Tag: teaching

Help me out here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?

I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.

In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.

(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)

Fair warning

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Coming home and dying on Fridays seems to have been a thing lately, and indeed, that’s what I did tonight, and we are going to be at a wedding out of town tomorrow night, so don’t expect much more than a hotel picture unless I can con the bride into something vaguely compromising. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of planning to do for Monday, because I suspect once we get back on Sunday all three of us are going to collapse into separate rooms and not speak again for a while.

I quit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

All of it. Forever. Forever and ever, and ever and ever.

This is a review of a local high school, and I hope the author steps on a Lego every time she gets out of bed for the rest of her stupid life, and I hope her mattress is lumpy and her pillow is fifteen degrees warmer than her room:

Also, guess what LMS my district uses?

There’s currently a screen up saying Canvas is undergoing “scheduled” maintenance, which … no. No, it isn’t.

Well, that didn’t work

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was going to write a post about an annoying-but-hopefully-ultimately-rewarding task that I set myself to complete tonight (take the word “task” with salt) except, oops, I didn’t actually finish it. Which kind of leaves me without a post and without the possible “ultimately rewarding” bit, because I think I might die if I continue working on said task.

On the plus side, I had a meeting tomorrow that I wasn’t looking forward to, and then I realized that I was the chairperson of the committee that I don’t want to go to the meeting of, so I emailed everybody and said “Hey, I’ve really got nothing to say tomorrow. Y’all mind if the meeting is an email?” So far the only person to respond is the principal, who was fine with cancelling (she hasn’t attended the last few anyway) but she’s the big boss so we are totally making the meeting an email.

Anyway, maybe we’ll do that post tomorrow night. We’ll see if The Task gets completed or not.

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

How did that happen?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.

(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)

Deep breath

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

Just tossed a job application off into the void, likely to never be heard from again. It’s a moonshot; there’s a national search taking place and, well, that’s probably enough right there to not stress myself out about it. But fuck it, I’m definitely not gonna get it if I don’t apply, and the hour or so it took to update my resume and dash off a cover letter isn’t exactly a massive time investment. It took longer to find a copy of my resume that wasn’t a .pdf than it did to do the writing.

It was a long day today. We started the final round of ILEARN testing today, so <insert rant here> as you see fit, and then I had an interaction with a student at the end of the day that led to me genuinely wondering why I don’t just slap a motherfucker in the face once in a while. To be clear, I was thinking about doing the job application before that— I’ve been tossing it around for a couple of weeks, in fact— but hearing “I’ve been written up 600 times this year and nothing ever happens to me” definitely was a factor in pulling the trigger.

The number is 24, by the way, not 600, and considering that the kid has been absent for nearly eighty days this year (not counting suspensions) I think it’s fair that she does, in fact, have some experience interfacing with the office. I’ve done a good job letting this shit roll off my back this year; life is going to take care of this kid sooner or later, so it doesn’t have to be my job. I normally try to have a little more compassion with my kids, but this one wasn’t even one of my kids, just some random shithead in the hallway being a shithead, so to hell with her.

Anyway, I promised a book review today, which is going to have to wait until tomorrow, but if it helps any there may be a semi-irate in-progress video game review after that? I dunno, we’ll see.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I wasn’t intending to skip posting for the second night in a row (Wednesday doesn’t count, that shit was funny) but I got home and fell asleep in a chair and that was it for the night. Good news, though: I successfully went to a full day of work for five straight days this week! Unbelievably, this is the first time this has happened in 2026. There are twenty-eight days of school left.

Also, Caskey Russell’s The Door on the Sea is really damn good and I should write a full review of it. Maybe tomorrow? We’ll see.