Fifteen teachers out in the building is already a rough goddamned day.
Making the worst DCS call of my entire life is already a rough goddamned day.
Both happening on the same day damn near broke me.
Tag: teaching
I can’t tell this story
I got a new student today, or rather I got her yesterday but I met her today, since I managed to drag my ass back to work this morning. Her name was unique but not in a way that seemed hard to pronounce; demographic data said she was white, but “white” can still cover a whole hell of a lot of ethnicities, right? I was prepared for her to be Eastern European or any of a variety of different things, but I still felt like I wasn’t going to immediately pronounce her name wrong unless there was something genuinely weird about it.
You may or may not be aware that “Micheal” is starting to be a way that people who are dumb and bad have chosen to spell their sons’ names. If you’ve been teaching in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably encountered at least one Micheal in there somewhere, and if you’re like me, you’ve immediately resolved to never contact those parents, ever, under any circumstances.
Gentle reader, the actual pronunciation of this child’s name is so, so much worse than simply reversing the admittedly-not-entirely-intuitive vowel placement in “Michael.” It’s worse than the forty thousand different spellings of “Jasmine” I’ve encountered over the years. Now, I really can’t tell you her actual name, because it’s unique enough that if she ever Googles herself she’ll find this post. But imagine a child being named, oh, I dunno, “Sahar,” and you think oh, that’s a neat name, I’ve never met a Sahar before, and you figure it’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “Sahara,” right? Might be wrong, but surely it’s not that far off. Like maybe you think it’s Suh-harrrr and it’s Sa-hair. Wrong, but not offensively so.
And then she tells you her name is pronounced “Sarah,” and you have to immediately freeze your face and not let the words No, it fucking isn’t, you poor thing out of your mouth.
I want my Oscar, Goddammit.
This was such a good idea
Teachers: name your calculators.
Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.
I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.
Y’all.
At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.
Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.
There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.
LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.
The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.
Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.
On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.
On vocabulary
I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.
(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)
Burn the whole technology to the ground
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
Taking tonight off
I’m going to finish the Chernow book if it kills me, and while I really don’t think it’s going to, I feel like I’m still tired from yesterday and pre-tired for tomorrow and Friday, so every time I sit down to read my brain is turning to mush.
The book is still five stars. Twain himself may have lost a star now that I know more about him.
An unfairly busy day
I had to get to work half an hour early, because I had a ton of shit to bring into my classroom to get ready, burned my entire prep on getting ready for a meeting after school, said meeting lasted an hour and a half, left work and drove directly to my son’s band concert at his school, carefully threw McDonald’s down my neck so as to not aggravate either my tooth hole or the sore that has developed in my mouth from a bad reaction to the numbing shots (super fun), spent over an hour on working on stuff for class tomorrow since I’m being observed during 2nd hour and she wants lesson plans for some reason, like, ma’am, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and it’s all muscle memory by now, I don’t write lesson plans, and now it’s 8:44 and I’ve written a single-sentence blog post and I’m going to go talk to my family for a few minutes and then go to bed.
Okay NOW I’m dead
Made it through PTCs, and now it’s 6:42 pm and I may very well be in bed by 7:30.
And I still get to have a tooth pulled tomorrow, so don’t expect the quality of posting around here to improve for at least another day.
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