Another one in the books

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My 23rd first day of school– I counted, I know I’m right this time– is done and dusted. One down, 179 left to go.

I have been talking for seven and a half hours, and I’m exhausted. I’m changing my plans for tomorrow so that I don’t have to talk as much. I’ll make Monday another big talky-talky day; these kids are gonna have to move around tomorrow. It was pretty nondescript as these things go; I have no immediate problem kids and the handful I had an eye on at least managed to come off as friendly and approachable. No obvious rage beasts just yet, which is good. I said “You will either be my favorite student or my nemesis” to at least two different kids, and of those two, I’m pretty sure I got lucky by having him in first hour. The kid who was widely regarded as the biggest discipline problem in the 7th grade last year is in my fourth hour and did not draw attention to himself today.

All positives, basically. That said, I’m so tired I could die, so I’m going to go do that.

In which I think I got away with it

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The boss spent at least an hour in my classroom today for a meeting, and then came back later and helped me move some boxes of textbooks from a cart in the hallway onto the counter directly behind the couches, so I think she’s probably not going to have anything to say about them, at least not right now. I’ll take it. I mean, if they end up with lice or some shit I’ll have to get rid of them, which is probably the reason for the rule, but that was never not true.

Also, I found out that the annual beg for school supplies that I’ve been running for years is also against school board policy and is supposed to get approved in advance– not by the principal, but by the school board. I got two more packages today, so … oops, I guess? I’m super chastened right now, I swear. I won’t do anything against board policy for at least a month, I promise.(*)

(Note again: they’re fine with banning us from asking for donations through Amazon wish lists– specifically referenced in the policy– without permission from the school board, but nobody is actually suggesting that they might pay to outfit the classrooms with supplies properly. There are three copiers in our building for seventy-something teachers and all three have been broken for at least a day this week. Fix that shit and leave me the fuck alone.)

I think I’m ready for tomorrow. I’m a little more nervous right now than I usually am, which is surprising; this week has been A Lot in a way that the last few years haven’t for some reason. Once the kids are in the room it’ll go fine, I know that, and as usual everyone I met at Open House last night seemed super nice. But I am going to sleep well this weekend.

(*) almost definitely not true

Two more hours

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A double shift of Open House was already going to be bad enough— 1:00-3:00 and then 5:00-7:00– but I was not prepared for a fucking tornado warning to happen during the first half. Not fun.

Gonna die the moment I get home. Today started out with moving the cars away from the hail, so I’ve pretty much had enough of everything at this point.

#REVIEW: Innamorata, by Ava Reid

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Warning, maybe: reading this will make you reread Gormenghast.

Innamorata, and in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t know why the title is misspelled, is the fourth of Ava Reid’s books I’ve read. I actually own five of them; the fifth is the sequel to one of the other ones, bought at roughly the same time, and I think I read the first one and didn’t like it very much so I never got around to reading Book Two. Typically, once I own five of an author’s books, I’ve graduated to big fan of that author, or at least fan, and Reid, frustratingly, still hasn’t quite written a book that completely hit for me. And to be honest, I only bought this one because there was a ton of stupid BookTok drama and backlash against it that I’m not going to get into, and it pissed me off so I bought the book, striking back with my hard-earned money against the opinions of people I will never meet who similarly do not know I exist or that I bought this book to spite them and their unreasonable ideas.

Anyway.

Have you read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books? If you have, knowing that Ava Reid begins this book with a quote from Gormenghast and that the castle that the main character lives in at the start of the book is called Castle Peake is probably enough to get you to pick this up. If you have not read any of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, you should go read them, then come back to this post.

The book begins with a funeral, the funeral for an old woman known as the Mistress of Teeth, and her funeral is attended by representatives for the Master of Blood, the Master of Eyes, the Master of Lungs, the Master of Bones, and the Master of Flesh, and the first several Masters take their parts from the corpse before the Master of Flesh stomps the flaccid, shredded sack of meat that remains into the mud, thus ensuring that the Mistress cannot rise from the dead. The former Mistress of Teeth’s teeth are made into a necklace for the new Mistress of Teeth, and I’m given to understand that the necklace contains teeth from several previous holders of that title. The book ends– this is technically a spoiler, but I think I can get away with it– with something “stirring” in a murdered woman’s womb, a murdered woman who was very much not pregnant when she was killed.

This is Gothic body horror, a lot of it, and it is deeply fucked up, and here I allude to the controversy in that you should completely ignore the marketing text that tries real hard to pretend this is a romantasy, because it is very much not a fucking romantasy, although I will admit it has some elements of same, including some, well, fucking. If you read books for atmosphere and mood and language, and the notion of reading something that is very much like a modern take on Peake appeals to you, jump at it. If you read books for other reasons … maybe not. The book is 532 pages long; I put it down, somewhat unwillingly, with about 80 pages left last night, having read all of the rest of it during my road trip. I got home from work today and read those last 80 pages, and I kind of feel like at some point the actual plot collapsed under its own weight. There is some interesting character development throughout, but that character development is going to involve someone completely abandoning every personality trait and motivation and goal that she had at the beginning of the book, and some of that stuff sounded pretty interesting! Lady Agnes wanted to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps– that’s grandma getting stomped into the mud in the first few pages– and restore necromancy to the creepy-ass island she lives on. That’s automatically cool!

She decides not to, basically because she gets distracted, and you’re going to have to be okay with that if you’re going to have a good time with this. And that was hellishly disappointing, even if a lot of the other stuff that happens was, again, cool and atmospheric and creepy and another part of the controversy was about trigger warnings, and I’m just going to tell you a lot of fucked up shit happens and has already happened, and there is so, so, so much blood in this book, and some spectacularly poor parenting, and I eventually turned that into four stars, but the sequel is going to get read right after it comes out, even if I’m kind of hoping it digs itself out of a bit of a hole.

Let’s call that a cautious and conditional recommendation for Innamorata, and you should definitely read Mervyn Peake.

Rebooting

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Is it weird that I can’t remember what year of teaching this is? It’s either 22 or 23, I think. It’s 2026, my first year of teaching was 2000, minus two years for grad school, minus two years for being Furniture Man, means I finished 22 years and I’m starting 23, right? Assuming I count the semester I took off when I got sick?

I feel like I should have an easier time calculating something like that, but I don’t want to write it down and my brain is stupid.

Anyway, we road-tripped today and drove home in a driving thunderstorm and I’m reading a good book and I have to be in bed in an hour. I’m absolutely sure something will piss me off at some point tomorrow so there will probably be a longer post then.

Back to the grind we go.

Let’s get this over with

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I have been tired and headachy all day, and seeing as how we have to go to Indianapolis for the day tomorrow and school starts Monday, I don’t have time to be sick right now. So I’m taking the night off and going to bed extremely early. Have a lovely evening, y’all.

We’re mostly there

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The hex lights that you can see there on that desk are basically the only things that have to be put up; I was out of the proper adhesives to hang them up and they just arrived today, so I’ll get those hung up on Monday, and I have one more item of decor that is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. The pile of miscellaneous junk on that other desk has been banished to the staff lounge, where anyone who wants it can take it, and if it’s still there in a week or so (it won’t be) I’ll just throw what’s left away. But the room is ready to go; if I found out I was having kids or parents on five minutes’ notice I could toss a couple of things into the closet and nobody would know the difference. This means that I can take the ten hours or so of classroom prep time that I have spread over Monday through Wednesday and use it for every single other thing I have to have ready rather than getting the room set up.

From the “say the same shit you said on Bluesky in a more permanent form” files, I give you these two skeets:

And here is the result of that work, after … oh, an hour, to get everything up on the wall properly? I didn’t fall off of the stepladder or the counter I had to stand on, which you should be proud of me for. Also, note that every single one of those letters is stapled to the wall in defiance of the documentation we were sent about classroom decoration, because the walls are supposed to have things stapled to them.

Anyway:

One more weekend, and then we’re back for real.

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Teaching1 Comment

Today was more or less the exact same day as yesterday– got up, went to work for a few hours, argued with no one in particular about my classroom furniture, got home, worked on school shit for a bit more. We met some family for dinner at a place that is traditional for my wife’s side of the family, and I think I am going to push back the next time it is suggested they go there, but “Luther didn’t like his dinner” is not the most engaging of blog posts.

So instead, I’m going to go read for a while. My suggestion to you is that if you have never heard Abdul el-Sayed speak, you should do some Googling and watch a speech or two. He’s been all over my TikTok lately and I’m starting to get serious Barack Obama 2004 vibes from the guy. I’m going to try to embed an appropriate snippet, but I’m not convinced it’s going to play nice with WordPress. We’ll see:

…

It will not. So click the link:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTAtWsPxa