Month: September 2013

In which leave me alone universe

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, CookingLeave a comment

All I actually want from life right now is to have nothing to do.   Unfortunately, these two piles of worksheets here don’t count as nothing and I probably shouldn’t cheat by not actually grading them or throwing them away or summat.  I just want them to be done and to not be my problem any longer so that I can have seven or eight hours of actual relaxation before going to bed tonight.

I may be growing weary of six-day weeks, guys.

That’s all for now. Somebody spent last night trolling through the archives (I SEE YOU) so I don’t even feel like I have to babysit my traffic today.  Screw you, pointless metric-obsession!  Hah!

Making reubens for dinner.  Read a book about a guy named Reuben last night and he made me hungry.  Plus, foodspin.

G’bye.

Speaking of spiders…

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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This lovely darling was discovered yesterday on the door at OtherJob; he is slightly larger than a quarter and furry. The furry spiders, as you all well know, are the scarier ones. I saw him first and pointed him out to the other person I was working with, who I believe is a high school senior. He is not, unfortunately, the most masculine high school senior I’ve ever met; his reaction was not quite Scooby-Doo windmilling his legs before jumping into Shaggy’s arms, but was close enough. I proceeded to continue horrifying him by rescuing the spider with a plastic putter and, fighting off the urge to chase the kid around the golf course, deposited him safely in a nearby bush.

“He’s gonna come back,” the kid said. “Remember the katydid?”

(I never told you the katydid story because it’s sad. Short, not-sad version: we couldn’t convince a katydid that it was safer outside the clubhouse than inside it.)

“I doubt it,” I said, thinking of the wide expanse of concrete the spider would have to cross in more-or-less broad daylight. “We won’t see him again.”

Fast forward about three hours, when there is a blood-curdling scream from somewhere around course three. I rush outside to discover a female customer in her mid-forties or so jumping up and down, wailing, and waving her arms frantically in front of her face.

Her husband described the spider that had webbed down directly in front of her face as “about the size of a quarter” and said “yup, that’s it” when I showed him the picture I’d taken. His wife was not pleased when I used the word “hilarious” to describe the situation.

Well, no, ma’am, your spine-tingling horror isn’t funny. It’s just that I could have killed that spider a few hours ago and saved you the trouble. I coulda said that. I chose not to.

I’m hoping there are no insect stories today.

In which I told you so

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

As of five minutes or so ago, today was the highest traffic day in the history of the blog. This happens every time I humiliate myself.

tl;don’t r

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized1 Comment

In accordance with prophecy, the post that instructed you to not read it if you respect me (which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wrote last night and delayed until noon today) has received a full day’s worth of traffic already.  I hate you all.

I spent all day today putting out fires, and right now I’m split between basically writing a short-ish “YAAR EXHAUSTION” type of post or going exhaustive and giving you a moment-by-moment breakdown of the horror that was my day.  I think I’m leaning toward exhaustive– after all, I’m at OtherJob, my lesson plans are already done, most of my grading is already done, and it’s been raining all day so there really isn’t much else to do.

It is entirely possible that this post will end abruptly with “fuck this, you get the idea” or something similar; please don’t hold it against me.  After all, you already got a post today, right?

BEFORE SCHOOL:  I wake up on time, but somehow going into the office to check and see if my paycheck came in and my union dues got paid takes half an hour.  I have no idea where the time went; I rush through my shower and manage to forget to eat breakfast before leaving the house.  I do manage to pack a lunch, which is an unimportant detail except insofar as it indicates that I was in the kitchen while I was forgetting to eat.  I manage to make it to work on time.

AT SCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS:  As I’ve mentioned previously I cover the gym in the morning.  There are a couple of other adults in there with me by the time the lion’s share of the kids are at school but it’s not uncommon for it to be me and two hundred kids.  Today, our assistant principal (new to the building this year) comes in and asks me in a rather pointed fashion what the building policy is on cell phones.  Note: she is fully aware of the answer to this question, which is that the kids basically aren’t supposed to have them, ever, and if they do they’re to remain in backpacks until such time as they are placed in lockers, and at all times they are to be off.

I explain to her that my policy on cell phones is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None; I ignore anything that is plainly related to listening to music, force phones to be put away when anything that could involve taking pictures is taking place, and tend to react reasonably, but harshly, to kids who are actually talking on them– which is rare.  The main reason is that every second kid in the gym has a cell phone with them and if I start taking cell phones away (which I am fully empowered to do by district policy) I will do nothing but take phones away and fight with kids every morning, all morning.  I fully understand why this is the policy in class but it is virtually unenforceable when the ratio of kids with cellphones to teachers doing something about them is literally a hundred to one.  I am not interested in that fight every day, and kids who are being reasonably discreet are going to be ignored.

She does not appear happy with this explanation until I look around and find five kids who are quietly listening to music and ask her which one she’d like me to take a phone away from first; that child will immediately find the other four and ask why I’m not taking their phones away instead of whoever I’m talking to.  They will then report to their parents that I’m picking on them.  No thank you.  This appears to clear the fog a bit and the conversation ends with no directive to change my policy.

The kids are on edge in a weird sort of way but there aren’t any fights or any real threats of one.  But there’s a weird vibe in the gym that I don’t like.

HOMEROOM:  The bright spot of my day, once the girls are done screaming about another spider in the hallway, which is quickly becoming the theme around here lately.  We do a Word of the Week; this week’s word was “ration.”  The kids are supposed to write a sentence for me; I select the best two or three and send them to the librarian, and he names a victor for each grade level.  One of my girls wins today.  If my name were Mr. Smith and her name were Charlie, this would be the sentence:  “Mr. Smith told me that he has a ration of Charlie that he is allowed every day, and I don’t get to talk to him again until tomorrow.”

I am beloved, obviously.

SUCCESS:  (It’s between homeroom and first hour, I didn’t name it, shut up.)  I’m ten minutes into my lesson when the teacher next door asks if she can borrow me for “a minute.”  There are two teachers in the room for Success so I have the other one take over and go into the hall.  There is an eighth grade girl who I only know by sight (new to the building this year) pacing and muttering angrily in the hallway with her fists clenched and tears in her eyes.  I get over my initial why the hell is this my problem bewilderment and ask her what’s wrong.

Here’s a thing:  Seventh and eighth grade girls are really fucking easy to manipulate.  I don’t know if you knew that but holy Christ is it true.  Some fifth grader– a fucking fifth grader— on the bus asked her if she thought she could beat up some other student, and now she’s angry because she has to fight this other student.  Who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the teacher next door) happens to be in my room at that very moment.  I spend a few minutes trying to calm her down and then call the other student into the hallway.  They are both saying stupid shit like “I don’t wanna fight her, but if she hits me I’m gonna kick her ass,” and pointing out that both of them are starting their sentences with saying that they do not want to fight is not doing the job it should of convincing them that, no, nobody’s actually going to fight here.

This conversation literally costs me the rest of the period.  By the end of it I’m reasonably convinced that I’m not going to have to break the two of them up at any point today and I’m ready to break the fifth grader’s head myself.  Then the teacher pulls another student out of her classroom who I have to convince that none of this shit was his business and he doesn’t need to threaten the first girl because nobody wants to fucking fight here so stop being a damn asshole.  I make a mental note to have a stern word with the fifth grader and bemoan the critical thinking skills of everyone under 30.  I do virtually no teaching in my first class of the day.

FIRST AND SECOND HOUR I have to spend keeping an eye on one of my autistic kids because he’s making his para insane and in general the kids are being weirdly dependent and pretending to not be as bright as they are.  This is an affliction that is not at all specific to them but they’re bad about it; I need to break them of this habit.  I have deliberately put a review packet together for my kids today because I have a crapton of desk work that must get done by the end of the day and my prep period was full before I even walked into the building.

(Note: this is something that most people don’t realize about teaching.  I have virtually no time to do anything during my day that isn’t teaching.  Any paperwork of any kind, including all of my grading, gets done on my own time.  It had piled up too much by this point.  It was time to have a work day.)

At any rate, this plan didn’t work out, because the kids had way too many questions.  I got a bit done but not as much as I wanted.

THIRD AND FOURTH HOUR was when all hell broke loose.  Third and fourth hour contain The Twins, who are several posts unto themselves and who I will talk about in more detail when I have the mental energy.  And if I’m being honest this is already a fourteen hundred word post and I haven’t even gotten to the stressful part.

So, yeah: I’m gonna abbreviate.  A lot.  The twins are, very soon, gonna get the shit kicked out of them, and it’s going to be their own damn fault– and that is not something I am prone to say about my students, particularly students who have obvious developmental issues (I suspect fetal alcohol syndrome; this is unconfirmed.)  But they piss off everyone they come into contact with, more or less deliberately, and then they tattle on the kids they’ve pissed off.

For example: if walking past the desk of the biggest gangbanger in the building, a kid who was in jail before he got expelled from his previous school and sent to us, maybe you don’t knock his shit on the floor on purpose.  Because he might literally kill you.

It’s happened twice.

The kids nearly caused two different fights today, and that’s not counting the number of students they got pissed off at them.  I ended up sending them out of my room with my coteacher for their own safety and not only arranged for them to not be in the halls during passing period for the rest of the day but literally created a security detail to get them to their buses at the end of the day so that they didn’t have to be in the gym with the rest of the kids.

I fully expect to find another article in the paper in a few months about how I didn’t do anything about the way they were mercilessly bullied, by the way.  I’m at 1700 words; this post would be twice as long if I actually talked about all the nonsense they created today.

And that was before my fifth and sixth hour got into my room.

God, I’m tired.

Don’t read this if you respect me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

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…I fully expect this to be my most popular post of all time, by the way.

Alongside this whole “don’t yell at kids” thing I’ve been doing lately I’ve been trying in general to become a gentler person.  At some point in the last few weeks I decided (possibly at the spirited urging of some internet people) that I wasn’t going to be automatically killing spiders any longer.  Seeing a spider no longer means trying to kill a spider.  They eat other bugs.  This is good, right?  We like spiders; we should keep them around.

There’s been a spider living in my bathroom for the last week or so.  Just a little house spider type of dude, one of the almost-transparent kinds, not like the black monstrosity I killed in the tub not too long ago (and, I think, blogged about, but I’m not gonna go looking right now.)  He’s been hanging out in the upper corners of the bathroom, so even if I were inclined to kill him, he’d be hard to reach and I’d have to stand on something– no real point, right?  So for several days every time I’ve gone into the bathroom I’ve spent a few seconds looking around to see if I could spot him.  The other day– Wednesday morning, maybe?– he happened to scuttle into the laundry room before I closed the door, and I’ve not seen him in the bathroom since.  Which, weirdly, was sorta sad.  I’d started thinking of him as a bit of a pet.  For all I know, the dog ate him.

My wife went down into our (more-or-less unfinished) basement tonight to go through some stuff and called me down; it rained like hell all day today and we had some water on the floor in the utility room and, as it turned out, some more– inexplicably in the middle of the damn room– in the main area down there.  I discovered the wet area in the main room by accident– by stepping in it, wearing socks.  Which led me to take my socks off and cuff my jeans a bit, as my jeans are generally a bit too long when I’m not wearing shoes.  Several times as we were poking around looking for wet spots (shut up, you’re gross) I walked through cobwebs.  They don’t freak me out like they do some people but they’re still kinda skeevy, y’know?  Nobody likes walking through cobwebs.

Being bald and walking through cobwebs is more unpleasant than usual, by the way.  Trust me.

Anyway, I’m brushing myself off every three seconds and my feet are cold and my pants and socks are wet and WHY THE HELL DOES EVERYTHING IN THIS HOUSE LEAK ALL THE SUDDEN JESUS CHRIST and suddenly it occurs to me that I have to use the bathroom.  There is no bathroom in the basement.  And, believe me, ordinary “have to use the bathroom” types of experiences get rather radically worse quickly when you have to use the bathroom while barefoot on a cold tile floor and wet.

“Gotta go,” I told my wife, and headed upstairs.

Where I entered the bathroom and, well, went.  This was, shall we say, a multiple event, necessitating a seated position, and because I’m like that I grabbed a book on the way into the bathroom.  (There’s a post coming about John Green, by the way.)  So I’m seated and reading my book and taking care of business… and my fucking pet spider drops onto the top of my head, scuttles off, lands on the book, and then drops into my underwear.

I will allow you to imagine the sequence of events that followed, as my skill as an author cannot do justice to what actually occurred.

I kill spiders on sight again, by the way.

NERRRDS

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

This is the greatest thing I have ever seen.

On venturing into public

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

My belly is full of pizza and my brain is full of nonsense. At the moment I prefer the contents of my belly; ultimately the pizza will cost me less. That said, it’s been a very long time since I was getting any kind of exercise regularly– and, despite my near-permanent status as a professional fat dude, I actually enjoy exercise. I got a weird little thrill when my wife pointed out that the current bathroom mirror (which is six feet wide and about four high, with no borders– just a big piece of mirrored glass) ought to go down into the basement as part of our as-yet nonexistent home gym. I was actually angry with myself that I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

I ran into three different families’ worth of students during the ten minutes that I was buying pizza, by the way, which makes me think maybe living in more or less the same neighborhood as my school isn’t that much of an advantage.

One of them asked me what I was doing there, which tells you the caliber of kids I’m dealing with. (Yes, this is an unfair thing to say. No student anywhere thinks his teachers are real people, and running into us in public, thus confirming the unwelcome truth that we exist outside of our classrooms, is always an occasion for wonder and mystery. But it’s still funny.)

“I’m here for pizza,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked.

I leaned forward.

“I actually live here,” I whispered, and pointed under one of the chairs by the door. “I slept there last night. Don’t tell anybody.”

Her eyes tripled in size. Her mother got their pizza (I was waiting for a Deep Dish pizza, which takes longer even though it’s more of a Deep Ish pizza) and shot me a weird look as they left.

By the time the third family said hello and left, I think the employees thought I was some sort of rock star.

The pudgy, bald, talentless kind, of course.

I tried to spend part of last night applying for a field trip grant through Target. Have I mentioned the DC trip yet? I take a group of seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C. every two years, and this year is a travel year. The trip is hella expensive so we’re trying to find a good way to pay for it that doesn’t involve me having to run a fundraiser. First it took twenty minutes and two changes of my password to log into the site, which is justweird, and then after taking three thousand or so characters to say I want to take my kids to DC so they can lern history gud, it lost my entire application except for the biographical part at the beginning. Frustrated, I tried to flip to the last section of the application, which asks me to break the trip cost down in ways that are frankly impossible (it costs, roughly, $800 per kid, but that’s a flat fee– they don’t break it down by transportation or food or lodging or whatever. It’s just $800. Target wants everything broken down specifically– I can’t even realistically estimate those numbers– and I doubt they’ll like it very much if I just put $32,000 HOLY FUCKING HELL ARE WE SERIOUSLY PAYING THEM THIRTY-TWO GRAND into one of the boxes.

Holy shit. How the hell are they making thirty-two thousand dollars off of us? That’s fucking insane. Mental note: redouble plans to become a DC tour guide once I decide I can’t teach any longer.

Jesus.

SQUIRREL!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TeachingLeave a comment

photo

I live in the future now; I’ve upgraded my two iThings to iOS 7, which means that for right now I’m fascinated and playing with the NEWSHINY and very soon I will be crying about battery drain and other horrible things and something I liked will stop working.  (My prediction for the first gripe:  while I like the new Control Center, I’ve already activated it accidentally several times while swiping around on websites.  This is going to be a problem.  Also, the battery drain on the phone is so horrendous that I’m predicting I already know what the first thing they address with an update is going to be.)

I also have iTunes Radio now, which is going to be a Pandora killer, I think.  Then again, I created an Atmosphere station first off (my favorite Pandora station) and right now it’s playing a song called “My Dick.”  Which is… something.  For sure.

(The song contains the line “We got dicks like Jesus,” by which I assume they mean circumcised, and I immediately forgive it.)

It’s been an uncommonly good couple of days at school, and my two biggest dickheads both got suspended today, so it ought to be a decent few more days as well until they come back.  While this year has been pretty high stress in terms of things not involving my classroom, I’m continually amazed at how well the Don’t Yell at Kids policy is affecting my actual teaching.  I almost never raise my voice in the classroom anymore; it’s amazing.  And it’s not just that I’ve got better behaved students this year, although that’s part of it– I don’t have to raise my voice in the morning class either, and that group, pound-for-pound, ought to be worse than either of my groups were last year.

Not much else right now, I don’t think, although I plan on gluing myself to the computer once the boy goes to sleep later– I need to get working on my two grant applications and there’s no good TV on tonight.  Plus iTunes Radio needs a good workout.  We’ll see if I find it superior to Pandora or not.

I almost forgot– add this awesome person to your blogroll and start reading her immediately.  Because I said so.