one she’d like me to take a phone away from first; that child will immediately find the other four and ask why I’m not taking their phones away instead of whoever I’m talking to.  They will then report to their parents that I’m picking on them.  No thank you.  This appears to clear the fog a bit and the conversation ends with no directive to change my policy.

The kids are on edge in a weird sort of way but there aren’t any fights or any real threats of one.  But there’s a weird vibe in the gym that I don’t like.

HOMEROOM:  The bright spot of my day, once the girls are done screaming about another spider in the hallway, which is quickly becoming the theme around here lately.  We do a Word of the Week; this week’s word was “ration.”  The kids are supposed to write a sentence for me; I select the best two or three and send them to the librarian, and he names a victor for each grade level.  One of my girls wins today.  If my name were Mr. Smith and her name were Charlie, this would be the sentence:  “Mr. Smith told me that he has a ration of Charlie that he is allowed every day, and I don’t get to talk to him again until tomorrow.”

I am beloved, obviously.

SUCCESS:  (It’s between homeroom and first hour, I didn’t name it, shut up.)  I’m ten minutes into my lesson when the teacher next door asks if she can borrow me for “a minute.”  There are two teachers in the room for Success so I have the other one take over and go into the hall.  There is an eighth grade girl who I only know by sight (new to the building this year) pacing and muttering angrily in the hallway with her fists clenched and tears in her eyes.  I get over my initial why the hell is this my problem bewilderment and ask her what’s wrong.

Here’s a thing:  Seventh and eighth grade girls are really fucking easy to manipulate.  I don’t know if you knew that but holy Christ is it true.  Some fifth grader– a fucking fifth grader— on the bus asked her if she thought she could beat up some other student, and now she’s angry because she has to fight this other student.  Who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the teacher next door) happens to be in my room at that very moment.  I spend a few minutes trying to calm her down and then call the other student into the hallway.  They are both saying stupid shit like “I don’t wanna fight her, but if she hits me I’m gonna kick her ass,” and pointing out that both of them are starting their sentences with saying that they do not want to fight is not doing the job it should of convincing them that, no, nobody’s actually going to fight here.

This conversation literally costs me the rest of the period.  By the end of it I’m reasonably convinced that I’m not going to have to break the two of them up at any point today and I’m ready to break the fifth grader’s head myself.  Then the teacher pulls another student out of her classroom who I have to convince that none of this shit was his business and he doesn’t need to threaten the first girl because nobody wants to fucking fight here so stop being a damn asshole.  I make a mental note to have a stern word with the fifth grader and bemoan the critical thinking skills of everyone under 30.  I do virtually no teaching in my first class of the day.

FIRST AND SECOND HOUR I have to spend keeping an eye on one of my autistic kids because he’s making his para insane and in general the kids are being weirdly dependent and pretending to not be as bright as they are.  This is an affliction that is not at all specific to them but they’re bad about it; I need to break them of this habit.  I have deliberately put a review packet together for my kids today because I have a crapton of desk work that must get done by the end of the day and my prep period was full before I even walked into the building.

(Note: this is something that most people don’t realize about teaching.  I have virtually no time to do anything during my day that isn’t teaching.  Any paperwork of any kind, including all of my grading, gets done on my own time.  It had piled up too much by this point.  It was time to have a work day.)

At any rate, this plan didn’t work out, because the kids had way too many questions.  I got a bit done but not as much as I wanted.

THIRD AND FOURTH HOUR was when all hell broke loose.  Third and fourth hour contain The Twins, who are several posts unto themselves and who I will talk about in more detail when I have the mental energy.  And if I’m being honest this is already a fourteen hundred word post and I haven’t even gotten to the stressful part.

So, yeah: I’m gonna abbreviate.  A lot.  The twins are, very soon, gonna get the shit kicked out of them, and it’s going to be their own damn fault– and that is not something I am prone to say about my students, particularly students who have obvious developmental issues (I suspect fetal alcohol syndrome; this is unconfirmed.)  But they piss off everyone they come into contact with, more or less deliberately, and then they tattle on the kids they’ve pissed off.

For example: if walking past the desk of the biggest gangbanger in the building, a kid who was in jail before he got expelled from his previous school and sent to us, maybe you don’t knock his shit on the floor on purpose.  Because he might literally kill you.

It’s happened twice.

The kids nearly caused two different fights today, and that’s not counting the number of students they got pissed off at them.  I ended up sending them out of my room with my coteacher for their own safety and not only arranged for them to not be in the halls during passing period for the rest of the day but literally created a security detail to get them to their buses at the end of the day so that they didn’t have to be in the gym with the rest of the kids.

I fully expect to find another article in the paper in a few months about how I didn’t do anything about the way they were mercilessly bullied, by the way.  I’m at 1700 words; this post would be twice as long if I actually talked about all the nonsense they created today.

And that was before my fifth and sixth hour got into my room.

God, I’m tired.

On venturing into public

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

My belly is full of pizza and my brain is full of nonsense. At the moment I prefer the contents of my belly; ultimately the pizza will cost me less. That said, it’s been a very long time since I was getting any kind of exercise regularly– and, despite my near-permanent status as a professional fat dude, I actually enjoy exercise. I got a weird little thrill when my wife pointed out that the current bathroom mirror (which is six feet wide and about four high, with no borders– just a big piece of mirrored glass) ought to go down into the basement as part of our as-yet nonexistent home gym. I was actually angry with myself that I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

I ran into three different families’ worth of students during the ten minutes that I was buying pizza, by the way, which makes me think maybe living in more or less the same neighborhood as my school isn’t that much of an advantage.

One of them asked me what I was doing there, which tells you the caliber of kids I’m dealing with. (Yes, this is an unfair thing to say. No student anywhere thinks his teachers are real people, and running into us in public, thus confirming the unwelcome truth that we exist outside of our classrooms, is always an occasion for wonder and mystery. But it’s still funny.)

“I’m here for pizza,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked.

I leaned forward.

“I actually live here,” I whispered, and pointed under one of the chairs by the door. “I slept there last night. Don’t tell anybody.”

Her eyes tripled in size. Her mother got their pizza (I was waiting for a Deep Dish pizza, which takes longer even though it’s more of a Deep Ish pizza) and shot me a weird look as they left.

By the time the third family said hello and left, I think the employees thought I was some sort of rock star.

The pudgy, bald, talentless kind, of course.

I tried to spend part of last night applying for a field trip grant through Target. Have I mentioned the DC trip yet? I take a group of seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C. every two years, and this year is a travel year. The trip is hella expensive so we’re trying to find a good way to pay for it that doesn’t involve me having to run a fundraiser. First it took twenty minutes and two changes of my password to log into the site, which is justweird, and then after taking three thousand or so characters to say I want to take my kids to DC so they can lern history gud, it lost my entire application except for the biographical part at the beginning. Frustrated, I tried to flip to the last section of the application, which asks me to break the trip cost down in ways that are frankly impossible (it costs, roughly, $800 per kid, but that’s a flat fee– they don’t break it down by transportation or food or lodging or whatever. It’s just $800. Target wants everything broken down specifically– I can’t even realistically estimate those numbers– and I doubt they’ll like it very much if I just put $32,000 HOLY FUCKING HELL ARE WE SERIOUSLY PAYING THEM THIRTY-TWO GRAND into one of the boxes.

Holy shit. How the hell are they making thirty-two thousand dollars off of us? That’s fucking insane. Mental note: redouble plans to become a DC tour guide once I decide I can’t teach any longer.

Jesus.

A goal for this year

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

(Note that I do plan on going back to talking about things other than teaching again eventually; for obvious reasons it’s just what’s been foremost on my mind lately.)

Here’s the goal I’m setting myself for 2013-14: I’m going to go the entire year without yelling at any of my kids. And by “my kids,” in this context, I mean “any kid in my building,” not just in my class.

Now, let me be specific on what I mean here: I emphatically do not mean “I will never yell” or “I will never raise my voice.” My job would be impossible without occasionally having to raise my voice, and frequently a good loud “YO!” at the front of the room can refocus a classroom when more traditional, gentler methods fail.

What I mean is this: I’m going to make it an entire school year, or as close to it as I can, without ever raising my voice at a kid. There’s a difference between generic Loud-Talkin’ to a roomful of kids and raising my voice to a specific kid. If you know me, y’all know that I tend to have a bit of a temper and I tend to be a bit on the volatile side.

I spent last year working for a guy who I saw defuse potentially nasty situations (and situations that were well past “potentially” nasty) on any number of occasions without ever once speaking harshly to a kid. Not one single goddamn time. And he got results over and over again. I don’t want to be yelly guy any more. This may well sound shocking coming from me, but I need love to be a bigger part of my pedagogy than it’s been in the past.

I’m a good teacher. I need to work on being a better person at school. I need to be someone who is better at de-escalation. I need my temper squashed. And I’m going to find a way to do it this year.

2013-14: no more yelling at kids.

On Open House

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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Parent Number One accosts me as I’m going to my car to get a change of clothes, half an hour before Parent Night.  She starts screeching at me about the class her daughter has been put in.  I am not her child’s teacher– have, in fact, never had either of her children in my class– and couldn’t change her child’s class if my career depended on it.  She also doesn’t want the daughter in question to be in my class.  I’m not sure why it’s my problem at all, to be honest; this literally has nothing to do with me at all and once I tell you who to bring your problem to our conversation ought to be over.  Further elaboration isn’t doing either of us any good and is wasting my time.  I need every second between now and Parent Night actually starting.  She ends the conversation– well, technically, I do, by saying I have to go and leaving– by suggesting that her daughter is in the class she’s in because they’re “giving all the goddamn poor kids vouchers,” which makes exactly as much sense as you think it does.

Conversation with Parent Number Two starts well, but then veers off into crazytown.  I had her daughter in sixth grade and got along with her well; Mom starts complaining about her daughter’s troubles with her fifth grade teacher and then segues immediately into how she was personally responsible for getting our previous principal fired.  I gently suggest that our principal was chosen by the school board to take over and improve a school that was in substantially worse shape than ours was; I leave out the fact that they nearly doubled his salary when he moved, that he’s currently the highest-paid principal in the corporation, or that they’ve literally (and I’m not misusing this word) given him anything he wanted in his new position, which is a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of fired.  Mom assures me that she knows the right people and has influence in the right places.  I think to myself that I’d like to get fired the same way he did.  Carte blanche and twice the money sounds just horrible.

I walk into a conversation Parents Three and Four are having with another teacher so that I can introduce myself; they haven’t come down to my room and there’s not much time left in the Open House and I’d like to speak with everyone I can.  I walk into what turns into an extended ten-minute rant about how another student in the same grade as their child “mercilessly bullied” their son on the bus “every day” all last year and no one ever did anything about it.  The following are facts:  1) I know both children involved; 2) They provided an accurate physical description of the bully, so I know that this is not a case of mistaken identity; 3) I am the bus supervisor for the entire building and every single accusation of any form of misconduct on the bus comes through me before any administrator sees it; I heard nothing of this situation from anyone involved at any point last year, despite multiple conversations with the accused child’s bus driver about that child; 4) The two students do not ride the same bus and never did; 5) the bully in question spent most of the last half of the year on half-days and during that time arrived at school at 8:30 or so and left by 11:45– in other words, he never rode the bus at all for nearly the entire second semester.

This story cannot possibly be true.

Furthermore, the two boys were in different classes and would, to the best of my knowledge, have had rare chances to encounter each other during the school day.  (I will admit I can think of one way in which that statement may not be true; the numbered items above are indisputable.)  I spend a few minutes wondering if these people know that they’re lying or if they’re far enough gone that they’ve convinced themselves this impossible tale is true.  I reflect on the number of stories you see and hear about vicious bullying in schools that “no one ever did anything about,” and the number of times I’ve been directly accused of same, under similar circumstances, and briefly consider quitting my job.

Parent Five pulls into the parking lot as I’m walking out of the building.  Parent Night has ended at 6:30; it is 6:40.  She has her son, a fifth-grader–the youngest grade in our school– with her.  I tell her that the Open House has ended and that she is not going to be allowed into the building.  She starts off very angry, but calms down as I talk her and her son through the procedure that we’ll be following in the morning.  I tell him my name, make him repeat it a couple of times, and show them what door to drop him off at and make sure he knows where to go when he gets inside the school and that they both understand what time they’re supposed to be there.  I tell him to come find me when he gets into the gym and that I’ll show him where he’s supposed to sit, and answer a few other questions from her about other things that will happen during the day and how much interaction he’ll be having with the seventh and eighth graders, a subject she seems especially tense about.  By the end of the conversation, she’s smiling and the boy actually tells me he’s excited about school tomorrow before they drive off.  As they leave, I realize that I never actually got his name.  No worries; he says goodbye as they pull out and repeats my name back to me.

I suppose it could have gone worse.