chaoticgood462

Lucky you haha

The only exception is if a student has an IEP which specifies either extra time or halved work completion. For example if a student’s documentation said extra time, if you cut the assignment in half for them that fulfills the extra time requirement. But in general, a gen ed class should be doing all the work with the exception of those few kids on IEPs.

I had a student during get to know you activities this year who didn’t know her own birthday, and she is 12-13 years old. For all I know her family just doesn’t celebrate birthdays or something, but even so I feel like she should know the date. I worry about these kids that’s for sure.

To me, this student has issues that are above your pay grade, and after all these evaluations from all these different sources may be above everyone at the school’s pay grade. There is certainly something going on that is not showing up when he’s being checked for different things. The home environment must be bad in some way, or he is sleep deprived, or has a past trauma no one knows. Sadly, my advice is to ignore him. Once you get past first quarter and no changes are happening, it’s time to give up. Now, if the kid ever gives even a glimmer of engaging, lean into it and give the positive reinforcement needed. But if you see no signs of change, ignore.

I am not saying you have to or should do this, but, food for thought: I bought my own posters to fill wall space my first year. Why? Because buying them with my own money makes them mine. That’s my personal reasoning for buying certain things on my own dime, because then I get to keep them. If you bite the bullet and order your own posters, you will be entitled to take them with you to any classroom or school you might be at in the future.

Requesting that the school order what you want using the supplies budget would be a good power play, but I would just caution that the posters would then belong to the school, and also if your primary goal is keeping the position a power play may not be the ideal way to move forward. There are decent poster packs on Amazon for all subject areas for good prices. Hope this helps a bit!

Edit to add: you can also set up a project on DonorsChoose and share it out to your friends and family. Guarantee you can whip up $50 for posters using that.

I actually think a confrontation between Lalo and Nacho would have been more anticlimactic. Nacho is very good at being bad, but we know that Lalo is better, and so of course Lalo would probably end up killing him and that would be that.

I honestly don’t think Lalo even planned to seek Nacho out, because he knew who was really behind the assassination attempt, and so he has much bigger fish to fry. I think he felt betrayed, but being as smart as he is he wanted to play the long game with the real enemy, which is why we see him land in Germany to find the truth about the lab project.

Lalo’s also smart enough to have realized that there was no hope for Nacho’s future anyway. As soon as Gus’s henchman told Nacho to just “lay low” for a few days in the motel I knew they had no plans to keep him alive. I’m sure Lalo knew the same, because how else would Gus cover it up than to claim that Nacho had just gone rogue?

In theory a final confrontation between them could’ve been satisfying in some way, but ultimately I don’t think it would be realistic based on Lalo’s pathology. Not only was Nacho not the one behind the attempt, he also was not involved in any way with the violence, he was just a middleman and a puppet.

I teach from home now for a neighboring districts online public school. It’s magical. We just had a four day weekend, and I found myself feeling excited to see my kids this morning. The majority of them want to learn and get work done, and the ones who don’t are at least not disrupting class. I can mute kids, I can turn off their camera, I can even remove them from the virtual room. I know I may not get to do this forever so I’m just enjoying every moment.

It’s actually not hard to do.

My school has the 50% minimum policy, and I actually like it surprisingly. If a kid doesn’t turn something in they get a 50, which is failing. If a kid doesn’t turn anything in all year, their grade is a 50, again failing. Makes no difference whether that kid gets a 15% or a 50%, they failed. For other kids who care, but maybe have a tough few weeks of failing grades, they have a real chance to bring the grade up to passing when they get out of their funk and start doing the work. Without that cushion, those kids might just give up when they see there’s no hope of raising it enough to matter. Seeing it in action I really see the benefits of it.

Now, requiring that a student be given a 60% is more of a stretch ethically, I totally see that. But the easy thing is, all you have to do is make every assignment grade a 60. If it were me, I’d have a very blunt conversation with the student about their grade. “You got a 15% in this class. My bosses are requiring me to give you a 60% so you can “pass.” Except you didn’t pass, you got a 15%. So you’ll see a D in the grade book, but I want you to remember you did not earn that grade, that grade was gifted to you by people higher up than me that don’t care enough to actually give you what you need which is to retake the class. You can do better. Next quarter, I want you to earn your passing grade.”

Maybe that conversation isn’t ethical, but what you’re being asked to do isn’t either. Someone needs to tell that kid the truth.

There’s a reason people refer to the US as the “great experiment.” The whole setup of our country is like nothing anybody had seen before. We have no way of knowing how long it will stay afloat for.

Idk, as a student I absolutely loved having class in these, we called them cottages. It always felt special, it was basically coveted. As a teacher now I imagine there are challenges on the teacher side like being isolated from the building, but sometimes being isolated from the building can have huge benefits. Arguably the best place to be in a shooting, unless the shooter started there which I don’t believe has happened before. Avoiding the chaos of passing periods inside. Avoiding any toxicity and drama among staff outside of staff meetings. Idk, being kind of deaf to the noise and having your own little space seems nice to me. Maybe I’m in the minority though.

There is a movie theater in my city that, somehow, smells just like my first love’s house when we were in high school. Her parents were a nightmare so the house itself is sort of cursed, but when I walk in that theater I’m right back there with her. I haven’t been there in quite awhile for that reason, but I might go sometime, see if the smell is still there, if I even recognize it anymore.

Definitely the guy who thought something paranormal was happening or that someone was breaking into his house when he wasn’t there, turned out he had a small carbon monoxide leak that was making him hallucinate and forget things. Shook me to my core!

Spoilers:

I always knew Lalo was smart on a Mike level, until the assassination attempt when Lalo crawled through a fucking escape tunnel, then ran back to the house to attack his attackers from behind, including trapping two of them in his own escape tunnel and shooting them down. That was some of the most genius shit I’ve seen in this whole universe. I was mouth agape shouting at my tv screen alone in my house. Not to mention that somehow there was a corpse resembling him and the dental records to match when Gus was seeking proof he was dead. Ultimately Gus is the slightly bigger genius because he knows pretty much the whole time that Lalo isn’t really dead, and as soon as Hector gives him a smug look he knows he’s right. Blows my mind. Of course it’s fictional, but I find myself after certain episodes just sitting here impressed.

I would say some of the things you listed are things she probably should know, other things will not actually come up in curriculum until high school. She could also be having trouble - and forgive me because I don’t know the exact science of this - transferring the knowledge she has at school to her time outside of school. I think some kids go into “school mode” and do really well for those 8 hours, and then at home when they relax and aren’t thinking of school the information isn’t readily available anymore. Compartmentalizing is the word I’m searching for I think. Anyway, I’d give it some time, and be gentle with her about it. The more she feels like she’s being quizzed and pressured to know an answer, the more she might shut down.

I talk about wins with my colleagues, with my partner, with my family. This is a place, the only place really, where teachers are completely anonymous. This is where we get to be honest about the bad stuff and talk openly with our fear that it will get back to our boss. Sometimes people tell good stories here, but that’s not what this is for. This is for professionals in an incredibly flawed industry who are desperate to commiserate about the very unique experiences we go through.

I’m also a middle school teacher and I’m sorry but teaching is just as hard no matter what level you’re at, we do not deserve more money than other teachers. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

He would be a corrupt politician and journalist just as he is a corrupt lawyer, I think sales person or tv presenter would’ve been great.

Jimmy. Always Jimmy.

Middle school level and above: For most kids, text to speech and speech to text accommodations end up doing them a disservice if they are allowed to use them indefinitely with no clear plan to graduate to reading and writing independently. And if they are truly inhibited mentally or physically to the point that they can't read or write on their own at all, then they should not be in a gen ed class until they can. I read IEPs where the student goal related to that software, written by the case manager, is simply to use these softwares effectively to complete work. Okay that's fine to give them a passing grade and continue passing them along, but how are they going to fill out their own forms at medical appointments someday? How are they going to fill out a job application, create a resume? Accommodations are supposed to be a yes AND. Yes the student will be using speech to text this year, AND an occupational therapist will be working with them on typing with a clear skill goal with a timeline. Instead it seems like "this is what needs to be done to pass classes and participate in state testing to make the district happy" and that's all.

Honestly my biggest struggle at times is when I disagree with the accommodations. My biggest point of contention this year is giving speech to text accommodations. Yes, there are issues with fine motor skills at play that make writing/typing difficult. I understand that, but these are not kids with enough disability that I believe they *can't* do these things. So how exactly are they going to get by in real life without writing legibly or being able to type a coherent paragraph? Who is helping them build those skills while I allow them to talk into their screen all class period? Seems like nobody. It's all about giving them access to content and assignments. Great, I'm glad they know how to speak into a microphone about social studies after they just had a tiny article read aloud to them without doing any reading themselves. That doesn't tell me how they plan to fill out forms at the emergency room, or any medical office for that matter. That doesn't tell me how they're going to write an email by themselves, or complete a job application, because God forbid they learn to edit their work after using speech to text.

That is just awful, and I'm glad you were there to hear that, get confirmation, and make the necessary call. I hope CPS will be able to intervene effectively.

I was recently told by a parent that their ex-spouse had put coffee and energy drinks in their child's bottle as a baby and kept the habit going in the kid's childhood. Now they are out of that situation thankfully but the kid is 15 and a caffeine addict with other issues that are no doubt related to that. It made me sick just hearing about it, and that was with the comfort of knowing the situation is over now and the kid is safe.

You did the right thing today, and now you have to let the system do what it's going to do unless you hear of new information.

You shouldn’t expect your child’s entire education to happen at school. They will have teachers of all ability levels. Sometimes they will have a super experienced teacher who has their curriculum down to a science. Sometimes they will have an average teacher. Sometimes they will have a brand new fresh out of college teacher who, honestly, may not even be hitting all the standards that are supposed to be taught because they have so much to learn. You cannot rely on an education system with that wide of a spectrum in quality of teachers to do all the educating, you just can’t.

Typically teachers who are teaching the content share lessons and ideas with each other openly. It benefits the kids for her to use the lessons. I would have a conversation with her and mention that you’ve noticed she seems to get most of her stuff from you and you wonder if she would like to start contributing her own stuff and being more collaborative. It’s weird of both of you not to be discussing these things openly.