The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
The overhead light still needs to go, and there are three really stubborn nails that I may just cut off instead of pulling, but we are basically ready for the new closet to go in at this point. This was way easier than either of us thought it was going to be.
More later, probably.
Guess what’s happening later this week?
Let’s see. I promised a real post today, after several days of brief whines about being tired, only … really, all I did today was clear out my closet. A little bit of shopping for my son’s birthday later in the week. And I put together my parent contact log for this year, which, damn it, I’m going to use, and I’m going to use it because I’m going to be better about contacting parents.
I’ve been saying this for 22 years and it hasn’t happened; I hate talking to parents. This will be the year, though, I swear. I also dug into discipline data from last year and it turns out that my current group of kids had considerably fewer office referrals than either of the other two grades last year, which was an interesting thing to find out. Tomorrow, in between– ahem– some bouts of demolition work, I need to do lesson planning, because it turns out I do actually have to teach this week. And so it goes.
That probably doesn’t count as a real post. I guess it’s good that this is my blog and it’s up to me. 🙂
I’ll be back to normal tomorrow, and today was a stellar second day of school, but my God, I’m going to die early for like the fourth day in a row.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.