On cell phones, classrooms and idiots

On August 16, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching1 Comment

I suspect that what happened in my classroom today could be used by other members of our staff as evidence that I need to be more vigilant in patrolling our students for cell phones and confiscating them or forcing them to be returned to lockers. And while I don’t actually want this post to be About Cellphones, I think it’s just more evidence that schools have irretrievably lost the battle about cell phones. To be clear, before I get too far ahead of myself: I do think cellphones were used in my classroom today in a way that is a problem. However, I think the problem doesn’t lie with the phones themselves, I think it lies with the people using them– and, worse, the people I’m referring to are the adults, not the kids.

Anyway. I had just gotten class started today in my 3rd-4th hour group, which is my largest by a decent margin and, oh gee what a surprise, also my most disciplinarily problematic by a similarly large margin. Suddenly one of my girls jumped up out of her seat, in tears, and started hollering about how she had to go to the office, and then headed for the door. Like, out of Goddamned nowhere.

I caught up to her just before she actually got out of the room and got her into the hallway to talk to me, and it turned out that there was some sort of sudden family emergency. I’m not clear on the details and don’t see the point of sharing them anyway, but Mom decided that the way to let her daughter know that something horrible had happened with one of her family members was to text her while she was in fucking class and tell her.

So now she’s panicking, my class is blown up, and every fucker in the room knows something’s going on with her family and is bothering her and asking her all sorts of questions. And had it been a teacher other than me whose room this happened in, I can easily imagine it turning into a fucking power struggle over the cell phone and not a quick pass down to the office, which was my reaction– or, if she’d moved faster, an utterly confused call to security, where all I have is so-and-so just got up and ran out and I have no idea where the fuck she went.

PARENTS! I understand why kids have cell phones! My kid is 9 and he will likely have one within a year. Why? Well, he lives in a house with no Goddamned land line, and he’s getting old enough that leaving him at home alone for brief periods of time and/or having him at activities without us is starting to become a conceivable thing, and once those things are happening he needs a way to get ahold of us. I also do not agree that kids should keep their expensive-ass cell phones (or even their cheap burner cell phones) in their lockers, which are not remotely as secure as administration would like us to believe. Nah. Their phones are in their pockets. I don’t love it, but I’ve made my peace with it. Schools lost that battle. So be it.

Don’t fucking call or text your kids when they’re at Goddamned school.

Especially do not call your kids and tell them about family emergencies when they are at school, even if your overarching goal is to get them down to the office so you can pick them up. You call the fucking office, and the office calls for the kid to come down and bring their stuff, and then your kid doesn’t have a fucking panic attack in front of their entire class.

Christ. I need y’all to be smarter than this.

On Afghanistan

On August 15, 2021August 15, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I don’t know a Goddamn thing about Afghanistan.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I probably know more about Afghanistan than most Americans. But that is a perilously low bar, and does not really imply anything worth bragging about, and if the bar is not compared to other Americans but is my knowledge of this country useful or sufficient, well … it ain’t, on either count.

I saw someone suggest on Twitter earlier today that the one thing we could have done to avoid what’s going on right now in Afghanistan would have been to elect Al Gore in 2000, and I have some sympathy for that argument. I saw another that suggested that Biden has simply decided to be the President who takes the hit for a result that was going to be inevitable whenever we decided to leave, and that the main thing the policies of the Presidents between him and Dubya have done has been kicking the can down the road so that the disaster after the withdrawal was someone else’s problem.

We have been in Afghanistan nearly half my life. The Taliban has simply … waited. They are more patient than us. They always have been. No matter which President chose to leave, the Taliban were still going to be there, waiting. And I don’t think that the regular Afghans were especially happy to have us there either. One way or another, they were still going to be there when we left.

I do, however, feel like it’s not unreasonable to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should have done something more to help those who helped us. America should have been welcoming of Afghan refugees for decades, and we haven’t, and I have to believe that the number of people we’re looking to evacuate– I’m seeing the number 3500– is sorely insufficient. There are apparently just short of 100,000 Afghans in the United States right now. I feel like after 20 years of occupying their country that seems like a very small number.

We spent two trillion dollars and lost over six thousand soldiers there in twenty years, and in the end it was for nothing. We probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place, or maybe we should have just kept paying attention after we got there— Afghanistan has always been our forgotten war even just after it started, when our attention immediately turned to Iraq. I don’t know. I don’t know how things could have gone better. I’m not sure how they could have gone much worse, either.

I suppose we’re about to find out what the results of 20 years of shitty policy looks like one way or another.

In which I don’t have it tonight

On August 14, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

This thing with Makyi is still weighing heavily on my head and my heart, to the point where I’m starting to wonder what the best route to getting the felony murder statute overturned in Indiana would be. I have enough mental energy to fuck around with video games on Youtube but not enough to blog coherently. So I’m taking the night off, and I’ll be back tomorrow.

On hope

On August 13, 2021August 13, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life, Politics, Teaching3 Comments

The “South Bend man” referred to in this headline is a former student. He was a bright, inquisitive, funny and honest student when I had him in 6th and again in 7th grade; his older brother was one of my DC kids and was a member of my single favorite class of students I’ve ever had. There are still pictures of both of them on my phone.

He was just sentenced to 45 years in jail because he and a high school student planned to steal another man’s gun and then beat him up. The “plan”– and I strongly suspect I do not have anything even close to the full story– went badly sideways for them, and the man killed the high school student and shot Makyi “at least” eight times. Somehow, another person’s decision to kill a child and attempt to kill a second person rather than be robbed of a gun has led to the person who was shot being convicted of murder and sentenced to jail for 45 years, more than twice as long as he has been alive.

I am not interested in you attempting to justify the existence of “felony murder” charges, and I can guarantee you that attempting to do so will be the last thing you ever say around here. I don’t care if you think this is okay or justified. You can keep that shit to yourself. I loved this kid. He was smart. He had a chance. He should be in fucking college right now. And instead he’s 20 years old and somehow has been convicted of a murder that everyone involved in his sentencing knows that he absolutely did not commit in an incident that led to he, himself, being shot eight + times, and will be in jail until he’s 65.

I hate it here.

#REVIEW: Jade Legacy, by Fonda Lee

On August 12, 2021August 12, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have begun many a review with a disclaimer to this one: I can get caught up in my own enthusiasm about things from time to time, and sometimes it’s good, when I find that I like something, to sit on it for a couple of days and see how or whether my feelings about that thing abate a bit with the passage of a little time.

Jade Legacy is the third book of a trilogy called The Green Bone Saga. The first volume, Jade City, was my favorite book of 2018. The sequel, Jade War, was better than Jade City. I compared it, with no fear of being accused of hyperbole, to The Godfather, Part II. It was my favorite book of 2019.

Jade Legacy concludes the trilogy. I got an early copy. The damn thing’s not even out for you regular people until November. I was scared to read this book, guys. It’s hard to imagine a book heading into a stronger headwind than both of the books before you were the best books I read in the year they came out. The only book series I’m aware of that can even come close to claiming a stronger first two books are The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire, and we all know what happened to ASoIaF. Further complicating things, I went into Jade Legacy knowing that the book covered a roughly 22-year timeline, considerably longer than either of the first two books. Which … that’s tricky, right? You have to keep a narrative thrust going when some of your characters are literally starting the story as children and ending as adults. And there’s no way that doesn’t introduce a tonal shift of some kind from the first two books. But the book had the word Legacy in the name, and it was damn well going to earn it.

I am, in recognition of the fact that this book is not out for several months yet, going to write this as a completely spoiler-free review. Other than the timeline, I’m not telling you a single damn thing about this series. If you want to know the premise, go read my review of Jade City.

Here is the closest thing to a bad thing I can say about this book: it is not quite as good as Jade War. Maybe. I’m not even sure that’s true, actually. I think it’s the best book of the series about 40% of the time I’m thinking about it.

This is the best trilogy I have ever read.

Period. There are no exceptions. The Lord of the Rings is a more important series of books to me; I am too old for anything to manage to eclipse the level of importance to my life than those books have had. But I have never read a trilogy this good. Ever. Yes, that means it’s better than ASoIaF. Much better, in fact. It’s better than The Wheel of Time and the Shannara books and The Kingkiller Chronicles (let’s be real, though, we’re never getting Book 3 of that series) and anything else in the fantasy genre you might care to mention, classic or modern.

This is a work of simply staggering quality. It blows my mind how young Fonda Lee is, and the idea that she will be around to continue to write more books for a long time is just amazing.

If you haven’t read Jade City yet, you can go start now. You have time to read it and War by the time Legacy comes out. You can thank me later.

In which I’ll take it

On August 11, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Higher attendance than I expected today, and in general I feel pretty good about my classes. You never really get a good idea of who they are on the first day, but for now I’m going to call today a good start.

Meanwhile, I’m going to collapse in front of something mindless. I owe you a review of Jade Legacy— the tl;dr version is that it’s every bit as phenomenal as the two previous books– but I don’t have the energy tonight. Sometime in the next couple of days.

In which you’ve got to be kidding me

On August 10, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

We have had, despite global climate change and all that, a pretty damn mild summer here in Northern Indiana. So naturally now that we’re going back to school and I have to spend all my time around smelly-assed unwashed 8th graders the heat index has shot up to 105. I wish I could find someone specific to blame this on so I could have them shot. Genuinely. And that’s before they give everybody Covid. It’ll be a great first day.

That said, I’m as ready as I’m going to be; tomorrow’s session is going to be only partially improvised, which is about as good as I can hope for given that I spent most of the day only barely able to remember how teaching actually works. And I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to sleep tonight, too. I think. Maybe.

Expect me to be quietish the next couple of days, as most of my life activities are going to involve coming home from work and dying. For now, I’m going to stay in the air conditioning and curl up with Jade Legacy and see if I can finish it before bed. If Fonda Lee hits the dismount as effectively as I’m expecting her to, this series instantly becomes one of the greatest triumphs of fantasy literature I’ve ever encountered. I have high hopes.