Terrible Decisions, Stage Two

On August 24, 2013August 24, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

We started off so well. If you’ve noticed my Instagram feed over there, there’s a picture of a bunch of boxes containing my new toilet, my new tub, and my new tub surround. We’d gotten a bunch of flooring samples from a place online and had narrowed our flooring choices down to two possibilities, one light and one dark. We’d found a vanity or two we liked, and a store that would let us custom-design basically whatever the hell we wanted without blowing our budget up too goddamn much.

Then my father-in-law came over. You remember my father-in-law the general contractor, right? The guy who gave my brother a heart attack when, ten seconds after arriving at the Great Redeckening, he pronounced our wood incorrect?

Yeah. That guy.

“That tub’s not going to work,” he says. Which means the surround isn’t going to work. And I am now very angry– not at him, because he’s right, and more importantly he’s right well before we started destroying our tub or taking things out of boxes and he’s right while we can still take stuff back. I’m angry because I shoulda noticed this shit on my own and I didn’t.

60 inches is basically standard for a tub nowadays, right? I had measured our tub and it had come out to 58 inches from tile to tile– which, I reasoned, given that there was a layer of tile and, underneath that, a layer of drywall, meant that there was certainly going to be sixty inches from stud to stud. The new surround attaches directly to the studs, so all of that stuff was going to come out and then the tub would fit.

Take a real close look at that picture there and see if you can figure out what’s wrong. Go ahead; I’ll wait. No, not the rotten drywall and the mold. We knew about that already; that’s the problem we were going to fix with the new tub and new surround. We discovered the leak when the wallpaper back there started turning black– it’s close to the floor in between the tub and the toilet, though, so it was easy to ignore. Then the drywall started disintegrating. I ripped some of it out to try and figure out how bad it was; it’s actually not very moldy– the black is all on the surface and the wood itself is still, mostly, solid. The white thing on the left is a guard that we put in that (I thought at the time) would stop the leak– I thought water was just running along the edge of the tub and hitting the drywall. No, as it turns out, it’s behind the tile, as we discovered when we pulled one of the tiles out and ran some water. The leak’s not in the tub at all.

But forget about that. Look at the tub, and then look at the wall stud above it. See a problem?

The tub extends a good inch underneath the studs. These fuckers who built this house put the tub in before they even studded the wall, and then built a bloody header over the top of the thing. Which means that any sixty inch tub that expects to have a surround around it is going to be wider than the bathroom is. It’s impossible to put any other modern sixty inch tub in there without moving fucking walls around, and that’s not a level of work that we’re willing to commit to at this time.

My father-in-law figured all this out at a glance.

We have to keep the tub, but we’re still going to have to rip out the tile. There was a brief flirtation with 54″ tubs, but after looking around a bit we decided against that idea on account of they’re all crap. What we’re going to have to do is pull out all the existing tile, pull out all the drywall behind it (which is going to be mostly rotten and moldy at this point anyway), then redrywall (hopefully with a thinner board than they’re using) and retile over that. Tiling is beyond my skill level, so we’ll have to hire someone for it, which is probably gonna blow up our budget– although we’ll make a tiny bit of it back by not having to buy a new tub, I doubt we’ll get anybody to come out and do the new tile work for less than the tub would have cost– although I’ll admit I haven’t really looked into it much so maybe I’ll get lucky.

Also, so much for getting all this done by next weekend. Don’t think so. Sigh.

A goal for this year

On August 23, 2013August 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

(Note that I do plan on going back to talking about things other than teaching again eventually; for obvious reasons it’s just what’s been foremost on my mind lately.)

Here’s the goal I’m setting myself for 2013-14: I’m going to go the entire year without yelling at any of my kids. And by “my kids,” in this context, I mean “any kid in my building,” not just in my class.

Now, let me be specific on what I mean here: I emphatically do not mean “I will never yell” or “I will never raise my voice.” My job would be impossible without occasionally having to raise my voice, and frequently a good loud “YO!” at the front of the room can refocus a classroom when more traditional, gentler methods fail.

What I mean is this: I’m going to make it an entire school year, or as close to it as I can, without ever raising my voice at a kid. There’s a difference between generic Loud-Talkin’ to a roomful of kids and raising my voice to a specific kid. If you know me, y’all know that I tend to have a bit of a temper and I tend to be a bit on the volatile side.

I spent last year working for a guy who I saw defuse potentially nasty situations (and situations that were well past “potentially” nasty) on any number of occasions without ever once speaking harshly to a kid. Not one single goddamn time. And he got results over and over again. I don’t want to be yelly guy any more. This may well sound shocking coming from me, but I need love to be a bigger part of my pedagogy than it’s been in the past.

I’m a good teacher. I need to work on being a better person at school. I need to be someone who is better at de-escalation. I need my temper squashed. And I’m going to find a way to do it this year.

2013-14: no more yelling at kids.

On progress and discipline

On August 22, 2013August 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t normally bleed at work, and I’m not terribly fond of it, but I managed to be bleeding before the first bell even rang this morning. I broke up a fight– or, at least, what was about to be a fight– and one of the combatants managed to scratch my finger in an annoyingly painful fashion while I was separating the two of them. I spent most of the rest of the day telling my boss that he owed me workman’s compensation once my finger fell off. I didn’t know one of the kids; he’s relatively new to the building (possibly this year, but I think he came in late last year) and the other one was an eighth grade kid who I’ve been having irregular run-ins with since he was a fifth grader. I’ve broken up more than one fight he was in and manhandled him into the office on more than one occasion.

The weird thing? I actually get along with him fairly well, all considered. He didn’t start this particular brawl, and the fact that he let me get in between the two of them and separate them actually represents progress. I’m not going to go so far as to say that I’ve made a connection with him– I honestly don’t think anyone in the building except maybe for the football coach can say that, and I’m not even sure about him– but I seem to have figured out how to finesse him to get him to do what I want. I grabbed him in the hallway later that day and let him know that I’d put in my write-up that he wasn’t the guy who started the fight, and talked to him again at the end of the day to make sure that there wasn’t any ongoing beef with the kid who had been messing with him. He said it was going to be okay, and I figured he was telling the truth.

Then his bus was late. The buses are terrible this time of year, and this was a perfect example of why: when the bus finally showed up to school, there was still a primary center kid on the bus, who either didn’t know his address or had gotten on the wrong bus or some piece of nonsense that was keeping the driver from dropping him off at home. Complicating things, the driver’s radio wasn’t working properly for some reason and she wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone at the little guy’s school. So the kids all filed outside to get on the bus and then the driver had to make them all wait (outside, in drizzling rain) while she went inside and made some phone calls to try and figure out what to do with the kid.

This didn’t set well with him. So he and another kid (his girlfriend, maybe? And as I’m writing this it occurs to me to wonder where his little brother was…) decided to walk home.

They can’t walk home if they’re supposed to ride the bus, even if the bus is late. There are massive legal issues involved; if they’re bus riders, they ride the bus. Period. Is it unreasonable? Yeah, probably, on some level or another, but it’s still the rules and I’ve got to enforce them. I managed to get him to head back into the building, but he wasn’t happy about it.

“This is fuckin’ bullshit.”

One of our new paraprofessionals overhears this. “What did you just say?”

“Fuckin’ Christ, dude, leave me alone.”

He takes exception. And I did something I haven’t done before: I actually waved the guy off, letting the kid go into the building unmolested and holding the para back (not physically, mind you) to convince him to ignore a fourteen-year-old not only directly disrespecting him but doing so in an impressively profane fashion.

And the interesting thing? By the end of the conversation, the guy agreed with me. The kid, meanwhile, went inside, like I wanted him to, and while he was the last to sit down like he was supposed to, he did it. The thing about this kid? He’s all street, and has absolutely no parenting whatsoever at home. His mother’s worthless– another teacher in my building, who has his little brother, and is new to the building, met her the other day and said she was the rudest person she’d ever met. I have absolutely no idea where or who his father is. For all I know, neither does his mother.

This kid is not going to back down to anyone, and he’s even less likely to do so when he’s already had a shitty day. There are things I need him to do, right? I need him in the building, where I’m not going to get my ass sued off if he gets hit by a car while he’s walking home or just never goes home at all. I need him sitting down and being with everyone else (granted, this I need less than I need the first thing) and I need him back on the bus in a few minutes and not in a screaming match with the driver who’s keeping him from getting home on time. And a stranger (remember: new paraprofessional) getting all in his face about how he said “fuck” a couple of times is not going to make any of those things happen.

So I basically let him get away with dropping the F-bomb a couple of times. Maybe I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow. Today, this afternoon, wasn’t the time, and doing it in a confrontational manner definitely wasn’t going to work. Confrontation itself doesn’t work with this kid. The only thing I’ve seen work with him is quiet, calm conversation and simple, direct requests, which he’ll usually comply with, and ignoring his occasional outburst.

Is this doing the right thing? Or am I guilty of not having High Standards of Behavior now? Have I Done Nothing to punish his profanity if all I do is remind him about how to talk to adults tomorrow? Is a lunch detention really gonna make any difference?

Back to the Bible, dammit.

On August 22, 2013August 22, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

There are apparently two new children at my school this year. Their names are Osiris and Goliath.

I just… I can’t, anymore, with this. Just no. No. No. You can’t. No.

I will be calling them Peter and Steven if they end up in my room.

(It has not escaped my notice that Goliath is a Bible name. My official response: shut up.)

In the beginning

On August 21, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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I’ve had twelve first days of school as a teacher. That was… certainly one of them. My throat hurts from talking all day, I’m exhausted, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m actually teaching tomorrow, which could potentially be a problem. Hopefully tonight I will be able to brain enough to pull together a couple of days’ worth of useful lesson plans, and to be able to bluff my way through actually teaching them tomorrow. Let’s cross our fingers!

It worked out kinda funny, actually: my first group was way more obnoxious than I was expecting them to be. My second group was way less obnoxious than I was expecting them to be. My afternoon class was exactly what I was expecting them to be. My day is, therefore, timed beautifully; my kids start off a hot mess (at the time of day where I’m most likely to have my patience together) and get better behaved and more fun as the day drags on. And my prep period is last hour, which works with me for a variety of reasons. The buses were terribly late, but not as terribly late as they’ve frequently been on the first day of school. (Elementary students, who let out before we do, sometimes don’t get off at their stop like they’re supposed to, and then don’t know things like their phone numbers and addresses, which have to be tracked down. The first few days/couple of weeks are always disastrous until transportation gets the bus routes worked out.)

All told: not a bad first day. We’ll see how the next two days go once I’m actually being expected to teach them something and they’re being expected to learn something.

I’m going to mention this here just because I need to mention it yesterday: Elmore Leonard died this week; I would do terrible things to my friends and loved ones in exchange for a fraction of the man’s talent. The only person whose Rules for Writing are better than his are Mark Twain’s:

1. Never open a book with weather.

2. Avoid prologues.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

RIP, Mr. Leonard.

Now that it’s over…

On August 21, 2013August 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Let’s talk about how the summer went.

In a word? Weird.

As I write this (which isn’t at 8:00 on Wednesday morning, which is when this is going to pop; I’m probably passing out locker numbers to my homeroom girls right now) I still don’t have ISTEP scores for the 2012-13 school year. We can argue– and I have, no link necessary– about how important these tests should be, and how much they actually accurately measure student learning, but the simple fact is that they’re really really important right now even if they should be. In a very real way, I’ve spent all summer unable to close the book on 2012-13 because I never got my ISTEP scores. I have kids who have already transferred or moved who I’m never going to get to be able to tell that they passed for the first time, or that they brought their scores up by more than they ever have before.

That’s kind of a big deal for me. Now, granted, I’ve got a lot of these kids back, so I can have the conversation with them this year, but it’s not the same. Psychologically, I haven’t let go of last year yet. I haven’t been able to process how well they/I did– for better or for worse– and figure out a way to adjust and/or do things better for this year, because I don’t yet know how well the changes I made last year worked out. And that’s a damn weird position to be in. (I’m hoping that by the time this actually publishes I’ll actually have scores in-hand, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Outside of school… well, it was still a weird summer. It started off too wet, transitioned into too hot– expected in northern Indiana in July– but then took a weird detour straight into Octobersville, which is where we’ve lived for the last month or so. Business at OtherJob hasn’t been what I’ve wanted it to be, because the weather never cooperated with us. And it’s made the job less fun in a way that I don’t like at all, because having something fun to get paid for is the whole point of OtherJob. I don’t like it when that doesn’t happen.

I built a deck. That was awesome. I cooked a bunch of stuff; also awesome. Ripped up some carpeting in my hallway and started working on the year’s biggest project, the new bathroom, which I’m hoping will be awesome once it’s done.

I failed at ukulele. That was unfortunate.

And then there was this place. I haven’t been a regular blogger for several years, and I managed to write damn near every day through the summer (when the hell did I start this place up again? Early June?) regardless of what else was going on. I think I only missed two or three days all summer, and while the posts haven’t exactly all been brilliant at least I’ve been writing. I’m hoping to hell I can keep up at least a four- or five-days-a-week pace once school starts; we’ll see. Weirdly, I think my schedule– my prep period is last hour– might help with that; it’ll give me time to get stuff done before school lets out, which will mean I won’t be at school as long, which will mean I’ll theoretically have time at home to write. I don’t want this place to wither, but I can’t pretend there’s not a real risk of it. The plan will be to always try and write for the next day so I can keep posts popping in the morning. We’ll see.

The biggest failure of the summer has been where it always is: writing fiction, which I’ve barely done at all. Which I never do, despite my constant desire to the contrary. But you’ve seen that rant before, multiple times, so I’ll spare you.

And that was that. Here we go again.

On Open House

On August 20, 2013August 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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Parent Number One accosts me as I’m going to my car to get a change of clothes, half an hour before Parent Night. She starts screeching at me about the class her daughter has been put in. I am not her child’s teacher– have, in fact, never had either of her children in my class– and couldn’t change her child’s class if my career depended on it. She also doesn’t want the daughter in question to be in my class. I’m not sure why it’s my problem at all, to be honest; this literally has nothing to do with me at all and once I tell you who to bring your problem to our conversation ought to be over. Further elaboration isn’t doing either of us any good and is wasting my time. I need every second between now and Parent Night actually starting. She ends the conversation– well, technically, I do, by saying I have to go and leaving– by suggesting that her daughter is in the class she’s in because they’re “giving all the goddamn poor kids vouchers,” which makes exactly as much sense as you think it does.

Conversation with Parent Number Two starts well, but then veers off into crazytown. I had her daughter in sixth grade and got along with her well; Mom starts complaining about her daughter’s troubles with her fifth grade teacher and then segues immediately into how she was personally responsible for getting our previous principal fired. I gently suggest that our principal was chosen by the school board to take over and improve a school that was in substantially worse shape than ours was; I leave out the fact that they nearly doubled his salary when he moved, that he’s currently the highest-paid principal in the corporation, or that they’ve literally (and I’m not misusing this word) given him anything he wanted in his new position, which is a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of fired. Mom assures me that she knows the right people and has influence in the right places. I think to myself that I’d like to get fired the same way he did. Carte blanche and twice the money sounds just horrible.

I walk into a conversation Parents Three and Four are having with another teacher so that I can introduce myself; they haven’t come down to my room and there’s not much time left in the Open House and I’d like to speak with everyone I can. I walk into what turns into an extended ten-minute rant about how another student in the same grade as their child “mercilessly bullied” their son on the bus “every day” all last year and no one ever did anything about it. The following are facts: 1) I know both children involved; 2) They provided an accurate physical description of the bully, so I know that this is not a case of mistaken identity; 3) I am the bus supervisor for the entire building and every single accusation of any form of misconduct on the bus comes through me before any administrator sees it; I heard nothing of this situation from anyone involved at any point last year, despite multiple conversations with the accused child’s bus driver about that child; 4) The two students do not ride the same bus and never did; 5) the bully in question spent most of the last half of the year on half-days and during that time arrived at school at 8:30 or so and left by 11:45– in other words, he never rode the bus at all for nearly the entire second semester.

This story cannot possibly be true.

Furthermore, the two boys were in different classes and would, to the best of my knowledge, have had rare chances to encounter each other during the school day. (I will admit I can think of one way in which that statement may not be true; the numbered items above are indisputable.) I spend a few minutes wondering if these people know that they’re lying or if they’re far enough gone that they’ve convinced themselves this impossible tale is true. I reflect on the number of stories you see and hear about vicious bullying in schools that “no one ever did anything about,” and the number of times I’ve been directly accused of same, under similar circumstances, and briefly consider quitting my job.

Parent Five pulls into the parking lot as I’m walking out of the building. Parent Night has ended at 6:30; it is 6:40. She has her son, a fifth-grader–the youngest grade in our school– with her. I tell her that the Open House has ended and that she is not going to be allowed into the building. She starts off very angry, but calms down as I talk her and her son through the procedure that we’ll be following in the morning. I tell him my name, make him repeat it a couple of times, and show them what door to drop him off at and make sure he knows where to go when he gets inside the school and that they both understand what time they’re supposed to be there. I tell him to come find me when he gets into the gym and that I’ll show him where he’s supposed to sit, and answer a few other questions from her about other things that will happen during the day and how much interaction he’ll be having with the seventh and eighth graders, a subject she seems especially tense about. By the end of the conversation, she’s smiling and the boy actually tells me he’s excited about school tomorrow before they drive off. As they leave, I realize that I never actually got his name. No worries; he says goodbye as they pull out and repeats my name back to me.

I suppose it could have gone worse.

In which WHY AM I NOT SLEEPING

On August 20, 2013August 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I’m writing this at Otherjob on Monday night. I’m going to try not to die while I’m doing it.

I got to school with 45 items on the To-Do List of Doom; by the time I’d made it from the front door of the building to my classroom it was up to 48. Like, seriously, walking down the hallway people gave me three more things to do. The list stands at 27 right now and I’m hoping to have it down to 23 or 24 by the end of the night. Hopefully we won’t be busy. (EDIT: Down to 22, only one or two of which can feasibly be done here, and I don’t feel like them. I’ve done well today.)

The manager has me scheduled until “close” and the sixteen year old kid I’m working with scheduled until 11:00, which is odd, since I’m closing this place down at ten o’clock if my life depends on it. Tomorrow’s the last day until the kids arrive and, for the first time since June, I’m actually getting paid to be there– which, of course, means that I need to be there at 7:15. No way in hell am I gonna make it to work at 7:15 if I’m at work until past eleven.

Parent night is at 5:00. I have until then to convince myself that I know how to do this. I’m in good shape, but it’s still gonna be pushing it.

Lotta stuff to get done today. Let’s hope for very few meetings.