The one thing that requires zero effort is shutting the motherfucking hell UP during a lesson, but my 8th grade students can’t seem to make it happen, so I separated their desks yesterday afternoon and pointed all of them forward, and they’ll no longer be engaging in group work.

Edit: Because we have a bunch of Dunning-Krugers in this comment thread, I will clarify.

I’ve been teaching for 18 years. This is my 6th year teaching 8th grade. I have four classes with more than 30 students, and a full third of the students in all six classes won’t stop talking. This is not an incompetent first-year teacher saying this. This is not a jaded, about-to-retire teacher saying this. This is not just a paycheck for me. It is my vocation and I take it seriously. I earned a Bachelor’s in education and a Master’s in math education; my K12 students generally love my classes because I am knowledgeable and make math fun to learn, and I always get the highest evaluation scores for the undergraduate classes with students regularly saying “I always used to struggle with/be afraid of/hate math, but [teacher] helped me get my first A/B ever in a math class.”

The entire school…from the teachers to the administrators…knows what I know about this group of 8th graders, that the behavior of one-third of them is beyond the pale. None of us has had a set of students like these before, and none of us has a great solution. So we are just going to take away all privileges and give them back slowly over time once they’ve shown that they have earned them.

It’s not just that they talk to much. It is that it is a third of every class, that they make it impossible to teach the two-thirds who are capable of being decent students on any given day, that they take pride and literal pleasure in being disruptions, that they have little shame or humility and thus no impetus to allow their teachers to teach, that phone calls home are fruitless, that we have little recourse as far as the administration is concerned and have to keep them in class, that I am autistic with auditory processing disorder and can’t understand what a kid right in front of me is saying even with me putting my ear right next to their mouth and them repeating their question three times…

So please save armchair teachering because you really, really don’t know what you’re talking about.

I can read UPC, UPC-8, ISBN, and EAN bar codes. Tear the numbers off the bottom of the bar code, hand me the lines, and I will tell you the numbers you tore off.

I used to work the midnight shift at a call center back in the late 90s. It was incredibly boring because we weren’t allowed to browse the internet when no calls were coming in (which was most of the time, got maybe five calls total per night). So I picked up a copy of Yahoo! Internet Life, a now-defunct technology-centered magazine. This issue had a how-to section for wacky shit like that, so I committed it to memory because wtf else was there to do?

This past month, I moved from Texas - a state that bans collective bargaining rights for public employees - to Oregon. Oregon has strong unions for educators, so I was prouder than a new dad to pay my dues for this year.

After almost 20 years teaching in Texas, where your teacher’s organization dues are really only lawsuit insurance. Sure, they will send reps to school board meetings to fight for better wages, but they really have no power at all. You even whisper the word “strike”, and the Texas Education Agency will cancel your certification permanently. So this is a very welcome change.

“Again, we want to make clear our unreserved apology to Anna Landre and we are making every effort to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

That’s the thing though, isn’t it? The entire point of her advocacy…of anyone’s advocacy when it comes to their disability…is for able-bodied people to think ahead to make sure that the same services they enjoy and places through which they can travel can also be accessed by disabled people as well.

Apologizing ex post facto and “making every effort to ensure this doesn’t happen again” really just means “we’ll make sure we have ramps available next time.” It doesn’t mean they are committing to choose well-contrasting colors in their documentation for ease of reading for color blind people, or that as a matter of habit they will have sign language interpreters on call for every event, or any number of other things. The “Oops, We Dun Goofed” apology promise is almost always just to not to do that particular goof no more.

As an autistic teacher (as in I am autistic, not that I teach only autistic kids), I am on the lookout for ND kids who have slipped through the cracks. One of them this year took under my wing, and she just flourished.

When J would come into my on-level Algebra 2 class at the very beginning of this past school year, I could well recognize the fear of math lurking behind her glazed-over eyes and panicked microgestures. I suspected she was autistic due to her speech patterns, movements, and other things, so I put that idea on her counselor’s radar. Not sure what became of that, but it’s not my job to clock the counselors and diagnostician, so I just trusted they were doing their jobs. 😊

I started with building trust with J, by insisting that she just try and then, when she got stuck in frustration, showing her the patience she deserved and guiding her with a smile through filling the gaps in her knowledge. Once she could see that I wasn’t going to jump on her wrong answers and make her feel even more stupid than she already felt, she was willing to follow through on just trying as I’d asked her to do every day. “Perfection is a myth, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. So just…try! Give yourself permission to be wrong, because that is the only way learning can happen.”

And so she did…her grades for the six grading periods of the school year were (approximation) 70, 75, 81, 86, 92, and 98. By the fourth six weeks, she was asking for extra examples to try in class, and she insisted upon being able to understand how to do them before the period ended. I’m not sure if I could say she loved math after my class, certainly not as much as I love it, but she was no longer afraid of it, and she had developed the tenacity and self-efficacy she needed to show any future math class what for and no mistake.

J really did my teacher heart proud!

Right? And also…who needs space between two homes if there are no lawns? Just moosh all the outer walls together.

Come to think of it…that’s gonna result in a ridiculously long line of houses. Maybe we could moosh roofs and bottom floors and stack 'em up a bit to make the line of houses only a half to a third as long, and then leave a little space between Consecutive House Stacks™️ - y’know, so that there’ll room for more windows.

You mean like having movers coming in a few weeks but not getting off my ass for the past five days to start putting my life into boxes to move halfway across the country? Cuz it feels like you might be referring to my having movers coming in a few weeks but me not getting off my ass for the past five days to start putting my life into boxes to move halfway across the country.

In the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the main character Sadie is a video game designer who created his game in which you play a worker creating factory parts. If you ignore what’s going on around you and just focus on winning the game by making the parts better and faster, eventually the game ends and it becomes clear that you were creating equipment for Nazis during the Holocaust and, thus, you lose the game.

Movies love to have twist endings in which something would have been obvious if you were paying better attention. I think more video games need to do this as well.

I grew up in Arlington, TX and can confirm this is true. For our field trip every year, we’d go to the Southwest Airlines warehouse and take the tour. And by “tour”, I mean we’d wait 15 minutes outside while our teacher got our wristbands, and we’d go in and look at the Commodore 64. Then we’d leave and eat our sack lunches.

OH…and the guy didn’t have a mini-bat. It was full size, and any snotty 10-year-old getting his grubby little hands anywhere near ol’ Tandy 400, he’d go “Uh uh uh!” and point at the bat.

She was an hour and a half late. I only waited for her because she was responding to my messages, apologized for her tardiness, and said a couple times she’d be there within 20-30 minutes which led to a 90-minute wait). Once she got there, she told me that she was late because she was having some anxiety that day and went to a friend’s to smoke a bowl first. She chainsmoked on the patio, and I sat away from her because I don’t want to smell that while I’m eating. She told me about a terrible book she was writing, with the sort of stupid plot you’d get from r/writingprompts. And then she said she needed to get high again and asked me if I wanted to come to her car with her while she did. I declined and said I was gonna head home. Proceeded to promply never see her again.