Victory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have made it to Spring Break. Certainly not the hardest year to do so, but I started my last three classes of the day with the words “your job is to make sure I don’t go to jail today” anyway. My official observation last week turned out literally perfect, and the guy who was in my room for the disaster lesson on Tuesday was back yesterday and everything went beautifully.

I even made it through April Fool’s Day without any particular nonsense, although one of my students did attempt to convince me she’d passed out, sticking to it until I stepped over her prone body and pointed out to the whole room that generally when human beings pass out they fall backwards.

“I guess she could be dead,” I said. “If that’s the case, someone needs to drag her into the hallway. There’s no dying in here. Y’all know the rules.”

One of the boys actually got up and that’s when she abandoned the joke.

And yes, I really do have a rule that no one is allowed to die in Math class, and I really am like this, and I guarantee if you ask my kids to name one rule in my class, about a third of them will mention that they need to stay in their seats and the rest of them will say they aren’t allowed to die.

Anyway, I’ve been playing video games all evening, and now I’m going to go read until I decide it’s time to go to bed. Hooray!

Monthly Reads: March 2026

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Book of the Month is the most excellent The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen. This was kind of a bleh month overall, but Slewfoot and Trad Wife were pretty good too.

Unread Shelf: March 31, 2026

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How long, do you think, will I hold out until I cave and call this post “Unread Shelves”?

In which that could have gone better

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I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

Ha ha ha lol we’re all gonna die

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Nine teachers out tomorrow already, before 9:00 PM. Five of them are out for the entire week. I went ahead and signed up for coverage every day next week, figuring that it’s going to be one of those weeks where I don’t end up having a choice. I slept all afternoon and into the evening and am bound and determined to be back in bed by nine, which is in ten minutes. I have not had dinner. Last night featured truly spectacular digestive distress. Whatever this is, I’m planning on sleeping it off, because hell if I can afford to miss any school this week.

Four days. It’ll be fine. Really.

Halfway there

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I finished Robert Jordan’s A Crown of Swords today, Book Seven of the Wheel of Time, which means I have finished eight of these dreadful books (there’s a prequel, technically book zero) and am either halfway through the series or over halfway depending on how you’re counting. I only have four of the actual Jordan books left and then the trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson. I am also about to enter what fans of the series refer to as “the slog,” which means that a book series that will regularly go five hundred pages without a single speck of advancement in the plot is going to get slower.

Seriously, Crown of Swords is eight hundred and fifty pages long and maybe three or four actual events happen in the book– someone dies abruptly in the prologue, someone else dies abruptly and more or less off-screen in the last chapter, someone fake-dies (I don’t believe it for a tiny shred of a second) a few chapters before the end, and some of the characters find something they’ve been supposedly looking for for like three books. They’ve been looking for it for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to be for, and when they find it, it’s also off-screen. A character literally walks out of a room with a bundle wrapped in cloth and announces “Here’s the thing! We’ve got it!”

Oh, and two other characters, whose relationship has never made sense for a single second, get married. Off-screen.

I am going to finish this damned series this year, but I have always been reading it out of spite, and nothing has changed. The physical books still make me happy every time I walk past them, though. I have no regrets.

Made it

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Survived another week, and my observation went well, and the kids took a test today mostly without shitting the bed. Speaking of bed …

Well, that sucks

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I was going to write a post about how these special editions of the Nevernight Chronicles went on sale yesterday, and I really want them, because I love those books and I don’t have hardcover copies. The problem is the publishers are overseas and, because my government is run by maniacs and fools, they won’t ship to the US. So I was going to see if I could possibly leverage my worldwide fandom to ship a copy to me if I ordered it and sent it to their house instead of mine.

Only it’s sold out now, in barely over 24 hours.

So I’m gonna go play video games instead, and add one more fucking thing to the incredibly long list of reasons why I hate Donald Trump.