Tag: teachers

Let’s see

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.

Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.

I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.

(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)

I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.

I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.

Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.

New classroom!

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Pretty sure you can click for bigger, if you want— but I popped over to work this morning so that I could drop a few things off, and my classroom has officially been moved, so I went in and sat for a while, trying to figure out where to put everything.

Two big problems to be solved right now: one, you will note in one of the pictures that there are huge globs of thick brown glue all over one of the walls. That glue used to be behind a blackboard which they just removed; I don’t mind losing the blackboard in favor of more wall space, but I was assuming they’d take the glue down with it? Maybe it’s on somebody’s To-Do list; I’m just gonna hope and not worry about it until August. Also, there’s print on one of the whiteboards– that bit that looks like watermarking on one of them is actually there— which is hopefully also removable somehow.

Second, I’m coming from a classroom where there were literally wall outlets every two feet around the perimeter of the classroom (my old room used to be a computer lab) to a room with a total of eight– two in each corner of the room. I am trading this for more floor space and an actual window, so I’m not mad about it– I made this decision on purpose, after all– but it’s still something I need to figure out, since I have a shitton of stuff that needs to be plugged in. I mean, extension cords exist, but at some point the building services folks are gonna get mad at me, right? Plus I have to control all those cables somehow, and that’s going to be a lot of work.

There’s a ton more storage, too, so I can probably get away with putting one of my bookshelves back in the old classroom, but I also want to have at least a small classroom library this year, in case we are doing silent reading in Advisory again.

(I am thinking about cell phone solutions, too, and I just discovered this exists. I don’t really want to pay for it, but an actual locking cabinet specifically to hold phones seems like a pretty useful idea, more so than a bunch of pouches on the wall.)

(falls down a rabbit hole)

Actually, let’s talk about that a little more: the state of Indiana just passed a law literally making it illegal for kids to have their cell phones in school, or, to be slightly more specific, requiring schools to have a policy that says the kids can’t have their cell phones. Now, we can say that all we want; we’ve been saying it for years and it doesn’t matter. The kids aren’t going to leave their phones at home, and they aren’t going to leave them in their lockers, but it’s not impossible to set up something where they put them in a specific place in the classroom, so long as it’s reasonably secure and other people can’t walk off with their phones. This is the problem with the “pouch poster” system– anybody can walk off with anybody else’s phone, and if I’m going to monitor when people get their phones out of a pouch on the wall, I may as well lock the damned things up somewhere so that I can just lock and unlock a box at the beginning and the end of class. I’m already planning on having as deviceless of a classroom as possible next year; we’ll be starting most days next year with everyone’s iPads in a pile in the back of the classroom where they’re out of reach. I just have to figure out a phone solution.

Anyway, back to thinking about what to do with that classroom. Anything stand out to you?

Almost there

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I broke up a fight yesterday involving two of my favorite students, and since it was a girl fight it involved prying fingers out of hair. The girl I grabbed had bruises on her arm after the fight. Pretty sure they were from me. Today there was a fight within ten seconds of the first bell of the day.

I have officially reached the point where I am done trying to motivate kids who don’t want to do their work; the deal works like this: I’m going to spend the first part of class teaching to whoever will listen. If you’re obviously not listening but you’re quiet I’m going to leave you alone. After that I’m going to give an assignment of some sort; that assignment’s going in the grade book. Want an F? That’s cool, you can have one, and I’m not going to hassle your ass to get your work done, again, so long as you’re quiet about it. You want to sleep through class or watch YouTube videos for the whole period? Go for it. You’re gonna get the grade you want; at this point in the year I’m here for the kids who want an education and I’m done worrying about everyone else.

Twelve days of school, y’all, and my final exam is in seven.

Oh god I’m a nerd

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

It is Friday night, and I am sitting at my computer, listening to the first concert of Pearl Jam’s new tour, featuring the first live performances of half a dozen tracks from Dark Matter, and interpreting data from charts and spreadsheets.

In other words, this is very close to the perfect evening, and at 47 I may as well accept what I am because it’s not changing.

I am a rock star, ladies and gentlemen. We took the final NWEA of the year on Wednesday and Thursday, and … goddamn. I was elated by last year’s scores. I am fucking ecstatic with these. I have never seen results as good as what I got on this year’s spring NWEA before. And the really awesome thing is that I could go a dozen different ways after that sentence and they’d all be just as awesome.

Let’s back up a bit. The NWEA is administered three times a year and eats up a grand total of about twelve hours of instructional time over the course of the school year. It is primarily a growth test, with no concept of success or failure– the scores are indexed against grade levels, but you can’t fail the NWEA; you only show high achievement or low achievement compared to your grade cohort and high growth or low growth compared to other people in the score band of your grade cohort.

This is the kind of test I want. I get kids all over the map– kids taking a class two years above grade level and kids with 60 or 70 IQs. I don’t care whether or not my kids are successful against some arbitrarily designated cut score that can be manipulated depending on whether the politicians think we’re passing enough kids or not. I want to know whether they got better at math under my instruction. And the NWEA provides me with that data.

And it also provides me with something I really like– the ability to compare my own kids’ performance in Math against their performance in Reading, which I don’t teach, which is as close as I can get to an unbiased check on whether I’m doing my job right. Two years in a row now my kids’ Math growth has kicked the shit out of their Reading growth. It was rough last year; it was staggering this year. Which brings me to that chart up there. That’s my second hour. The pluses are their Math scores and the squares are their Reading scores, so each kid is represented twice on the graph. The farther to the right their boxes are, the better they performed, and the higher they are, the more their growth was. In other words, you want them in the green box and maybe not so much in the red box. Orange and yellow are on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand territory.

Here, let me clear the Reading scores out:

Now, this particular chart shows the two things I want to highlight more clearly than the rest of my classes, but believe me, these are common threads across all of my students. First, look at how many of them are high growth. I have four fucking kids at the 99th percentile in growth– in other words, kids who showed more growth than 99/100 of kids who took this test, nationwide. I have eleven across the 117 kids I have scores for. There were nine of them at the 90th percentile or above, just in that class. There were 26 across all of my classes– in other words, 22% of all of my students were in the top ten percent in growth in America.

I want a fucking raise.

The other thing I want you to notice is that yellow box, the one for kids who are high achievement but low growth. Notice that that fucker is empty.

If we look at my low-achievement kids, 44 of them were high growth and 44 were low growth. Which sounds exactly like you might expect, but “what box are they in” is kind of a blunt instrument. Almost 2/3 of my high achievement kids– 19 of 29– were also high growth. And the high-achievement kids are widely considered to be much more difficult to get to show growth.

This is interesting to me in terms of what it says about me as a teacher. I did a good job with my low-achievement kids. I want to dig into those numbers more and look at averages and medians to get a little more detail, but I’m still pretty damn happy with a 44/44 split. But I did a fantastic job with my high achievers. I am doing a mathematically demonstrably better job achieving growth with my high-achieving kids than with my low-achieving kids. Which, believe me, I’m going to make a point of when I campaign to get a Geometry class and maybe the other Algebra class back next year. I would love to see numbers from the guy who teaches the Geometry class at the only middle school in the district where it’s actually taught. If he’s beating the numbers I put up this year, I need to be sitting in on his class.

God, I love being a numbers nerd, and God, I love it when I get a chance to brag about my kids.

In which I miss out

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

There were apparently something on the order of fifteen thousand teachers protesting at the Statehouse in Indianapolis today. Most of the public districts across the state, including mine, cancelled school today when it became clear that it would be utterly impossible to staff the buildings given the number of people taking personal days to attend the protest. I was not personally among them; I know a bunch of people who went, obviously, but given that my mother is currently back in the hospital and the only viable transportation to the protest was by bus (I am not about to fight fifteen thousand extra out-of-towners for parking in downtown Indianapolis) I was deeply leery of being three hours away from home and not actually personally in charge of when I could come back.

So I didn’t go. Which, honestly, is probably for the best; I have Twitter and my blog when I want to talk and/or think about politics, the governor wasn’t there anyway, and I really didn’t need to spend the day in a simmering rage. If I could have had a guarantee that no one would try to talk to me while I was there it might have worked out okay, but that seems unlikely. Instead I stayed home and played with cats and also played the new Star Wars game on my PS4, which is not the most productive use of my day but possibly the most sane.

The new cat’s name might be Dr. Doofenschmirtz, by the way.

In which I am in the presence of excellence

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Just a quick note today again, because while I made it to work today and got through the entire day I’m still feeling pretty shit: we had a parent-teacher conference today. It was prescheduled, mind you, as it’s the time of year for these things, so it’s not like it was one of those YOU MUST COME IN NOW AND DISCUSS YOUR CHILD WITH US sorts of things.

I think the highest compliment I can possibly pay to my son’s teachers is that they make me miss teaching. I mean, in general the quality of the staff at Hogwarts is pretty damn high, but I am going to seriously miss him being in first grade with the teachers that he has, and– and I say this without even knowing the names of the second grade teachers, so I could very well be wrong– we are going to seriously have to prepare for a letdown next year, because there’s just no way he’s lucky enough to get people this good in charge of his education two years in a row.

I mean, yeah, it didn’t take that long of having a non-education job for me to miss being around education and around kids, but moments in the past two or three years where I missed teaching itself are vanishingly rare. And every time I sit down with these folks I spend the entire conversation thinking yes, that’s exactly how you should handle that and yes, that’s exactly what I tried to do on my best days in this job and yes, that’s exactly the sort of mind-set I want you to have about my son, who is smart as hell but who is manifestly not perfect and absolutely has any number of things that we want him to try harder and do better with.

And it’s every single conversation I have with them. I just hope he realizes how fucking lucky he is. I wish everyone had teachers this good.

In which I’m not sure what I’m mad about

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

R-580242-1518276830-4202.jpegSo the district I used to work for just named its Teacher of the Year for the 2017-18 school year.  I don’t know the guy; he teaches fourth grade and has been with the district for five years.  I assume he’s good at his job; typically that’s a requirement for being named a building TotY, and to be named for the entire district is a genuinely big deal.  Best I ever did was top 10.

There’s an article in the paper about him.  After thinking about it, I’m not going to link to it, because the purpose of this post is not to shit on this guy and you’re just going to have to believe me that I’m quoting this accurately.  The article is mostly Good Teacher Boilerplate until I got to this part, about 2/3 of the way through:

Like his students, (name redacted) appears to have a bottomless well of energy.

He and his wife, (Mrs. redacted), have three children, ages 4, 2 and 1.

Besides full-time teaching, (redacted) works 10 to 25 hours per week at a home improvement store and is studying for a master’s degree at IU South Bend. He was head football coach for 11 years for the team at St. Matthew’s School in South Bend.

My first thought was that it’s ridiculous that we pay our teachers so Goddamn poorly that  this guy, like most working teachers in the area, has to have a second job.  Without an MA and with five years of experience he’s probably not even making 35K a year, and if he is, it’s barely.  And that’s too low.  It’s insane that a job that requires a college degree and insists on continuing education after that pays so poorly, particularly one that’s so critical to the functioning of society at large.

And then I thought about it a little more.  Dude’s a full-time teacher.  That’s, bare minimum, 8-4 five days a week.  He’s not in a low-grading classroom where he can just pass/fail everyone, and for me grading and lesson planning was at least another eight hours a week– ie, most of Saturday or most of Sunday or longer hours every day during the week– and I was excellent at crafting assignments that took as little time as possible to grade.  No Teacher of the Year is working 40-hour weeks.  It’s impossible.

And he’s supposedly laying another one to three eight-hour shifts on top of that, plus a bare minimum three hours a week in an MA classroom assuming he’s only taking one class and doesn’t spend a single second reading or studying, plus travel time to all the above, plus he has three children all under five years old?

And now part of me is going “Jesus, this poor guy,” and the rest of me is pretty goddamn sure somebody somewhere is lying, because there literally aren’t enough hours in the week for anyone to pull this schedule off.  The reporter apparently didn’t care enough to add it up and figure out that this guy is claiming eleven-hour work days every single day ever while also somehow raising three very fucking small kids.

I seriously can’t figure out which is worse: that this could actually be his schedule, in which case he’s going to burn out and hit a wall very, very soon, and it’s not going to be pretty for anyone involved when he does, or if a guy who is already Teacher of the Year still feels the need to lie about his schedule and the reporter just shrugged and wrote it down.    That’s how pervasive the teacher-as-martyr idea is; he or she looked at all that and boiled it down to “bottomless energy” and not “on the road to flaming out and divorce at 30.”

 

RIP, Mrs. Gates

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching1 Comment

image-29403_20180310.jpgxI got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92.  Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.

I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years.  My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right?  As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time.  I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.

The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it.   Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean.  She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.

I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away.  And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone.  Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation.  I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class.  And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates.  Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances.  I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.

For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story.  I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates.  I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.