In which I do things for no reason

On August 12, 2013August 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m not actually looking for another job right now, I swear. For starters, I’ve already got a new job this year, right? But apparently yesterday’s post just wasn’t enough thinking about Teh Futar and so for some reason I spent this morning tooling around on LinkedIn and creating a profile.

(I had a whole rant prepared about how LinkedIn doesn’t seem to think teachers are professionals, since “Educational Management” is an industry (note: I don’t know what that is) and “Higher Education” is an industry but my actual job didn’t seem to fit into their categories– until I finally noticed that the slightly-less-than-intuitive “Primary/Secondary Education” was on the list. Technically middle school is neither of these but close enough.)

So, yeah, I’m on LinkedIn now. It has real information about me that I won’t put on Facebook because Facebook at the moment is more evil and plus my students don’t know LinkedIn exists. Which is probably not a meaningful difference, but whatever. Maybe someone will call me up and
offer me a million-dollar job. Meanwhile, their iPad app is not only wildly useless but somehow more useless than their phone app, and the school district I work for appears to be misspelling their own name on their official page. Which, sadly, is depressing but not surprising.

The boy’s not feeling well, and his grandmother is also not feeling well, so I’m at home with him instead of at school relearning how to do Algebra so I can teach it like a competent person who is not an idiot. One way or another– probably by bringing him along– I’m going to swing by school this afternoon anyway and grab a copy of the textbook and try to work through as much of it as I can this week. I have no fear of not being able to teach this stuff to my standards but I’d still like to be able to actually refresh my memory on all the material before, say, the first day of school. I’ve got a week and a half and there’s already too much to do this week.

On my future

On August 11, 2013August 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Higher_learning

This is going to be my twelfth year of teaching, and my fourteenth year of thinking of myself as a teacher.

It’s time– it may be well past time, honestly– to start seriously figuring out what the next step in my career is going to be. This is the weird thing about my job; unlike basically every other career out there, there isn’t really any way to get promoted as a teacher. While I’ve spent my career in middle schools and I’ve often sort of thought of the eighth grade math teacher as the apex predators in the building, I don’t actually think that for any real reason. The person who had my job last year was a second-year teacher; it’s not like you have to prove yourself to get into that end of the building any more than you do anywhere else.

I can change jobs as much as I like, but short of flipping school districts somehow (and I suspect the other districts around here actually pay less than mine does) there’s no way to actually increase my salary that way. I can increase my marketability for other districts in various ways and I can shift my own focus on my teaching in some ways, but precious few of them will lead to a whole lot of change. Let’s run through the possibilities, shall we?

Go back to school and get my doctorate. This will not actually increase my salary so long as I live in Indiana, whose wise Republican government decided a couple of years ago that there’s no point rewarding teachers for getting education. It will also cost me money unless I can manage to get someone else to pay for it, and while I haven’t actually looked too deeply into this I don’t really think that there’s a whole lot of money for funding out there. I cannot acquire more student loans. I currently owe nearly ninety thousand dollars for student loans as is. That number will not be increasing under any circumstances. Further issue: there is no college offering an Ed.D or a Ph.D in education within non-pain-in-the-ass distance of my home. Online degrees are a bloody joke and there are any number of obvious issues with, say, trying to commute to Ball State (nearly three hours away) for classes. This takes something that already had major issues and nudges it thaaaat much closer to impossible. That said? I want a doctorate. I know lots of people with advanced degrees and goddammit I want one too. I know it’s irrational; shut up.
Administrative certification. This would require classes, but not necessarily another degree. That’s kind of weasel-talk, though, since most of the time admin prep programs are meant as Master’s Degree programs anyway, and I already have two of the damn things (that’s where 89 grand in student loans came from) and don’t want a third. Becoming an administrator would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, increase my salary. I would also probably hate the job, as principal jobs– and, especially, the Assistant Principal job I’d certainly have to spend a few years in before becoming a principal– basically mean you spend all of your time doing precisely the parts of this job that I hate and seek to minimize at all costs. I posted “Do I want to be a principal?” as a Facebook status the other day; damn near every single person said I did not.
I can always get certified in additional subject areas, which widens what I can teach and ensures that I can continue job-hopping every few years for the rest of my life. This does have its attractions, mind you, but I’m already one of the more heavily certified teachers in a district that employs thousands of them and it ain’t like it’s putting money in my pocket. You do reach a point where you hit overkill, y’know?
National Board certification. This provides flexibility in that it instantly certifies me in most of the states across the country, meaning that I can move somewhere where having your National Boards actually matters. Most states provide financial incentives– some of them quite sizeable– for teachers who attain National Board certification. Indiana, naturally, is not one of them. Board certification is difficult and moderately expensive, but cheaper than an entire degree and, frankly, it would probably be more helpful. Effect on my day-to-day life as it exists right now: zero.

Noticing a pattern? I’m kinda stuck, and I don’t like it one bit. The best answer appears to be “move to a state where people actually give a shit about education,” and that would be great if, oh, I lived by myself. It gets rather more complicated with a wife and a baby in the picture, particularly when moving means taking both sets of grandparents’ only grandchild away from them.

Seriously? The only thing I can think of that might be workable is to start writing books. I can’t make myself write fiction to save my life; my struggles with that have been amply detailed in any number of blog posts since forever, but I can sure as shit talk ad nauseam about teaching. The weird thing is, while I can’t actually make myself write fiction, I have tons of ideas for stories, and I can actually get myself to sit down and knock out a thousand words of nonfiction at the drop of a hat but I have absolutely no idea what a book about teaching from me might actually look like. Like, none. I’ve fiddled with the idea from time to time and gotten nowhere with it.

Although I WILL SLAP RAFE ESQUITH IN HIS STUPID LYING FACE would be a great name for a book, wouldn’t it? And its sequel, MAYBE YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE BECAUSE YOUR PANTS MADE THEM THAT WAY, YOU ASSHOLE, due a year or so later.

Bah.

Screw it, it’s Saturday.

On August 10, 2013August 10, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Just watch this video. Forever.

(The best one is at the 5:45 mark or so, and I’ll embed if I figure out how.)

(So, it’s 3:15 now, and the video’s mostly different, and my favorite one is gone, and I’m very very sad.)

In which I am defeated

On August 9, 2013August 8, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

paprikash

The weird thing is I’m not even sure I’ve had chicken paprikash before.

I’ve been sitting on this recipe for a while; a friend linked to it on Facebook and I went “Man, chicken paprikash, that sounds awesome,” and bookmarked it, and then went through a few weeks where we either weren’t cooking very much or were mostly cooking stuff we’ve made before, which I don’t tend to give any attention to.

Note that the recipe calls for, specifically, “sweet paprika.” At the time I was unaware that paprika had varieties. A bit of research (and reading the rest of the recipe) revealed that it also comes in Hot and Smoked flavors; the Hot and Sweet are specifically Hungarian in nature; if you’ve bought something just labeled “paprika” it was probably sweet paprika, as the hot variety tends to always be labeled as such.

For, as it turns out, a damn good reason.

Witness this exercise in understatement, ladies and gentlemen:

If you enjoy spicy food, try replacing half of the sweet paprika with hot Hungarian paprika.

Oh, well, hell. I’m not actually a huge fan of spicy, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to improve my palate in that area; I’ve gotten to the point where I can tolerate sriracha (and, more to the point, want sriracha) on, well, just about bloody everything. I can handle, barely, the hottest wings at hot wings places, although I’m not at the point where I can finish an eating challenge or anything like that.(*)

Anyway, I found proper paprikas after looking around a bit; I was proud enough of it that I took a picture of the cans. I sniffed them; the hot paprika honestly didn’t seem all that different from the sweet. At the time. So instead of two tablespoons of sweet paprika, as the recipe calls for, I used a tablespoon of sweet and a tablespoon of hot. It’s a goddamn Martha Stewart recipe. Isn’t she from goddamn Minnesota or something like that? She don’t know from spicy.

I didn’t realize what I’d done until tasting a fingertip’s worth of the sauce before I dropped the chicken into it. It’s got a nice delay on it; it takes a few seconds of man-that’s-not-hot-at-all and then you’re trying to find a cow.

Hot Hungarian paprika is no goddamn joke, people. I’ve made food that I tried to make super hot that didn’t come close to this shit. And there was only a tablespoon in there. Considering the amounts of cayenne and red pepper flakes that I’ve blithely tossed into chilis and pulled pork and, hell, my tikka masala, you’d think that basic food preparations would have lost the ability to kill me.

Neither of us could finish it. I ended up putting some sauce on the noodles along with a healthy dollop of additional sour cream and that made it pretty tasty and, well, edible, but I made four chicken breasts and right now two of them are in the fridge and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. This isn’t a “Man, lookit how I screwed up dinner this time!” post, really; I did everything right and the chicken was cooked properly– I just didn’t have any idea what a sonofabitch that hot paprika was going to be.

I cannot wait until the next time I make chili, though.

(*) Seriously TMI addendum: We went to BW3’s for dinner the other night, and I had about five of whatever they call their hottest wings. People joke about those hurting coming out. This, as it turns out, isn’t true. Eating super spicy hot wings does not sear as it comes out the next day. What it does, folks, is paralyze your asshole, numbing it to such a degree that being able to tell if you’re shitting or not is not actually possible. It is an incredibly odd feeling to go to the bathroom and then, ten minutes later, be standing in your living room and having to admit to yourself that it is entirely possible that you’re shitting yourself and you can’t tell. It is deeply goddamn unpleasant; I’d rather have pain.

In which I stab my eyes

On August 8, 2013August 8, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music2 Comments

574962p

So– hah– this post was gonna start with the words “just a quick note, since I want to be at school by 8:30” when I sat down twenty minutes ago to start writing it, before I 1) decided to look and see how much a song I heard on the radio would cost to download and 2) make sure to download a new album onto my non-3G iPad so that I could listen to it at work today. I was going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this New York testing fiasco, where they switched to a Common Core-based standardized test and, in accordance with prophecy, “proficiency” scores fell through the fucking floor.

Neither of those two things worked, though, and now I’m all “fuck everything digital” and no it has not escaped me that I’m using a computer to write that on the internet, and if you’re so clever how come you haven’t figured out a way to go fuck yourself yet?

One, the goddamn MP3 album was three bucks more expensive than the CD. And that’s bullshit, always. You cannot charge me more to Not Send Me a Thing than you do to Send Me a Thing. The digital version of a thing should always be less expensive than the Actual Thing. And most of the time shouldn’t exist. I’ve been converted to MP3s because MP3s are genuinely more useful than CDs are– yes, I really do want my entire twelve-some-odd-thousand song music collection with me all the goddamn time, because I never know what I’m going to be in the mood for, and my tastes are catholic enough that it’s difficult to even come up with a proper representative sample.

I pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, which is supposed to ensure that everything on my computer also lives in the cloud and can be accessed by both my phone and my iPad. Granted, in the case of the iPad, if I want to be able to listen to something when not in reach of a wireless network I need to specifically download it, but I knew that when I bought the thing.

So why is the fuckin’ album I want to download the only album that doesn’t seem to have shown up on the iPad, almost a week after I initially downloaded it? Hell if I know, and attempting to convince my iPad to find the damn album has unleashed hell in a manner that I don’t have time to describe. Needless to say: technology clusterfuck, and nothing has the right album covers anymore, among other more massive but less obvious problems, and THIS DOESN’T FUCKING HAPPEN WITH CDS, GODDAMMIT, AND MAYBE SOCIETY SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT A BIT? Earlier this week just about my entire (small, as I hate them) collection of books disappeared out of both devices. I had to redownload everygoddamnthing twice. Have I ever had to redownload a physical book? Nope, not once, and the total number of books I’ve lost or accidentally destroyed over the course of my life is probably twenty, most of which were lost in The Great Dog Piss Incident of 2009. It happens to digital files all the fucking time.

I fucking hate the future. Also, standardized tests, but I’ll bitch about that later, apparently.

Okay, stop the world, I’m getting off

On August 7, 2013August 7, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Ladies and gentlemen!

I give you… the internet.

Make up your mind, boy

On August 7, 2013August 6, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting5 Comments

Actual description of interaction with my son follows:

I get home from a grocery run (I’m cooking two full meals tomorrow! Whee!) and my wife is sitting on the couch with the boy watching, as it turns out, YouTube baby videos on the TV. She’s found a bunch of videos from the Baby First channel. He’s watching a Bonnie Bear video at the moment.

I fucking hate the Baby First channel, folks. I can watch Sesame Street all goddamn day long; Sesame Street taught me to read and I will be forever grateful to it for that. I found the image over there by typing “FUCK HARRY THE BUNNY” into Google Image Search. The fact that the people who commissioned this stupid cake spelled their son’s name “Jakeb” tells me everything I need to know about them, and I hate them almost as much as I hate Harry the Bunny.

But whatever. I can put up with a few minutes of this insipid bullshit while she draws his bath, and he’s gonna age out of it soon. As parenting problems go, this ain’t one.

Anyway. Like I said, she’s not watching the channel (sidenote: we just dropped cable,) she’s watching YouTube videos through our Apple TV. So she leaves the room and it’s over in like two minutes. She’s done a search for “Baby First TV” that came up with a bunch of stuff. I choose one featuring Rainbow Horse, who I also hate, but not as much as Harry the Bunny.

He starts screaming. “BONNIE BEAR! BONNIE BEAR!” Okay, shit, fine, dude, I didn’t know you cared that much. I locate another Bonnie Bear video and queue that up.

He starts screaming again. “HORSE!!!” I’ve just turned off the goddamn rainbow horse.

“You sure, kid? You just said you didn’t want Rainbow Horse.”

“RAINBOW HORSE!!!” The little shit’s actually tearing up. Okay, fine, we’ll watch what we were watching RIGHT BEFORE YOU SCREAMED AT ME TO WATCH SOMETHING ELSE. And I go back to the Rainbow Horse episode that was just on.

He’s fine with that, for two minutes. I ask him what he wants to watch.

You ever had to tell the difference between a toddler saying “bunny” and “Bonnie” before? Ever had to do it when even if you choose the one he just said he was going to immediately change his mind and scream at you to watch the other one? Because I just had five minutes of that and it’s fun. Oh, and he hates Rainbow Horse again so we can’t go back to that.

We finally landed on the fucking bunny, whose “episode” was three minutes of him determining how to put on a hat. I hate you, Harry the Bunny.

How long until he’s sixteen?