This isn’t the usual rant, although I’m pretty sure after 5,485 posts over the last thirteen-plus years, I’ve probably written it before. I locked grades for the first quarter today, and in keeping with previous practice today’s classes were given over to test retakes and missing work, or for doing nothing if you were satisfied with your grade.
Y’all, I only had twelve kids fail my class this quarter. That’s out of a hundred and thirty-four. That’s 8.9 percent. Thirty-two in my regular Math class are getting an A, plus seventeen more in my Algebra and Math lab classes. 36.5%.
I gotta admit, that number feels too high, although it’s skewed by my other two classes being Algebra and a Math Lab class that nonetheless is full of Algebra students. But even my regular Math classes managed 29.6% getting an A. That’s crazy.
To put this in perspective, I have had plenty of individual classes where more than 12 kids were failing. Typically if it’s below fifteen percent I feel okay about it. I really want to go back over the last few years and compare my grades during first quarter to see if I’m just remembering wrong.
So, what am I doing right now? Congratulating myself on, at the least, motivating more kids to get their work done, because it’s not like there’s anything I can do if they choose to do nothing? Marveling at how my command of my craft means that my kids are really learning this year, and that’s the reason grades are up?
Nah, of course not; I’m trying to figure out where I’ve gotten easier and lazier about grading. There is no good news in my goblin brain, and there are a million ways to take anything that looks like good news and turn it into bad news.
Tomorrow, I get to remind everyone that grades are starting over, and because of that when half of them don’t turn in their assignment tomorrow, that half will wake up on Saturday morning and find out they’re failing Math. I’m also super psyched about the way the good news is only going to last for about a day.
Which is fine, honestly, because I’m just as crabby tonight as I have been all week, and I’m completely convinced that tomorrow is going to be annoying. I want to gripe about how my kids shat the bed on a test again today, but they didn’t, really; the average for everybody is a C, which is right about what you’d expect, and had I given it three weeks ago it would have been about a 10%, so I have actual evidence that learning happened. Just not, like, evenly. Which is the perennial gripe of my job.
They aren’t allowed to talk to me at all tomorrow, by the way. I’m handing each kid a piece of duct tape or a stapler, their choice, when they walk into the room. Here is your progress report. You have until 3:20 to fix it. Go away.
I have been in a miserable, hateful mood all day today, I forgot my coffee this morning before leaving for work, and I had a dream last night that has knocked me so thoroughly out of sorts that I’m genuinely starting to think I need to look into a therapist. I have been a fucking mess for the entire day, to the point where one of my third hour kids noticed. The last time I tried talking to a therapist was quite a while ago and didn’t really do me any good, but there’s probably more than one out there, right? Maybe I’ll try one of the others.
In accordance with prophecy, the parents of Little Billy Who Only Just Wanted To Play Football were already in the office when I got to work this morning. LB did not play last night, but as his grades are now fixed he can play the last two games of the season … which is exactly what would have happened had they pulled none of their bullshit at all. IEP talk was shut down quickly and forcefully by the head of the special education department, who pointed out that a student failing a class is not, in fact, automatically a violation of an IEP. Oops!
And then I missed half my lunch and had to write my first three referrals of the year, none of which were for my own students or even my own grade level, and all three of which resulted in suspensions. I still haven’t written any for my own kids. I may very well make it through the first quarter. There’s only three weeks left!
That said, it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I came home and killed yokai for a few hours, and now that it’s 8:00, and since the book I’m reading has nearly 1300 pages … well, it’s Kindle time in the Siler household. Because my wrists aren’t strong enough to hold a 1300-page book for very long. This is clearly what ebooks were made for.
I wish I thought I could get away with posting work emails in full, because hoo-boy, did I have a doozy of a banger of an email thread waiting for me when I woke up this morning– waiting for me in the morning, because it was sent at 12:30 last night. A parent emailed thirteen different people because her darling sweetheart wasn’t eligible to play middle school football any longer, on account of his failing three of his seven classes, including mine. Has he been failing three classes for weeks? Of course he has. Do teachers have a way to see if parents have been checking their kids’ grades? Of course we do. Have they? Of course they haven’t.
This decision was “potentially affecting his future.” He is five foot two and 110 pounds, dripping wet. He will not even make the high school team, much less anything beyond that.
Now, as it turns out, I had him retake a test last week, which he didn’t finish. Had I been at work yesterday, I’d have had him finish it then; I was planning on him finishing it this morning, which he did, and which brought his grade up to passing. I want this perfectly clear: I was going to do this anyway, even if the email had never been sent. That didn’t stop the thread from continuing to escalate throughout the day, as she apparently thought that everyone involved up and down the command structure was just going to drop everything to make sure that little Billy got his ten minutes of playing time tonight. At least two of his teachers do not have prep periods and one has been out for the last two days; needless to say, nobody is making replying to hysterical FAFO emails their highest priorities. Also, literally none of us have a single drop of influence over whether he plays football or not, and I suspect none of us care.
Then Dad, who no one has ever heard from all year, got involved, and Dad decided to cc in the superintendent, who I can absolutely assure you neither has the time nor the inclination to give a single damn about whether a kid with three failing grades played football tonight. Mom’s email was, in its own way, reasonable; Dad’s very much was not, and trust me, sir, only showing up to gripe about playing time in football is not endearing you to any of us. Two of my kids ended up in the hospital after the last 8th grade football game, one concussed so bad that he hasn’t been back to school yet after a week. As far as I’m concerned the entire fucking sport should be banned.
The worst thing? Dad’s a teacher in our district. Which means that he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he’s full of shit, and that no one is trembling at the thought of the superintendent stepping in. By the end of the entire mess Mom was hyperventilating about the kid’s IEP, which, needless to say, does not mention sports eligibility on any of its nineteen pages and also does not contain any particular restrictions on the grades we have to give work that is not turned in. Does he have extra time to get his work done and turn it in? Yes! But he still has to turn it in before that matters, and … well.
The last email was a “demand” that she receive a “clear and written explanation” about whether her son could or could not play in tonight’s football game and why. If she received any such thing, I was not included in the response; I look forward to seeing her in the office already as I walk in in the morning. Because I’m not even failing him anymore and I am genuinely looking forward to this conversation. Of the three of us, me and his sports-obsessed idiot parents, who do you think has actually read the lad’s IEP?
This has obviously been the best weekend ever, as I’ve spent the entire day in bed and have been in the bathroom every 45 minutes to an hour, all day, since about 7:30 this morning. I’ve already called in sick tomorrow. I have a job where I can’t get to the bathroom without someone else covering my class and even if I wake up feeling better I can’t risk it.
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 left the house ten minutes early today, wanting to get to work a few minutes in advance of the morning’s staff meeting, and promptly encountered a car accident on the highway that slowed me to a complete stop and got me to work at pretty much exactly the same time I usually get there– ie, a minute or two late, but not enough that anyone will ever notice or say anything. But God damn if it hasn’t led to me feeling half an hour behind on everything, for the entire day. I ran some errands after work and picked the boy up from school after a club meeting, so I didn’t get home until after 6, and then we ate dinner, and now somehow it’s 8:15 and I’m working on this blog post. I’m completely convinced it’s going to be 9:30 when I finish, no matter how long the post ends up being, and if you can’t tell it’s not like I have a ton of material to work with today.
(A brief digression, where I attempt to find a picture for this post, and find one that keeps getting more bizarre the longer I look at it until l realize that two different girls in the picture have extra knees and therefore the picture is AI. I’m not posting it, but feel free to Google “quiet kids sitting in rows” and see what comes up.)
(Also, Adobe, if something is AI-generated it cannot, by definition, be a stock photo.)
(I type “classrooms” into GIS looking for something generic and the first picture I see also turns out to be AI.)
(Fuck, and I mean that with every ounce of disrespect in my body, generative AI.)
Anyway.
Yesterday was not a bad day at school by any means but all of my classes have been wilder the last couple of days than previously, so I decided to pull back on the reins a little bit today and made everybody stay in their seats for the entire class period. Typically my move this year is that everyone stays in assigned seats for the instruction portion of class, and after that I don’t really care where you sit so long as you’re in the room and you pick a spot and more or less stay there. I wasn’t mad and didn’t act mad in class, I just said that they’d been a little rowdy so we were doing to dial back for a couple of class periods and then things would probably go back to normal.
Here’s how good my classes are: you could have heard a pin drop in my fifth and third hour classes during work time, and my sixth hour was quiet until 90% of them were done with their work, at which point a class discussion erupted that was entirely my fault and made it nearly impossible to keep everyone quiet. Which, again, wasn’t my goal anyway— I wanted to limit movement and chaos a little more than usual and cut down on the noise, but I’m rarely interested in silent classrooms unless I’m teaching or they’re taking a test. Silent classrooms full of kids creep me out, to be completely honest.
All that said, my honeymoon may be coming to an end, as the counselor pulled me aside this afternoon to tell me that a currently homeschooled student would be visiting my classroom on Friday (??) so that she could decide (???) whether she wanted to attend our school part-time (????) or go to the district’s alternative school instead. (?????) As none of this is usually the child’s decision– you have to have made some serious mistakes for part time or alternative school to be an option, and at that point the “option” is not usually your option, it’s the district’s– but I look forward to seeing what sort of bomb this is going to drop into my lovely, peaceful day.
I can only assume that I should have put homeschooled in quotation marks up there.
