The boy wasn’t feeling well today, so we both got to stay home since my wife is out of town until Friday morning(*), and … blech. I tend to spend all day gaslighting myself when I’m home because I’m sick, and when I am absolutely not sick at all and home anyway the feeling is powerful indeed. Like, I’m union; I get family sick days and frankly no one gets to challenge me on my sick days one way or another anyway. But I’ve spent all day being twitchy and nervous for no goddamn reason at all.
I, uh, don’t really have anything other than that. Today didn’t suck nearly as hard as the rest of the week has but that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear. Hopefully I can get through tomorrow without any illnesses, car accidents or people getting shot. We’ll see.
(*) Because my schedule means I leave before he gets out of bed, and because my wife has a job where she can work from home effectively any time she wants at the drop of a hat, she is nearly always the one who stays home. Not because hurr durr sick kid is Mom’s job.
Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.
Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.
To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.
(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)
I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!
Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.
The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.
My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.
Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.
The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.
Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.
All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.
I kind of need tomorrow to go well.
(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.
In the last 24 hours there have been two teenagers shot, one killed, in two separate incidents in the town I teach in. One has a direct connection to my school; the other has not been identified yet.
I have spent far too much of today arguing with deeply stupid people on social media, and my God, y’all, the literacy crisis is real. The literacy crisis is real and I am not very bright, but I am stupid in a different way from, for example, someone willing to argue that there are only white people in the town I live in, or someone who wants to argue about what a legal disclaimer means but clearly hasn’t actually read the Goddamned thing. I am stupid because I am unable to simply block these fools and move on with my life, or better yet, avoid activities that cause me to be exposed to them in the first place.
In my defense, at least one of them started it.
Like, there weren’t even any opinions involved today. Text can be interpreted, sure, but phrases like “in perpetuity,” “throughout the world,” and “for any reason” have a fairly plain meaning, and demographic data exists. I sometimes like to pretend I still live in a world where at least semi-objective reality exists, and I’m too old to adapt to a post-truth existence.
The internet was a colossal mistake, is what I’m saying here, along with virtually every single other thing that has happened to society since, oh, Ronald Reagan. I use the words “everything is going to get worse all the time forever” fairly frequently, but I don’t really believe it, because the depth of dumb out there keeps managing to surprise me.
I am not watching the Super Bowl, in accordance with my standard practice, and I am not watching the halftime show either. I watched Kendrick’s show live last year, after spending far too long fucking with streaming platforms, and I just don’t care about Bad Bunny enough to fuck around with it this year. I admit that I’m curious whether anyone at NBC or whoever the hell is broadcasting the thing is smart enough to know to bleep “chinga la migra,” but I assume anything interesting that happens is going to be all over TikTok tomorrow so I’m not going to worry about it.
My wife is going to be out of town all week, so I’m on solo Dad duty, which isn’t much of a problem except for the number of tasks it adds to my mornings. My son’s schedule and mine differ enough that he’s generally not even out of bed when I leave for work, and while we have someone picking him up to take him to school my wife generally handles the three hours of reminders and gradually-sterner pokes in the ribs it takes to drag his eighth-grade ass out of bed, not to mention things like lunch-packing and such. He’s going to have to get up earlier so that I can make sure he’s conscious and vertical before his ride shows up, and I’m going to have to get up earlier to make sure everything is ready on time.
I also have to remember to pick him up on the way home from school, also not normally my job. Luckily we live close enough that the one day I slip into autopilot and drive home, I can turn around and go to pick him up and just pretend that I got tied up at work and couldn’t leave right away. Nobody has to know, right?
Anyway, my wife’s train— yes, train— leaves at midnight, so I’ve got some time to kill before I drop her off at the station. What’s that, Nioh 3? Yes, Daddy will be there soon.
Pretty sure today was the first day I completely lost to Nioh 3, and I’m only “pretty sure” because I’m only about 50% sure it hasn’t been more than one day since I last slept.
At any rate, regarding the image, I hate that fucking thing, #iykyk.
We had a surprise snow day today— I woke up, thought “Man, it would be great to find out we had a two-hour delay,” and then we did, and less than an hour later it turned into an asynchronous cancellation. We had an ugly burst of sleet and lake effect snow at the worst possible time, apparently, and the rural roads were disastrous. This is somehow our seventh snow day of 2026, which is absolutely insane.
On Thursday a student walked up to me and asked me what the plan was for the walkout protest next week, since she had heard I was “in charge” of it. And holy fucking Jesus I have never shut an incorrect idea down so quickly. High school students across northern Indiana (and I assume most of the country, but this was definitely the week for them around here) had walkouts this week, and there are more planned for next week. Our district sent out a communication to the teachers explaining precisely what their expectations were for the staff were our students to decide to walk out of class. I have been talking with a lot of my students about the protests (at, to be clear, their instigation, not mine) and to be completely fair, the idea that I was “in charge” isn’t completely out of left field. I quietly distributed whistles into the staff mailboxes late last week, and it was hilarious how no one in the building, including my principal, hesitated for even a moment to decide that it was me behind them.
The problem is that I genuinely don’t love the idea of middle school students doing a walkout. Teachers have been told that they must remain in their classrooms if even a single student does not walk out, and we are to “continue instruction as normal,” and if everyone leaves, we are to contact the office for further instructions. I strongly suspect that there will not be enough supervision. This is a very different thing from high school walk-outs, where half of the students are at least on the verge of adulthood, have drivers’ licenses, etcetera. There are eleven-year-olds in my building. It is not the same thing. And while I’ve quietly encouraged a handful of students to take leadership roles if and/or when, the social environment in a middle school doesn’t work the same way a high school does either. Not to mention the fact that in my specific building, without providing a lot of detail, the physical layout of the building and the surrounding streets aren’t great for marching.
The notion of these kids spreading themselves out over a few blocks while they march around the building or whatever— or, worse, some of them deciding to do that while others congregate near the doors and chant or whatever— is … kinda terrifying, to be honest. All we need is one rogue asshole to decide to start a fight and all hell is going to break loose. Again, high school is different; there are going to be some of the same concerns, of course, but the kids are more able to self-police themselves.
Oh, and we already know ICE is in the area despite this being a red state, and all it takes is one fucking car full of Nazis to try to snatch one of the brown kids.
I happen to have an eye appointment scheduled toward the end of the day on one of the days that is being frequently discussed for a walkout. I could, technically, take the afternoon off, and then none of it would be my problem. But if I did that and something happened— or if I followed my district-issued instructions and stayed in my room for one kid or whatever— and something happened, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I find myself genuinely hoping they don’t have the guts to go through with it.
… but guess what I had to buy four of on no notice tonight?
The good news: turns out I can afford a sudden low-four-figure emergency! Which doesn’t mean that I want to spend that kind of money, or that it doesn’t toss me into a shitty mood for the rest of the night, especially when it takes just over an hour to get the new tires installed. And especially especially when I can feel my stomach lining eating itself while I’m waiting, which leads to a 3500-calorie Burger King dinner, and I think I’ve already eaten enough in January and February to last me until March.
And it’s going to end up being three nights in a row, too, because tomorrow after school I have my weird little gay kids club and then after that I have TRIVIA NIGHT for probably longer than I think. I haven’t done TRIVIA NIGHT in a while but feel free to read this and this to find out how the last one went.
