In which I need a sniglet

On February 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Teaching, Television10 Comments

Here’s a way to tell whether you’re old: if you know what a sniglet is, especially if you know it immediately without looking it up or going “Crap! I know this!” for five minutes, you’re old.

Dinner was salmon. Sriracha-maple-syrup-lime salmon, specifically. With baked potatoes. Which was frigging delicious, lending further credence to my frequent suggestion that you can put sriracha on anything and it will be awesome.

(Recipe: One half of a salmon. Two tablespoons of maple syrup. A teaspoon of sea salt. Three teaspoons of sriracha. The juice of a lime; zest it if you want. Whisk the marinade/sauce together in a bowl for a couple of minutes until it combines, pour it over the fish, skin side down, in a greased or vegetable sprayed glass pan. 15 minutes at 425. Pair with baked potatoes.)

Anyway. The word I need means “something which you feel ought to be a character flaw, and would probably be a character flaw in someone else, but which is nonetheless part of your personality and you don’t care.” Because as delicious as my dinner was, it didn’t look like much, and I didn’t take a picture of it. Which disappointed me, because I’m a wanker idiot. Foodstagrams in general are supposed to be looked down upon by the internet glitterati anyway, right? I wanna be glitterati!

Meh. I don’t care. There’s something weirdly fun about taking pictures of food I make and I’m gonna keep doing it even if I’m vaguely ashamed of it. So yeah. I need a word for that.

———————–

Got most of what I wanted to get done today done, even if it didn’t always make it into the post below, and I made dinner besides, so I managed to keep myself busy today once I got my carcass out of bed. Tonight will be nothing but television; we discovered True Detective yesterday and there’s a new Walking Dead, so pretty much the second the boy’s in bed all interwebs activity will cease and we’ll be glued to the television for the rest of the night.

Also, it really hit me today just how close we are to ISTEP. If it wasn’t for the delay the state allowed, it’d be two weeks off, and as it stands it’s still less than a month. And the DC trip is not far off and there’s also the chance that I’ll get a letter on Friday that will literally change my life on the spot. It may be about to get busy around here.

Day off agenda

On February 17, 2014February 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized7 Comments

Okay.

A rough list of today’s agenda items, in approximate order of how likely the tasks are to be accomplished:

~~Get my Lazy Ass out of Bed (done!)~~
~~Shower~~
~~Breakfast~~
~~Somehow avoid watching the three episodes of True Detective and the episode of Walking Dead that are waiting for my wife to come home~~
Finish reading The King in Yellow; see above.
Find everything H.P. Lovecraft wrote involving Hastur; read that too. (Mental note: The Whisperer in Darkness)
Real blog post not involving a bullet list
~~Get grading caught up~~
~~Lesson planning for this week~~
~~Success groups~~
~~Catch up on email~~
~~Write report for administrative team on SAP. (Trust me.)~~
Get house generally clean.
Pull wallpaper down in bathroom.
Restructure back wall in bathroom.
Make some progress on BA 6.
Finish editing on BA 5.
Finish the third Wheel of Time book.
~~Go to grocery~~, one or two other shopping errands.

All before 5 PM, which is when I’m making dinner. Probably ought to start on item 2, I guess. (Later note: Well, hell, all the stuff I’ve done this morning wasn’t on the list. Time to change the list!)

Because the entire internet needs to know

On February 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Photography6 Comments

…I had perfect for dinner, guys.

Think before you post

On February 16, 2014February 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy47 Comments

This image has popped up at least four or five times in my Facebook feed in the last couple of days, and instead of starting the exact same fight in several different places I’m just gonna go ahead and start it here. I don’t know who the hell Joseph Sobran is, and I’m not about to Google him, but I’m pretty sure he’s either a moron or a racist. Because let’s spend just a few seconds thinking about what might have changed in American history and American culture since nineteen fucking fourteen.

Actually, no, let’s not even start with that; let’s start with the fact that it ain’t exactly hard to find high school Latin classes nowadays. Greek might be a trifle more difficult but it’s not like it doesn’t exist. And who was taking Greek and Latin a hundred years ago in what Sobran is stupidly referring to as “high school”? Rich white boys. Basically the only folks who had access to any postsecondary education of any kind at all in 1914.

Just to make sure we’re clear: “High school” as an institution in this country barely even existed in 1914. You got through sixth grade or so and that was it. Maybe the top five percent of everybody got further education beyond that, and if they did, they sure as shit didn’t call it “high school.” It was college prep, generally under individual tutors. You didn’t start seeing any real broad-based concept that people should attend school for twelve years until the late 30s or early 40s, and even then if you weren’t white and male and relatively well-off you could fuck right the hell off.

Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, for Christ’s sake, which means we weren’t even trying to educate anybody in this country who wasn’t white until sixty years ago. And even then… hell, if you can’t remember the struggles over public schools in the sixties you have no business commenting on education in this country under any circumstances. If you are able to take a look at the incredibly vast way in which access to education has expanded in this country over the last hundred years and your take-away from that is “Durrr, people used to be smarter,” then you should not only throw yourself into a lake but you probably ought to never speak to me again.

Sub-rant: I’m also sick to fucking death of hearing about colleges and people affiliated with them complaining about having to remediate incoming freshmen. If only there were some mechanism by which colleges and universities could determine who was able to enroll in their classes! OH, right, they’re completely one hundred percent in charge of that. Raise your standards or quit fucking bitching. Assholes.

EDIT: Fuck it; I went ahead and Googled Joseph Sobran. Oh gee look I was exactly right: he was an anti-Semite (speaking of people who generally weren’t allowed access to higher education in 1914) and a Holocaust denier. So, great job, folks; this is an awesome guy to put dumb-ass quotes from on your Facebook page.

Creepy children’s programming review: Color Crew

On February 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews14 Comments

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So this “Color Crew” program is the new shizz around here for some reason. TV for little kids is always deeply weird on one axis or another; this may be the weirdest program he’s ever wanted to watch, with the possible exception of “WordWorld,” which isn’t allowed into my house any longer.

Color Crew is the story of ten crayons. The ten crayons are basically identical except for Purple, who is high as hell, and Green, who is… special. The intro song sets up the basic premise of the program:

See, the whole thing is about competing for the hat, which has magical powers and allows the Color of the Day the power of speech. The crayon’s only allowed to say its name, though, so it’s not actually that great as a superpower. The crayons all hop around and compete for the honor of wearing the Hat, which always goes to the fourth crayon in line, a fact that they seem not quite bright enough to have figured out yet. Then that crayon and the crayon to its left get to go color a picture.

Coloring a picture is very exciting! The pictures exist in a weird world without perspective, though, so it’s entirely possible that the piggy bank on the bed is 2/3 the size of the entire bed, or the two cherries on a plate are going to be the same size as the entire piece of cake on the plate next to it:

Note the relative sizes of, say, the two oranges, the frying pan, and the carton of milk. Which is, inexplicably, on a plate. Somewhere underneath them will be some built-in shelves each holding a single carrot.

Anyway, as you can see, the Color of the Day gets to color some of the things in the picture! This is very happymaking for everyone involved, and the crayons get rather indecently excited about it. Like, there are crayon boners going on, I swear. Sooner or later, though, the color of the day will stop shrieking his name over and over again and get a liiiitle bit too excited and color something the wrong color. Objects in Color Crew world, you see, can only be one color, ever, and the other colors will tolerate no bending of this rule. The mixture of horror and sadness on the face of the other crayon when something gets mis-colored cannot be expressed properly in language and must be seen to be believed.

And then the sinister purpose of the second crayon becomes apparent. He’s the enforcer. He’s there to make sure the rules get followed. He’s there to summon the Angry Eraser:

The Angry Eraser is a terrifying mixture of a shop teacher from a 1970’s teen movie and Adolf Hitler. He exists to destroy art and color and is perfectly happy with his role as Pure Evil. He glares hatefully at the miscreant crayon, destroys their horrible mistake, and then grins like a fucking pedophile maniac and skids back off screen. At which point the Color Overseer recolors the deviant portion of the page and everyone gets back to work. Sooner or later all of the crayons zoom in, at which the picture unaccountably becomes colored with markers instead of crayons:

The whole thing is weird and creepy, so naturally my kid loves it. How long until he can watch Walking Dead with the wife and I?

Geography blogwanking again

On February 15, 2014February 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking29 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-02-15 at 2.43.39 PM Guys, I am wasting my several hours of relative solitude and time-to-get-work-done at OtherJob in an epic fashion today; the most active I’ve gotten has been to go outside and hack at the ice in the parking lot, since I managed to wipe out on the way in the door (I’m fine) and now I have a vendetta against it. But holy hell there is just nothing else happening around here right now. So let’s give you some information you don’t care about at all, and provide everyone with an update on how my ongoing project to have every country on Earth view my blog is going. It’s a lot better than last time! But there are still some holdouts and dangit world get off your duffs and come look at my blog.

North America: Done, technically, or at least the parts that I recognize as “North” America as opposed to “Central” America. I’m not sure exactly where the continental divide is; I think technically all of Central America belongs to North America? This is not impressive, though, because there are only three countries in what I’m calling North America and I live in one of them.

Central America: Still missing: El Salvador and Nicaragua. Plus Cuba and probably some tiny islands. Belize showed up yesterday. I just got my first hit from Puerto Rico a couple of days ago, too, which was startling; I’d have figured they’d have shown up earlier. This makes me wonder how many of the fifty states I’ve actually gotten traffic from but I don’t know of a way to find that information. I figure of the three Cuba is probably the biggest longshot, although I don’t actually know if they heavily filter the Internet down there the way other Communist nations do.

South America: Missing three: Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. I can’t find the link right now but I had an entertaining conversation a couple of weeks ago with a guy who was also chasing hits from French Guiana for forever to the point where his blog was showing up in Google searches for the country. This makes me think that that will probably be the last of the three, but as I know nothing about any of them other than Jim Jones’ people killed themselves in Guyana, I don’t have a good idea about what’ll be last.

Australia: Done! Also New Zealand and most of the nearby island nations, not counting most of the super-duper teeny-tiny ones.

Europe: Mostly done. Liechtenstein and Vatican City haven’t shown up, but they probably shouldn’t count, and it turns out that WordPress lands on the Kosovars’ side on whether Kosovo is part of Serbia or not. I actually thought Europe was done until I figured that out. I was missing Albania for a long time but I finally got a spate of hits from them a couple of weeks ago. Pretty much once I get a hit from Kosovo I’m gonna call Europe done.

Middle East: Missing Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Yemen seems like it ought to show up sooner or later, particularly given the number of hits I get from neighboring countries; I suspect the ongoing civil war in Syria and totalitarian government in Iran will keep me from getting traffic from there for a while, as those folks seem to have other things to worry about other than visiting my blog.

Africa: Currently a mess, which is unsurprising. Hard to say which country will be last; I’d have thought Ethiopia but I’ve already gotten half-a-dozen hits from there. Somalia, maybe? South Sudan? Who knows.

Asia: Mostly done; missing some of the breakaway Soviet republics (Tajikistan; Turkmenistan, a couple of others) as well as Mongolia, Nepal, and North Korea. Obviously North Korea is on the “probably never” list. I was gratified to see a hit from China about a month ago, as I’d figured I’d need to write them off forever.

Miscellaneous: The Svalbard Islands, which are those islands east of Greenland and north of Russia. Not nearly as big as they look due to the way the map works and technically part of Norway. That said, searching for posts tagged “Svalbard” produces a surprising number of posts so I figure I’ll catch them sooner or later.

Please tell me I’m not the only person who cares about this. Anybody else out there have a geographic white elephant they want to share?

On the teachers’ lounge

On February 15, 2014February 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching7 Comments

teachersloungeshirt I reblogged a post the other day called Choosing Sad Over Cynical, and I’m glad I did; it’s a magnificent piece that makes a point that I think teachers really need to hear. Cynicism is a choice, and while I’ll freely admit it’s a choice I’ve made gleefully at more than one point in my career it’s absolutely useful to remind myself that there are better things to do with my mental health.

That said, I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of days, and I’m going to take issue with one minor aspect of the post:

Way back when I was a newly minted Special Ed teacher, I remember listening to veteran teachers talk in that proverbial den of negativity, the faculty room. Any time I’d say something positive, some veteran teacher would say, “Oh, you’ll get over that soon. Wait a couple of years.” I’d notice how miserable these teachers were, how much they hated their jobs, the mean things they’d say about kids and parents.

It goes on from there, but you get the point.

First things first: March Hare is absolutely right to describe your average teachers’ lounge as a “den of negativity.” That description is both fair and accurate. It also completely misses the point of the teachers’ lounge, and misses it in a way that’s hard to describe to people who aren’t teachers.

Yes, the teachers’ lounge is a den of negativity, and a place where people, usually teachers, are occasionally prone to say terrible, horrible things about the children who are in their charge. But here’s the thing: don’t worry about it. What y’all need to realize– and I’m generalizing now because this post is far from the only post I’ve seen discussing teachers’ lounge “culture”– is that 1) my twenty-five minutes in the teachers’ lounge is literally the only 25 minutes of my day where I get to interact with adults when I’m not on the job. Even if I have a co-teacher or paraprofessionals in my room, I don’t get to have “off-duty” conversations with those people while they’re in my classroom, and I’ll admit to being rather cold to people I shouldn’t have on the rare occasions where they tried to have a conversation unrelated to what was going on in the classroom. That’s not the place.

The teachers’ lounge is the place. During those 25 minutes I need to a) eat lunch, b) find a way to relax a little bit, and– and this is the important part– frequently I, and everyone else, need to c) find a way to blow off steam. That’s a lot to do in 25 minutes, and I can build up a lot of damn steam in the first four hours of my day.

I’m sorry if it sounds terrible, and it probably does, but if calling Jimmy a stupid brain-dead motherfucker in the teachers’ lounge keeps me from treating Jimmy like a stupid brain-dead motherfucker in the classroom, I’m going to run my mouth about him– to people who know him, and who understand, mind you– in the teachers’ lounge, and I’m not going to feel too bad about it.

Wanna see something interesting, though? Watch what happens if a sub tries to talk shit about our kids– or anybody else other than us who may happen to be in the teachers’ lounge at that time. Every adult in the room will jump to the defense of a kid who we might have been perfectly happy to joke about the suspect parentage of five minutes ago. Why? He’s ours. We can talk shit about our own kids. Nobody else gets to. Period. And everybody in that room who hears me call Jimmy a stupid brain-dead motherfucker knows that I’m about to walk back into my classroom and work my ass off to teach the belligerent little shit some math.

Are there teachers who are complete burnouts, like she describes? Absofuckinlutely. I’ve come dangerously close to it at any number of points in my career– hell, the last two weeks have not been pretty; I really needed the last couple of days to go well and I’m glad they have, but I got home on Wednesday griping that I needed to find something else to do with my life, and not remotely for the first time. But you identify a burnout by what they do in the classroom, not what they say in the teachers’ lounge.

We all sound like assholes in there.

In which we played bones, and I’m yellin domino

On February 14, 2014February 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Teaching6 Comments

Unknown Today was the following: 1) A Friday; 2) Valentine’s Day; 3) A dress-down day; 4) a full moon; 5) the day before a three-day weekend. Today had no right to be anything other than a god damn disaster. And yet it was the second of two uncommonly good days. A few highlights of the last 48 hours and a few other random things that I feel like talking about:

First and foremost: There will be no gay marriage ban on Indiana’s ballot this fall. While, unfortunately, this isn’t as big of a deal as actual marriage equality, it basically means that the gay marriage ban is dead, because even if the bigots behind it keep bringing it up it now can’t be on the ballot before 2016 due to Indiana’s nicely complicated constitutional amendment laws. “Can’t be on the ballot before 2016” is a nice way of saying “will never, ever be on the ballot” at this point. Marriage equality advocates have won; this debate is over, it’s just that the dinosaur is taking a while to die. If fucking Indiana can’t pass a gay marriage ban anymore, it’s over. Judges nationwide are starting to wake up to the fact that “Eew! Icky” and “But JEEEEEZUS!” aren’t actually legal arguments, and that once you lay those aside there is nothing left. By 2016 this is a dead issue.
Somewhat less important but still way awesome: De La Soul is celebrating the 25th anniversary (jesusold) of Three Feet High and Rising by making their entire record catalog available for free on their website. The catch: you’ve got until, like, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Go forth and download.
Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, so we got to go out with a couple of friends for dinner, which was nice. We didn’t make it into our first choice restaurant (a bizarre spike in business that had the normally bitchy owner incredibly apologetic kept us from getting a table) but we were fed well at our second choice so no worries. We’ve kinda ignored Valentine’s Day because our 6th anniversary (damn) is in two weeks.
On the other hand, wife’s birthday means I got to watch the boy eat cake tonight. Which is always fun.
I stayed after school a bit today to watch a wrestling meet. I like watching middle school wrestling; I like watching amateur wrestling in general and unlike virtually every middle school sport you don’t get the occasional burst of cringeworthy incompetence that has you trying your damnedest not to laugh at your students behind a hand. Basketball in particular is prone to this. We won big, too, against our biggest local rival, which is awesome.
I commented to someone this morning that Jihad had had a decent week in my class (only two fifteen-minute ISS timeouts) and that he was dangerously close to making it through an entire week of school without being suspended, which would be the first time all year. I almost complimented the kid. He was in the office by lunchtime (I had nothing to do with it) and was suspended for five days. I know why but I’m not going to go into it here. This and the next item don’t count as good news and kinda spoil the tone of the rest of the piece a bit but the musical number at the end will make up for it.
We also busted a kid today for snorting vicodin in the restroom– five pills!– and put another one up for expulsion for bringing a BB gun and a knife to school. That last one was sort of my fault; the kid told me that he’d gotten punched at the bus stop after school yesterday (right thing to do!) but neglected to mention that he had brought weapons to defend himself in the future (wrong thing to do!). I let the office know about the fight and apparently he told them about the BB gun and the knife. Sigh.
Good school news: The blind kid is not nearly as blind as I’d been led to believe although he is extremely nearsighted, and while I’m still not completely up to speed in terms of providing him with the accommodations he needs to succeed it’s not going to be as onerous as I’d initially thought. It hit me today that this means I have a kid with major vision issues and a kid with major hearing issues in the same classroom.
More good school news: I’ve gotten two days of consistent paying attention/doing work/in school for a reason type behavior out of both of my most consistent low-IQ-but-also-legitimately-insanely-lazy kids. One of them actually volunteered to do work at the board today! It’s normally like pulling teeth to get either of these kids to do anything at all so seeing consistent compliance and even the occasional right answer once in a while has been awesome.
I’ve got the DC trip ironed out. Bad news: no Monticello; we just can’t make the scheduling work to a degree that I’m comfortable with. Good news: we get to go to the national zoo! ZOOOOOOOOOO!!! I think my tour director was legitimately startled by the vehemence of my positive response when she mentioned this was a possible replacement. I love zoos, and I’ve never been to the National Zoo before. Woohoo! The trip is in six weeks. Getting excited.
Speaking of things that are soon… one week until I find out about the grant. Still keeping my fingers crossed.
The good thing about it being both Friday and Valentine’s Day: I have divine sanction to listen to this song over and over again:

Three day weekend, so I’m planning on spending tomorrow alternately grading and writing; expect a thousand blog posts and hopefully a few thousand words of fiction, which you probably won’t see here.

How’re y’all?