Unread Shelf: July 31, 2021

Luther M. Siler

It doesn’t look like I read anything at all this month, does it? Sigh.

In which I’m listening

Luther M. Siler

I got new albums from Prince and Billie Eilish today, both of which were released today, and I feel like that fact represents most of the breadth of my music tastes pretty accurately. The Prince album was recorded in 2010, at the tail end of the New Power Generation years, which for me is Peak Prince. I’ve only listened to it once (and am currently halfway through the Eilish album) but it’s entirely possible that there will be gushing about it in the near future. I need a couple more spins before I’m going to be able to write coherently about it, though.

Yeah, I said “spins,” even though I’m listening to MP3s. My blog, my grammar. Shuddup.

I went over to work today, as planned, and while there was some stuff that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to (they had all summer to move my desk, and they haven’t, which … grr) I got a decent start on setting the room up. One thing I’m going to try out this year: I have more bulletin boards than I know what to do with, so I’m going to use one of them to display student compliments for each other. I’ve used this a few times on assignments as a bonus question– literally “say something nice about someone else in the room for a bonus point,” and the kids generally do a pretty good job. It’s also interesting how cleanly the compliments seem to get spread around– I pay attention, and while there are some kids who are more popular than others everybody seems to be getting mentioned every other time or so.

What I’m thinking I’ll do is make a little form– maybe a quarter of a piece of paper– and occasionally pass them out and demand everyone write something nice about somebody and also leave them out so that they can leave compliments for people whenever they want. Maybe on the days where I make them write them I’ll clear the board first so I can pass the kids’ compliments back to them. I figure anything I can do to make the classroom more welcoming is only going to result in good things, and this is going to be a year where I need as much buy-in from my students as I can possibly get, since I’ll be asking for a lot from them. And if it doesn’t work, I can always take it down after the first quarter if I want to.

Off to do some recording. I’ll likely do some live-streaming tonight as well, so swing by the channel this evening if that sounds like fun.

It begins, pt. 18

Luther M. Siler

Because capitalism, let me begin by reminding you of two things: that I have a new book out and that my YouTube channel is going strong and could use some more subscribers. The game we’re in now, A Plague Tale: Innocence, is particularly narratively strong and I think would probably be quite a bit of fun to watch. It’s a game where you’re occasionally called upon to feed Inquisition soldiers to rats! You’ll love it.

(Why “Pt. 18,” in the headline there? This is year eighteen of teaching. Eighteen fucking years. Madness.)

School has not started yet, and won’t for nearly two weeks (two weeks from yesterday, I think, is the kids’ first day) but my rosters showed up today when I went looking for them, and I was greeted with smaller classes than I thought I was going to have (alarmingly small, honestly; I can imagine a world where if some of these kids don’t show up they collapse a section on us) and an organizational change that will make grading and record-keeping a lot easier, at least once I get done redoing the planning that was predicated on things working like they did last year. I am fighting off the urge to go to Target tonight to do a touch of supply shopping for stuff I know I’m going to need, and I will be in my classroom for the first time this school year tomorrow. I likely won’t be there much longer than an hour or so– long enough to take a quick inventory of what I want to do with the classroom now that I’m actually decorating it (remember, I’m in the same room I was in last year, but I never really decorated last year) and figure out what I might need to buy over the weekend.

I will be in my classroom Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week doing setup, Thursday and Friday are all-day meetings downtown, Monday the week after I’ll be in my room, then Tuesday is the first day for the teachers and the kids are back Wednesday. So this is the last weekday of summer, basically, since I’ll have Job Stuff every weekday from here on out.

So, yeah: here we go.

Let’s see, what else? I have a Family Thing this weekend; not one as extensive as last time, just for a day– but it’s for my wife’s side of the family, and I don’t know any of them especially well. Unlike my own family, I’m also not a hundred percent sure I can trust the vaccine status of everyone who will be there, a lot of whom I won’t know at all, and while I like my wife’s cousin and her kids, her cousin’s husband is still … I’ll say a potential danger spot in terms of his and my mutual ability to get along with each other. I have, as of yet, no concrete reason to distrust the guy beyond vibes, but we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years for obvious reasons and in general the people I might be interested in staying away from seem to have gotten worse at hiding their bullshit since this all started. I will do my damnedest to be a good guest– or, at the very least, I will make damned sure that while we’re driving home angry after leaving early, it won’t be because I was the asshole.

This is where my life would be easier if I was capable of talking about sports, by the way. Sports is a great thing for men to talk about when they don’t want to talk about other things. That said, talking about sports right now is pretty much talking about politics anyway, so even that refuge may be gone. Hopefully what happened last time will happen again– that the teenagers will decide to hang out with me, and I will thus immunize myself (heh) of any accusations of refusing to socialize while still insulating myself against stumbling into a Don’t Want None Won’t Be None situation with anyone else.

It’ll be fine, but cross your fingers for me anyway.

I had a lot of things to do today

Luther M. Siler

… so you know what I did instead?

I took a nap.

It was a very good nap.

(Actually, I did manage to get the oil changed on my car and then swapped out a propane tank, so today was practically productive. But the most important thing was still the nap.)

On cars and Hogwarts, again

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

If you’ve been around for a while, it’s possible that you remember this story: my son attends a pricey private school, one that my wife and I are affording with financial assistance. When we first started sending him there, I was driving a Ford Escape that had a six-figure mileage and was, itself, old enough to have a drivers’ license. My current Kia Soul is an upgrade. However, there was a day, several years ago, when I was picking my son up during the winter in the Escape and experiencing a bit of class anxiety. I comforted myself with the existence of what looked like a station wagon in the parking spot next to me that also was covered in salt and muddy snow and looked kind of shitty, only to discover that I was comparing my $2000 Escape to a fucking $100,000 Porsche.

He’s at summer camp right now, and I just went to pick him up, and I found myself in the car line behind a Tesla– I don’t know exactly which model, but not the one with the weird doors. One kid got in that car and they stayed in their spot, possibly waiting for another kid. My kid came out and got in my car, so I waited for the lane to be clear and pulled out to drive around the Tesla that had been parked in front of me.

Only to find myself behind another fucking Tesla.

My wife and I do just fine, I swear, and I see the effects of actual poverty every day at work, and again, no one in this building has ever been anything other than perfectly nice, but damn, there is just no faster way to make myself feel broke than to look around at the cars any time I’m near Hogwarts. It’s ridiculous.

I suspect we’re going to be back up over 100,000 new cases a day nationwide by the end of the week, (EDIT: Ha, it happened today!) and the CDC just announced that everybody should start masking up indoors again. I just ordered a new pack of filters for my favored mask. I was really hoping to not have to teach in a mask again this year, but apparently only about 20% of 12-15-year-olds are vaccinated nationwide and I’m sure that number is lower in my district, so I really don’t have any choice. Indiana’s numbers are going up, but they aren’t spiking to the degree the nation’s are yet and St. Joe County isn’t as hot as the rest of Indiana, so I’m pretty sure the school year will be starting as normal this year. That said, I don’t think I knew on July 27 last summer how this year would be starting yet, so who the hell knows? I suspect everyone will just close their eyes and pretend Covid has gone away, but we’ll see.