Month: March 2014

In which I tried, really, I swear

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Man.  Even by my substantially-lowered ISTEP season standards, I have nothing tonight.  I had a long, distressing meeting after school– yes, a two-hour meeting that started after school ended on a Friday– and it’s rather sapped my will to live.  And I just found out this afternoon that a student’s mother died abruptly yesterday (the service is tomorrow, meaning I won’t be at OtherJob), and Raymond’s in the hospital because the doctors can’t get his seizures under control.

Maybe shoulda put those three things in a different order, I dunno.  I think it’s a night to curl up with a book and TV.

So, yeah, forget about me tonight.  Have three insanely creepy Willem Dafoe .gifs instead:

ozh0ss9h44m8acejkwuz jo1wja7ydsi2eih1i1ez kls2rbzzladzhxzhwp4z(True fact: the boy just ran in here, and his bewildered reaction to the .gifs has substantially improved my day.)

 

Social media update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

If you are so inclined to do so, you can Like my Facebook page here.  I think.  Links to blog entries are going to start showing up there soon, and I’ll start using it for other stuff… eventually?  Sure.

How bad you really want my whoa-oa-oa

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy8 Comments

i-cannot-brain-today-i-has-the-dumb-catI’ve been low on blogs lately.  Most of my posts for the last couple of weeks or so have either been pictures or very short, and the ones that haven’t been either of those have generally been about teaching.  I suspect I’ve started to bore people a bit, and my traffic shows it.  I mentioned this to my wife last night, and she blamed the fact that I haven’t been really pissed off about much of anything lately.

Apparently I’m funnier when I’m pissed off.  My students would disagree, I think, but it’s okay if you think that way.  It’ll be hilarious when my aorta finally blows from the stress, I promise.

Sadly, recognizing this problem doesn’t actually solve it, and while nine or ten years ago my reaction might have been to gleefully troll around the internet until I found something outrageous I’d like to think that I’m older and wiser now.  So let’s chalk this up to a natural variation in my brain output; we just finished the first round of ISTEP testing today so I hope y’all will excuse my near-obsession with talking about my job lately; it ought to level off a bit for a while pretty soon.  And I’ve got a hard deadline coming soon on getting the bathroom tub surround done, so expect more Terrible Decisions posts, and then I’m taking thirty thirteen and fourteen year olds eight hundred miles away from home after that and while there won’t be a lot of posting during those days what I do put up ought to at least be entertaining.

Let’s talk about this: I’m contractually obligated to produce a novel this summer, right?  I’m curious, folks: what should it be about?  Not, like, plot or anything, but genre, tone, that sort of stuff.  I’m gonna leave the question pretty generic, as I’m interested in what sorts of things people think I should write about without my input.  I’ll provide more detail on what I’m thinking later; right now I want to see what y’all come up with.

I promise to try and be more interesting soon.

In which I am so proud

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking6 Comments

Someone just found my blog by Googling “eldritch horror.” I’m wiping a tear as I type this.

How I’ll hate going out in the storm

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

The predicted Hell Blizzard sorta fizzled, at least around here (I haven’t been home long enough to see what the news has to say about other places) but man did it leave some pretty behind:

2014-03-12 16.16.28Freestanding icicles in the parking lot.  They were apparently attached to the bottom of a car and somehow just stayed there when the car pulled away.

It hasn’t really been snowing since this morning, but the blowing snow is crazy and it’s really sticking to all the trees.  This might be one of my favorite pictures from this winter:

10003404_10152225182438926_2054072308_nIt’s supposed to be fifty degrees again by early next week, of course.

 

It’s 4:15 AM…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

…and I’m wide freaking awake.  Also, there doesn’t appear to be a single flake of new snow or drop of precipitation outside, so so much for the “no school” theory.

This will not be a good day.

You’ve gotta be kidding me

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Starting to think that there might not be school tomorrow.  Follow the bouncing ball:

  • Five to nine inches of snow;
  • Starting after 2:00 in the morning;
  • after a period of rain (more ice)
  • and sleet (more ice)
  • coupled with 35-mph winds
  • peaking at two inches of snow an hour at… 6:00 in the morning.

That’s what you call a perfect storm, kids.  It’s basically exactly what you need in this part of the world for snow to cancel school, combined with the guarantee that weather like that will keep a lot of kids home even if the schools don’t cancel, because it’ll be vile as hell outside.  Yes, it’s ISTEP week.  Better or worse: extend testing another day for everyone, or have 15-20% of all the kids in every school need make-up tests?

(For the record: same thing happened three or four years ago.  They cancelled.)

In which I ain’t mad

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

anigif_enhanced-9949-1393531503-3So, my kids bombed the Applied Skills, and I don’t care.  I’m not legally allowed to discuss individual test items, and that’s not an issue that I care to challenge the state on, so I’m not going to.  I can say the rest of this, though: I had maybe six or seven kids who didn’t even finish, which for my students is incredibly rare.  (By comparison, I had only two kids out of all my current students who didn’t finish it last year, and at least three times that many in one class this year.)  Every other seventh-grade teacher who I talked to, in more than one building, reported the same phenomenon: much higher than normal numbers of kids not finishing the test.

This tells me that the state way overshot the difficulty level, and they’ll adjust for that when they score.  Plus, as I said a couple of days ago, I have kids who got zero points on the Applied Skills in sixth grade and still passed the test.  I learned after my first year teaching sixth grade; this test always looks horrifying and tries to destroy both my own confidence in my ability to do my job and their own confidence in their ability to do their jobs (as a bonus, the hardest question was the first one again this year) and it is manifestly not worth stressing out about.  They came in confident, no one gave up, and I felt like they did their best on the LA test that came second today despite getting beaten down by the math test.  That’s really all I can ask for.  I’m not wasting time worrying about it.

Something I am going to spend my time worrying about:  remember Raymond?  Unfortunately, his seizure during class a couple of weeks ago was only the first in a series of them.  He’s not been in class very much lately as his parents have struggled to find the cause of the problem and adjust medications, but they sent him in today because of ISTEP testing.

He apparently had at least one seizure during the test today.  He didn’t test with me because of his disabilities; he gets extra time and he has difficulty with fine motor skills like writing so he’s got a scribe with him for the test.  His para told me that there was no point anywhere during the test where Raymond had any idea what the hell was going on around him or what he was supposed to be doing on the test.

I can’t get mad at his parents; they were trying to do what they thought they were supposed to do.  But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to raise hell to get that test invalidated, and I hope to hell his parents keep him home for the next couple of days.  This is true for obvious humanitarian reasons– this test is not important enough for a kid to jeopardize his damn health to take– and slightly-more-selfish reasons, such as the fact that current ed reform theory is that there is nothing more important to student test scores than the skill of the teacher (and I’m certainly the only one who’s going to get blamed) and I suspect that fuckin’ epilepsy might have a bit to do with his scores here.  I didn’t find out about all this until late in the day so I didn’t have time to talk to his parents; I’m sure as hell going to be meeting with administration tomorrow to see what we can do about invaliding the test.

I suspect that meeting is going to be fun.