I had family in town today— my favorite aunt, along with her oldest son and his wife were in town from Michigan and California, respectively, and they went and picked my dad up and came over here for the day. It was a lot of fun but I am well and truly worn out from just being a human for several hours. I’m trying to beat Dandara just so I can put it to bed and figure out what I’m doing with the YouTube channel (wanna be subscriber #115? Sure you do!) in the days between this final episode going live on Monday and Elden Ring coming out on the25th, and right now I’m kinda clueless. I do know that my hands hurt because my current strategy for this utter bullshit final boss involves lots of button-mashing.
This is all a lengthy way of saying this is going to be all the blogging I have brain for today. Any cells I have left in another hour or so will be devoted to finding a couple more jobs to apply to. One of the ones I sent in an application for today has a salary range of $125-185,000, so I am denying myself nothing; if I think I’m even vaguely interested in the job, I’m applying. Not like I have anything to lose.
(There is an interesting phenomenon going on here, where I’m looking at jobs with high salaries and immediately feeling like I can’t possibly be qualified for them, and fuck that. I’ve met businesspeople. They’re people. I can be people too. Fuck it. I want a six-figure job. Give me one. I’m not letting my own bullshit hold me back here.)
So it turns out that one good way to have every single person in the building stop by your classroom to see if you’re okay is to say “fuck this” and leave work before advisory has even finished. Being out Wednesday and Thursday was already pre-ordained, but most of the building didn’t know that, and apparently as far as anyone knew I’d walked out and just not come back for a few days. I know that one of our seventh grade teachers took the entire week off explicitly as a mental health restorative and one of my other team members was forced into a panic attack on the same day I left, if you were wondering if it was just me.
The interesting thing? I don’t know if I actually mentioned this, but the Tuesday before last our principal and AP let the staff know that they’d been fired as of the end of the school year. Now, to be clear, if you’d read everything I’ve been saying about how work is going all year long, I wouldn’t cast aspersions upon you for at least considering the idea that a change in leadership might be necessary. I will provide this data point in their defense and then move on with the post: virtually no one left their jobs last summer. Our building was one of the only schools in the corporation and absolutely the only middle school that began the school year with no teaching vacancies. We had a couple of people who left for one reason or another but their jobs were filled quickly.
And from what I’ve been hearing over the last week and a half, I strongly suspect whoever replaces the current admin team is going to have to rehire at least 2/3 of the positions in the building. People who were already thinking about leaving, like me, have made their decisions. And everyone else is now at least thinking about it.
Anyway, as of about ten minutes ago I’ve now applied to 29 jobs since January 28. I’ve heard back from two; both “thanks, but no thanks” rejections. I applied to a couple today that actually seem pretty exciting. Hopefully soon I’ll start hearing back from somebody.
At any rate, it was a decent-to-good day. No referrals of any kind, which is always a plus, and one of my notables wasn’t in class and another had one of the best days he’s had in a long time, so I’ll take it. I’ve got a fair amount of grading to do this weekend, so hopefully I’m not going to have to send another email to all of my parents reminding them that all of their kids are still fucking failing. We’ll see what happens.
Next week: four days, since Friday is an e-learning inservice day for the teachers. The following week: four days, since Monday is Presidents’ Day. I think the week after that is a five-day week, but the week after that will be the last week of the quarter and therefore Friday will be a teacher record day. I’m gonna try and make it to the end of the semester without missing any more days, or at least without missing any days beyond taking a personal day when Elden Ring comes out. Again, we’ll see.
I was supposed to have jury duty today, and as of last night it hadn’t cancelled, so I was hoping that this would actually be the time that I get to serve on a jury– and yes, I mean get to, because I’ve never done it before and I wouldn’t mind the experience. I got the notification that my service was cancelled as I was getting into the car to head to the courtroom– which, on one hand, yay, because I’d already gotten the day off and it wasn’t like I was going back in, and on the other hand boo, because I’d gotten the day off so I could go do my Civic Duty as an American and that clearly wasn’t happening.
It’s not like there’s any chance I’m ever going to be allowed on a jury in the first place, unless the prosecutor isn’t paying attention and just assumes that since I’m a fat bald white guy with a beard I’m going to assume that whoever they put in front of me is guilty. I was kinda looking forward to declaring that all cops were bastards in my jury questionnaire. Alas, ’tis not to be, at least not this time.
So I came back inside and started job-hunting. Someone asked yesterday what sorts of jobs I was looking for. There’s a spreadsheet, because of course there is:
The blacked-out one is my kid’s school; they don’t actually have any openings right now but I sent in an application anyway just in case somebody resigns anytime soon. I’m not holding my breath over that one, but it’s pretty much the only way I’m in a classroom next year, since it’s a private school, which I’m pretty sure means that HB 1134 can’t touch it. If I find out otherwise I will probably mark them off the list. Nearly all of the rest of them are remote.
The interesting thing: I’ve been complaining about the quality of the jobs that the various search sites have been returning, but it turns out that once you start telling them what you’re applying for they start figuring out how to dial you in. I’m still getting the occasional blip where I search for education-related jobs in my area that pay $65K or more and get something in Fiji that pays $2 an hour to masturbate musk oxen, but … well, it’s getting better.
Anybody have any contacts at Edmentum, by any chance?
Has anyone else, while perusing job listings, seen a listing for a job with what is obviously a tech company, taken one look at the tech company’s name, and decided that regardless of the job, the tech company was going to be out of business in a few years and so there was no good reason to apply? I just got kicked a listing for a company called Optimizely. Optimizely. And … nah. That’s got pets.com written all over it. As soon as the venture capital runs out these folks are gonna be gone. I mean … this is from their website:
Does that not absolutely scream “we are burning through our seed money as fast as we can move it offshore”? These folks are gonna have their pink slips before I can finish the application. I love this picture, too:
I’ll give them this: for a tech company, there do seem to be a fair number of women around, at least in the pictures. But you don’t get to have someone holding up an “embrace inclusion” poster when you only managed to find one black person to stand in the picture, and given how awful the Photoshopping is across the board on this image one wonders if he was actually in the room with everybody else. A couple of those people initially scan Asian or maybe Hispanic but that is still a group of white people with some pepper sprinkled on it, not anything that looks like “inclusion.”
Note also that in all of those posters there’s not a hint of what this company actually does, which I suspect boils down to nothing at all anyway. I bet half the employees at this place couldn’t nutshell what their jobs actually are for.
Anyway, I’m still job hunting. Just not with these guys.
Called the office, told them they needed to put someone in my classroom, and as soon as that person showed up, put my coat on, went down to the office, filled out the paperwork for a personal day, and left.
I’m not fired, and I haven’t quit, but my timeline for a new job has moved up from “sometime before August” to “by Spring Break if at all humanly possible,” because I can’t take this shit any longer. I’ve had enough of these ignorant-ass, rude-ass children and their fucknut unconcerned parents to last a lifetime and I don’t have any intention of giving them any more chances. Fuck it. Most of my kids have not a shred of interest in receiving any sort of education and the state of Indiana doesn’t want me teaching them anyway, so everybody’s going to get what they want, and good luck with whatever future that brings them. I’m out. I’m done. This is not my problem any longer.
… is brought to you by Holy Shit How is it 9:00 and I Haven’t Slept in Two Days; so please, God, let me make it through the night with no sleep sweats, no 3:00 am headaches, and no fucking stress dreams involving having to work at my current school and my administrative job from like seven years ago at the same time.
I’ve been in this crabby, sluggish mood all day, and the steak and mashed potatoes my wife just made for dinner has helped with the crabby a little but but definitely has not helped with the sluggishness. I’ve spent most of the day reading, which is generally good, and I’m enjoying the book I’m reading, but … just … blech.
It’s Sunday, if it wasn’t perfectly clear.
In addition to reading, I’ve dedicated some time to job applications. I’ve done … maybe a dozen since the snow days started? I’m mostly doing moonshot type of jobs right now, putting ludicrously high amounts of money as my expected salary just to see if I get it, that sort of thing. I also started a trick today with several of the applications: most of these places will reject you before a human being ever looks at your resume if their software doesn’t find the keywords it’s looking for, so I’ve been taking the entire job description, condensing it to one-point text, turning it white, and sticking it at the end of my resume. The algorithm will find whatever words it’s looking for, but if the resume is printed it won’t be there for humans to see. We’ll see if I feel like it made any difference; if I get more emails from people for this round that might have had something to do with it.
(Does anybody out there do hiring? How important are cover letters? How much individual legwork should I be putting into each of these applications?)
Anyway, I’m going to put together tomorrow’s assignments for my kids– at this point I’m pretty sure there’s going to be school tomorrow– and then I’m going to go finish that book. No recording today, I think. How was y’all’s weekends?
Pictured above: my original,loyal Das Keyboard, which provided me with seven years of service before something underneath the left half of the keyboard cracked while I was trying to fish a piece of debris out of it. Underneath: its replacement, which arrived today and is effectively the 2022 model of the same keyboard, except specific for my Mac and also featuring Cherry MX Brown switches instead of the Blues that were in the original keyboard. While I am a big fan of clicky keyboards, and Blue switches are the clickiest keys currently on the market, the fact that my wife and I are still frequently in the office together when one or both of us is in a meeting means that my preferred kind of keyboard is actually kinda rude compared to the standards of way back when I purchased it.
(Discovers, accidentally, that the crescent moon button in the upper right actually puts the computer to sleep. Whoops?)
Anyway, the media stuff has been moved to the top right there, away from the function keys, and I think I actually prefer the volume wheel, and the top layer of the keyboard is actually aluminum instead of plastic, and the riser that lifts the keyboard up to a proper angle is magnetic and has a ruler molded into it for some reason, but other than that, it’s still a keyboard! I’ve only typed the words you’re seeing on the screen right now with it, so it’s not like I’ve put the thing through its paces, but it’s not like it takes a lot of breaking in to decide if you like a keyboard. Mechanical keyboards are still the way to go for me, and I hate wireless keyboards– this one also has a USB 3 hub built into it, so that’s an improvement too, but it means the wire is required– but the key travel and bounce are both pretty damn good and the sound, while not as loud, is still pretty pleasing, and I don’t feel like I’m making a lot of errors while I’m typing, so everything’s doing what my fingers expect them to be doing. I just took a couple of typing tests and they came out at 85 and 91 wpm, which is a trifle slower than I’m used to, but it’ll do.
It is possible that I have made my last student loan payment. Not guaranteed yet, mind you, but possible. My loans have officially been consolidated, meaning that the current worst case scenario is that my payments are eventually around $330 a month instead of the $545 I’ve been paying since 2005. Since the government has my loans now, I’m automatically part of the suspension of payments program that’s been going on for the duration of the pandemic, so I won’t have to make that first payment at the new amount until May.
However, my application to have my loans forgiven through PSLF has already been submitted, too, and that’s supposed to take no more than 90 days for the full review, and once that review happens they’ll find that I’ve made well more than the 100 required qualifying payments. Loan payments start back up on May 22 (assuming that the program isn’t extended again) and that’s more than 90 days away. So while on paper I still owe a shitton of money, I’ll be saving those payments for the next couple of months (and putting them toward my car, which I expect to have paid off very soon) and the loans may very well be officially gone before I actually hit the day where I’d have to start paying the reduced amount.
This … is a real big deal. Real, real big.
Juuuuust in case you’re somehow not aware of it yet, I’ve got this little streaming the video games thing going over on YouTube, and I just started this cool little game called Dandara: Trials of Fear, so if you haven’t checked the channel out you have an exclusive chance to click on this link and then go be my 115th subscriber. C’mon, you know you want to. Even if you don’t really use YouTube all that often. Hell, especially if you don’t use YouTube all that often, because then it doesn’t even throw annoying videos you don’t want into the feed you’re not looking at. Go check it out.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 