Tag: teaching

Never be early

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

The wrong kind of memory lane

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My wife asked me during dinner tonight if the story of two young local women who had gone missing this weekend had crossed my radar; it had not. Apparently they were found in the river today, still in their car. They haven’t been positively identified, but the clothes match and the car is registered to one of the pair.

And … damn. One of them looks very familiar, and both of the names sound familiar, but the ages don’t quite match up with when I was teaching– they would have been in middle school at least partially during my furniture years, I think, but that didn’t stop me from going through my yearbooks. Which neither of them were in. But I don’t have yearbooks from every year I taught, because there weren’t always yearbooks produced, and of course not everyone is there on picture day, and blah blah blah. So I can’t prove that either of them were mine, but any time I know anybody under 30 in this town five will get you twenty that it’s because they’re a former student, and they both ring way too familiar.

So naturally I spent an hour paging through yearbooks going “He’s dead … this one’s in jail … this one’s in jail too … also dead … murder victim … ” and now I’m not in the mood for really anything at all.

I got to say

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A whole lot of kids brought their grades up in class today.

No discipline problems.

Heard good things from several staff members about how pleasant covering my classes yesterday was, and even the ones with things to say were careful to say things like “It was just those two; everyone else was great.”

Found out that one of my least engaged students is really, really good at geography.

My Math Lab kids chewed this problem up and spit it out:

Came home and beat the hell out of some yokai. Tilapia and potatoes for dinner.

And now I’m going to go read until it’s time for bed.

Okay, I lied, I’m going to post an update. I put up this post, with the image below, in late January of 2024:

That’s 72 kids failing out of 134, with 22 kids getting zeroes. Now, this is third quarter– third quarter sucks. My kids’ grades will be worse on January 20 of 2027 than they are right now. So this isn’t a completely fair comparison.

But today was a catch-up day, which is exactly what I was doing on that day up there. And I put a message on the board today, too. And after each class, I updated the numbers. And right now, of my 112 kids who are in my regular 8th grade Math class, I have only fifteen who are failing(*) … and forty-three who are getting an A.

I’m not joking when I say this group of kids is the best I’ve ever had.

(*) That’s less than half the number of kids who were failing at the start of the day.

This is what I mean

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I gave my Math Lab class a paper with six equations on it today, and this one was easily the most difficult of the six. I told them that they did not need to do the equations in order and that I would be paying close attention as they worked, to their conversations with each other, and also to what questions they were asking me, and that I’d be grading them on effort more than whether they completed all six equations in class.

Fully a third of the class threw themselves at the hardest equation first. I gave them the answers; they know that the process is more important to me anyway and it’s useful for them to know if an answer is right before asking me about it. A couple of them refused to turn the paper in at the end of class, saying they were going to take it home and bring it back to me finished on Tuesday.

A lot of them came close, but they all ended up getting lost in the fractions, and one of them basically dared me to solve the question myself. I gotta admit, I was worried; one little calculation error was going to blow my credibility. But that is, in fact, the right answer, as ugly as it might be.

Nice to head into a long weekend on a high.

Time to admit it

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Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.

I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.

If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.

I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.

Another first

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

After twenty-plus years of teaching, I don’t encounter a ton of circumstances any longer that I’ve never run into before. I had two in two days, though– first, despite being home sick yesterday, it was the first day that I’ve ever received an email from a school nurse with the phrase “cannabinoid hyperemesis” in it. Which, if you’re wondering if I immediately sent thirty text messages demanding that someone tell me what I’d missed … yeah, I sure as hell did. Apparently four of our eighth grade girls– two of them mine, judging from the suspensions today– decided to hit a THC vape on the way to school, because there’s nothing like being high in middle school at 8:15 in the Goddamned morning, and, well, apparently one of them didn’t react very well to it. Chunks were blown.

I don’t know if the hypervomiter was mine or not.

Today I got a series of emails from one of last year’s kids, now a high school freshman, asking for help with her math assignment. This, in and of itself, is not remotely new– my record for helping former students is a college sophomore, a former denizen of a 7th grade homeroom of mine, who reached out to me completely out of the blue in hope that I could help her with her statistics homework. I could, as it turns out.

No, what was new was that she was doing this while she was sitting in math class. Her current math class, in high school, with her high school Algebra 1 teacher. And, to add to the hilarity, I know her math teacher, and I don’t like her very much. I have received emails from way more of last year’s eighth graders than I usually do this early in the year, and several of them have been begging me either to move up to the high school (nope) or take them back (also nope), and every single one who I’ve asked has turned out to have this particular teacher. I don’t know if y’all remember the saga in my previous district of the teacher whose “medical leave” led to me getting stuffed into her classroom and constantly yanked around when she told people she’d be back on a certain date and then didn’t come back, but yeah, she’s back, and she works at the high school now. She still sucks, too.

Anyway, I got her through her assignment, while teaching my own students. Because that’s just how much of a badass I am, that I can teach two different classes in two different buildings at the same time.

Who wants to touch me?

no words only sleep

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Came home, died in my chair, and then ate some pizza, and now in lieu of an actual post, please accept this picture of my new closet, complete with my clothes and the new motion-detecting lighting I’ve added. I thought for a minute that all my shit wasn’t going to fit, but that’s because I don’t understand how hangers work.

what the hell is this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

If I look at this very, very carefully, I can pull some correct answers out of it. Like, there’s a 230 next to #1 up there. There’s a B106 next to #7, next to some arcane hieroglyphics of no known purpose. The ones in black pen are my handwriting, obviously. This kid brought this to me with the first four done, asked me if he was doing them right, and the marks on the page resembled no known words in any known language, so I walked him through the very straightforward lesson again and showed him what to do. This is what he turned in.

It is possible that the psychic damage I will take from trying to read this carefully will not be worth it. It is also possible that reading this will teach me spells.

Another thing I ran into with this assignment that I’ve not seen before is kids who absolutely cannot write exponents smaller and in the upper right of the number. As in they don’t have the fine motor skills necessary for it. It’s mind-blowing. We’re going to have to do a lot of written work this year just to get their handwriting to the point where it’s at what we used to think of as a first- or second-grade level. This is, remember, a fourteen-year-old’s work.

Giving these kids devices was the worst mistake the field of education has made during my lifetime. It’s worse than the overemphasis on standardized testing. This is a fucking disaster.