Tried to find an appropriate image for summer school and couldn’t find anything I really liked, so feel free to enjoy this ultra-rare photo of two of my three cats sharing my lap. It could have been better if one of them was looking at the camera or both of them were in focus, but I was worried that any movement at all might cause one or both of them to bolt, so I took what I could get.
Anyway, summer school, or, sorry, the Summer Learning Program, since technically I’m not employed by any school district for the next several weeks, starts tomorrow. I have to be there at 8:00, have an entire hour of prep, then three hours of teaching, then I do that 21 more times and then I’m done. I have ten kids on one roster and twelve at another, so we’ll see how many actually show up. I know one of them already and she’s awesome. Tomorrow is a survey and a pre-test and some getting to know you activities. Tomorrow there’s a different pre-test. Actual regular day stuff starts Wednesday. The curriculum is all pre-baked. There’s literally no accountability for anyone involved. This should be easy as hell.
This will be my third piece about a former teacher who has passed away, and to be completely honest, had you mentioned Mr. Nemeth to me before a couple of hours ago, I would have thought that he had already left us some time ago. He was my math teacher in seventh or eighth grade– I think in eighth, so this would be 1989-1990, but I cannot remember my other middle school math teacher to save my life, so it’s possible I had him in seventh. He spent, according to his obituary, 45 years teaching, all of it at the same school, and once again I find myself flummoxed at the idea that I’m as far into my career as I am and may not yet have reached the halfway point of his. He passed away at 90, so he would have only been in his mid-fifties when I had him.
I am trying really hard right now to not think too hard about the fact that he wasn’t that much older than I am now when I was in his class, and I’m definitely not trying to reconcile that knowledge with the idea I had that he was much older.
I really liked Mr. Nemeth– everybody did, as far as I remember– and while my memories from middle school are sketchy at best, I feel like he was one of the better math teachers I had. He was definitely someone who enjoyed working with kids as well, which is not exactly the same thing as being a good teacher– you can, believe it or not, be a tremendous educator and not “like kids” that much.
Now, I need you to be aware that I wrote those three paragraphs along with several others, and then made the post live. After that I went and looked at my yearbook from 8th grade, and then my head exploded. I have left the paragraphs above unedited– you will note that I said that I don’t remember if I had him in seventh or eighth grade? As it turns out, I had him in seventh grade, and this story that I wrote about him for an RIP post, the story that I’m going to reproduce below, was not about him. Because I went and looked at my yearbook and, yes, I did have Mr. Nemeth, and I liked Mr. Nemeth, but my eighth grade teacher was named Mr. Farkas, and he passed away in 2020(*). So I wrote this whole story intending it to be a charming anecdote about a beloved former teacher who had passed away and I was writing about the wrong guy.
(Fun fact about middle school: A good chunk of adults have very few working memories of the years between 12-14 as compared to any other era of their lives, and it’s because your brains are so thoroughly marinated in puberty chemicals that forming long-term memories is actually inhibited. I could not have told you Mr. Farkas’ name until seeing his picture, at which point everything just completely shook loose in my head. To be clear, I did like Mr. Nemeth, now that I’m remembering him properly, and I’m going to tell the story about Mr. Farkas anyway, with the right name on it, because now that I’ve written all of this out it’s too good to delete.)
So, returning to the original post: I have a quick story I want to tell about Mr. Farkas, and for the second time, the story I’m going to tell is a cherished memory on my end and absolutely something that he would never be able to get away with were he to do it today. There was a particular Friday in Math class where a few of my friends decided to start telling everyone that I was having a party that night. I don’t remember what triggered this; it was likely nothing at all, as I was not at the time known for throwing parties, and I definitely wasn’t known for throwing parties that were attended by girls, and my friends were making no exceptions as to who they were inviting over to my house. No one took the joke especially seriously, and at any rate the guys weren’t sharing my address or phone number, so it’s not as if anyone could have found me anyway.
As it turned out, that night I decided to have a few people over anyway to play video games, including the friends that were telling everyone I was having a party. There were maybe four or five of us, I think. My mom and dad were watching TV in the living room and we were playing games in the family room when there was a knock at the door. We were all briefly confused, as everyone we were expecting was already there, and I didn’t live in the kind of neighborhood where neighbors dropped by very often.
I answered the door. It was Mr. Farkas.
He had a cotton candy machine with him.
I remember that he explained how he had come to be in possession of a cotton candy machine, but I regret to inform you that I don’t remember the reason. I don’t know if he specifically put the cotton candy machine into his car to bring it to my house and see if we wanted cotton candy, or if he was bringing it back from somewhere(**) and he had just decided to check and see if party rockin’ was taking place at the Siler household that night.
One way or another, though, my math teacher was at my door, asking if the four or five of us wanted him to spin up any cotton candy for us, along with my brother and my parents.
That is not an invitation that one turns down, believe me. So Mr. Farkas made all of us cotton candy and hung out for a little while and then vanished into the night, taking his cotton candy machine with him. And Monday at school, the same friends who had invited everyone to my house tried to tell everyone that there had been a party, and Mr. Farkas had shown up and made us cotton candy, and … okay, this bit could be partially invented, but I’m almost certain no one believed us, and I half-believe that Mr. Farkas denied the whole story as well.
I have to have gotten my habit of gaslighting my students to death from somewhere, after all.
Rest in peace, both of you, Mr. Nemeth and Mr. Farkas. I hope my students have as warm memories, accurate or otherwise, of me as I do of the two of you thirty-six years down the road, even if I don’t intend to show up at their houses to create any of those memories.
(*) The punchline to all of this is that Mr. Farkas’ obituaryactually calls him The Cotton Candy Man, implying that this was not the first time he’d pulled this move and explaining why he had the machine.
(** I didn’t live far from school, so this isn’t entirely unimaginable, if there had been a sporting event that night or something that he was making candy for. I have a vague recollection that it was his machine, but again, this was a long damn time ago.)
The thought of writing full reviews of all of these makes me tired, and it’s been a long day and my wife is out of town for the next eight days for work so I’m kinda crabby and tired already, and I’ve tried to write these for a week and not gotten anywhere. So we’re going to do this! I’m going to post four book covers! You should read those four books. If you want to know more about them, ask me in comments, and I’ll either respond in comments or write a full review of them this weekend sometime when I’m feeling more like a human being who can be engaged with in society.
At any rate, Canticle woke up my Religious Studies Brain, and after finishing it I immediately texted my friend with a doctorate in theology and insisted that she read it as soon as possible. This is historical fiction and is the only book on the list with no real genre elements, and God, it was so good. So so good.
I could have done without the romance angle in Weavingshaw, but everything else about it is so good that I can overlook it.
This was awesome, and one of the rare books that I wish was longer, especially for those of us who don’t really know anything about Moroccan culture. I wanted more story after The Thing happens, but The Thing doesn’t happen until very late in the book.
Absolutely brilliant, although I’m uncertain why Kay used his fictional Sarantium and didn’t just use Constantinople. I mean, there’s bits of magic and the supernatural here and there, so maybe that in and of itself is why, but I could have accepted a Byzantine Empire with that stuff. I have the sequel to this on my shelf already, though, and this is my first book by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I suspect I’m going to read a lot by him this year.
I am important and influential, and my stupid little website is going to reach 200,000 people this year, and you should really, really send me a review copy of the Sagrada Família set. I keep seeing TikTok videos of people opening their review sets early, so I know you have a program. I’ll review it and put up multiple build posts. Come on. Do me a favor.
Also, finally revealing this the same week you got me to buy Minas Tirith is mean, so you should definitely send me this for free to make up for it.
This week I’m going to try to catch up on book reviews I should have already written, so naturally I’m going to start with the book I just finished yesterday. I’m not completely sure what caused me to pick this up beyond amusement at the title and the lovely pink stained edges; I feel like there was something else but it was a while ago.
Girl Dinner is a flawed book in a lot of ways; the middle is kinda flabby, the end comes out of nowhere unless I seriously missed something, and a lot of the time the characters, either being academics or literal sophomores, have their heads firmly implanted in their asses. There is a lot of navel-gazing in this book, to mix metaphors, and it gets tedious sometimes.
But despite that, fundamentally the book works, and I need somebody else to read it and talk about it with me. The book is a satire– mostly, at least– and explores the intersection of academic feminism, modern femininity, social media and Greek (specifically sorority) culture, with just the tiniest little squirt of the supernatural over it all for, y’know, flavor. The two main characters are the aforementioned sophomore girl who is rushing one of the most exclusive sororities on campus, and an exhausted adjunct professor with an eighteen-month-old and a husband who isn’t worth much. The characters’ stories start off entirely separate other than that they share the same university, but by the end of the book everything knits itself together really nicely, at least up until the wait, what? that happens on the last page.
I handed this four stars; I wouldn’t be too pressed if you gave it three, and if the middle hadn’t been a little much I might have given it five, if only because I know enough academics to know (and I say this with love) that navel-gazing is kinda y’all’s thing. I need someone who thinks it sounds interesting to read it and then be my friend, because I want to talk about it with someone.
Because bitching about teacher training never gets old, and because I have three full days of online training and have to maintain my sanity somehow, I live-blogged my six hour summer school training today. Some of you do not yet follow me on Bluesky! Enjoy:
What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.
