The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Will I ever be free of this Tweet? No. No, I will not:
To be clear, this isn’t a former student; I don’t know this kid– they just made the realization that I was still online and so checked in with me to see what I meant with the Tweet.
I’m adding “my writing has been studied in high school Language Arts classes” to my resume.
I didn’t write about the sleep study on Sunday like I meant to, mostly because it kind of ended up fizzling as an entertaining story, but a couple of people have asked me about it from Real Lifetm so why not. The thing I was most prepared to be annoyed about was that I was expecting to be told to go immediately to bed upon returning home with the equipment. I believed this because 1) when my mother had a similar trial many years ago they wired her up and told her to go straight to sleep at, like, 7:30, and 2) my doctor told me that was what was going to happen. Sleep at 7:30 simply wasn’t going to be possible, so I was looking forward to many hours of laying with my eyes closed in a not-especially-dark room (we have, in 12 years of living in this house, somehow not managed to acquire curtains for all of the windows in our bedroom) and just … existing.
I made sure I was done with caffeine for the day before noon, which is not normally my move, and tried to be a bit more active than usual, hoping that Tired would set in, and indeed I did manage to elicit some yawns while I was driving to the hospital at, oh, 6:30 or so. I had three different shirts with me because I wasn’t clear about my instructions and didn’t quite know whether they were going to be putting any sensors directly onto my skin or, conversely, wanted to avoid putting sensors straight on my skin; instructions to wear a “button-up shirt or a pajama shirt” seemed slightly contradictory, especially for someone who sleeps in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else on all but the coldest nights. Sleeping with a shirt on was going to make the whole process even more complicated.
Anyway, it ended up all not mattering; the most interesting parts of the actual wiring-up bit were 1) taking my picture, both from in front and profile; 2) measuring my neck for some reason; 3) having to sign a form stating that if I broke or lost any of the equipment I was on the hook for $5300, I hate you America; and 4) discovering that not only did the shirt not especially matter (I went ahead and wore it, because the nurse suggested the straps could get uncomfortable, which seemed reasonable) but that I should go to bed at my normal time. This was mostly good news, although it meant I had to sit around my house all evening with the equipment on.
I did not take any pictures with the equipment on, by the way. I thought about it and then looked at what the straps were doing to my man-tits in the mirror and … nah. I love y’all but not that much. Here, if you want to see me looking ridiculous, check out this post-LASIK picture.
The actual equipment: a nasal cannula with a little attachment that hung down over my upper lip, both designed to determine whether I was actually breathing; a pulse oximeter attached to my left pointer finger; two elastic straps, one around my stomach and one around my chest, both to measure how much they stretched and contracted as I breathed through the night, and a sort of control box that strapped to the center of my chest and I don’t think actually did anything on its own. I suspect the pulse oximeter was probably the single most important part of the system, as I feel like watching that for eight hours will provide sufficient evidence of whether I’m breathing properly in my sleep or not. Either way it’s going to be a couple of weeks before I hear any results, assuming that nothing disappeared after I put it into the drop box at the hospital the next morning.
Here’s the problem, and yes, I’m an idiot, you don’t need to tell me: I really don’t know if I can wear one of those fucking masks if they decide I actually do have sleep apnea.
I am, and again, I know this is stupid, deeply paranoid about people being able to see me when I’m asleep. I was always the last one to fall asleep and the first one to wake up at slumber parties, and even now with a wife and child, one of whom is in the bed with me every freaking night, I can occasionally be weirdly twitchy about it. And while being asleep around my actual family isn’t much of a thing except on my worst anxiety-melting-my-brain nights, the notion that I might have to be asleep around other people while wearing that ridiculous-looking getup on my face offends me at a deep and primal level. Like, this shit is pre-rational; pure lizard brain. I can’t manage it. I’d literally rather have surgery (and yes, there’s all sorts of paranoia about anesthesia, too, but at least that’s only once) than have to wear that damn mask every night. Surely there’s something they can cut open or cut out or put a stent into or something like that? C’mon. Plus, I’m a stomach sleeper, and granted the whole reason I started pushing for this test in the first place was that if I try to sleep on my back I stop breathing, but I’m pretty sure strapping a 2-1B mask to my face is going to make stomach-sleeping pretty Goddamned uncomfortable, and the idea is that I can sleep however I want, not that I trade one way I can’t sleep for another way I can’t sleep.
Sigh.
At any rate, I’ll let y’all know when I know something.
I love how the panorama effect makes my classroom look much deeper than it actually is, and the fact that the lights changed color a couple of times while I was … panorama-ing … is kind of neat too. But basically that’s all I’ve managed to do so far, is get the lights up. The desks are absolutely not staying in that configuration, but I want something new this year and I haven’t come up with the new look yet. I do like how the lights look, though, and when they’re off and the regular lights are on you can barely tell they’re there, which is also nice. That white bag in the middle of the picture is full of stuff from the teacher store that needs to go up.
And, just for the hell of it, no pressure, no nothing, here’s my classroom Amazon wish list. If any of you happen to have discretionary income piling up with nowhere to go, even a couple of boxes of pencils would be massively appreciated, and I genuinely mean that. (And, in all seriousness, if you were to get one thing on that list, it’d be pencils. We go through so many pencils.)
I need to rewrite every policy I have, redo the class website, and ten thousand other things, and I’m also in a weird place where despite knowing all of that– after nineteen years, you can imagine some of this shit should be muscle memory– I feel like I have no idea what to do. I’m kind of reconceptualizing what’s going to go on the walls this year, where I only want to put things up there if I think the kids are going to actually look at them once in a while. So, what does that look like?
Dunno. I got a week to think about it, I guess.
This is not the otter, whose name was Wildcat, but the peacock took better pictures. This is the closest he’s ever let me get.
This year’s big innovation in classroom design is a couple hundred feet of Bluetooth LED lights that I bought from Amazon for like $19 a roll or something. I have decided that this year I’m in a secure enough financial position that I’m not going to worry too much about how much I spend to outfit my room; I know all the arguments about why teachers shouldn’t have to spend money on this shit (and, believe me, I’ve argued from the other side as often as from mine) and this year I don’t care. I’m gonna be spending eight hours a day in there and God damn it I want the place fun and comfortable. The lights can be controlled from an app on my phone and can cycle through a billion colors or something; I really only need eight or ten so we’re all good there. I don’t know how often they’re going to be on, necessarily, but they’ll be a fun option.
I’ve spent a good couple of hours over the last few days talking with the new principal, and while early emails raised a whole lot of red flags, nearly all of them have been put to bed as soon as in-person conversation became possible. I still have no sense of my assistant principal, who is a very quiet person. Honestly, in a lot of ways, the AP’s job is more important, as the AP is the one who handles discipline. You need an ass-kicker in that role. I am not getting ass-kicker vibes. But we’ll see. Two major “not important in the grand scale but a big deal to me” tests were passed; teachers do not have a dress code and I am not going to be expected to submit lesson plans, provided that I’m actually teaching, which is not going to be a problem.
Two more weekends and we’re back. I have an at-home sleep study tomorrow, have I mentioned that? It’s because my eye doctor thinks I have sleep apnea, a sentence that is 100% true and I have no intention of providing further explanation for. I’m expected to arrive at the hospital at 7:00 PM, where they will hook me up to a bunch of wires and diagnostic devices, then go home with all that shit attached to me and, at, oh, 8:00 or so, depending on how long it takes, go directly to sleep. Which, hah. I’m thinking about getting up at, like, 5:00 in the morning tomorrow and then not touching any caffeine after noon just in hopes of a chance that I’m not tossing and turning in bed all night. I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to do any of my usual wind-down shit either; I typically read for at least half an hour before bed and … well.
I’ll tell y’all all about it on Sunday.
I just sent my new principal a nearly 1800-word email message based on a conversation we had at school today. There are two days before school starts where the teachers are supposed to be in the buildings; typically one of those is for meetings and the other is so that we can get our classrooms set up. One of the several bits of insanity during the last couple of days of disaster PD was discovering that the district intends for every teacher to be at the same PD downtown on our “meetings” day; there was talk of “breakout sessions” in the afternoon for individual buildings (where are they going to put us? Who knows!) lasting an hour and a half.
This is not remotely enough time for a building where nearly everyone on the staff is returning. It is absolutely not remotely enough time in a situation like ours, where half the staff and the entire administrative team is new. It is, in fact, insane. I was at school today and asked my boss if she wanted to send her an email (and I was clear it would be a lengthy email) outlining some of the issues that she might encounter at this meeting so that at least she’d heard of them before. Turns out there’s an awful lot of policy-setting necessary to get a building as complex as a school running smoothly! Unbelievable, right? She said to send the email, so I sent the email, and if you’ve never been a teacher before, I feel like it might be illustrative to take a look at it. Obviously I’ve redacted a few things but really the majority of this could be written in any school in American with only minor edits. Enjoy:
(TLT stands for Teacher Leadership Team, by the way; you can probably guess what that might be.)
Principal Person–
This is going to be as complete as I can make it without taking three days to think about it. I’m sure I’m going to miss some things, but hopefully I can give you a useful heads-up on some issues that will probably come up so that they’re not a surprise. I’ll do my best to be as factual as possible but obviously any opinions presented are my own and it will not surprise you to learn that others may disagree. 🙂
(Assistant Principal Person, I let Principal Person know this email would be coming; it’s not out of nowhere, I promise.)
ADVISORY/BREAKFAST:
The biggest problems here were 1) buses being late and 2) kids simply declining to come to advisory. Keeping better control of the hallways will have to be a major priority this year, but at no time was that more obvious than during homeroom, where the advisory tardy bell would ring and 1/3 of the students would be in class, another third would be in the hallways, and the last third literally wouldn’t have arrived at school yet. I *believe* they were not allowed into the building at all until 9:20, and at that time they’d collect a breakfast and head straight to lockers and advisory, with the tardy bell at 9:30. During inclement weather or rain I think they’d let them into the commons area at the front of the building by the office. Teachers were expected to be at their doors by that first bell; a lot of the time if someone was absent the nearest teacher would just wave those kids into their room.
Using advisory for any sort of instruction is going to be tricky simply because the buses don’t arrive on time, especially in the winter. I genuinely don’t remember how admission to the building worked pre-Covid; I know we used to have the 6th graders in the LGI room once they were done with breakfast until the bell rang but I didn’t have morning supervision duty so I wasn’t down there.
PASSING PERIODS:
Four minutes is more than sufficient for everyone to get from A to B. Kids are supposed to stay to the right and walk; most of them do a good job with that. Profanity in the halls is a problem. Some teachers will close and lock their doors when the tardy bell rings; others leave them open and simply mark tardy kids late. Lockouts were called occasionally; anyone still in the hallway was supposed to go to ISS and generally remained there for a period; we do not have anyone to cover things like detentions so that was rarely if ever used as a deterrent. There is also the two-period block classes to be concerned about; some of us let our kids out during passing period for a quick break if they wanted one, but there should probably be a firm rule that if you do that you NEED to be in the hallway monitoring, and honestly even the teachers who don’t let their blocks out for that break probably ought to be near their doors keeping an ear open.
STAIRS:
Typically only 6th graders are supposed to use the stairs by the 6th grade science classrooms and Teachername’s room; 7th and 8th are only supposed to use the stairs near the cafeteria, and God help me, because my classroom is right next to them, but there are also rules about who is supposed to be using the stairs between 212 and 210 and I could never bloody keep track of them. TLT’s recommendations is that we literally find some hallway signs and put them at the top and the bottom of each set of stairs indicating who is to use them, because these were rules that (at least on my end of the building) the kids were expected to know and abide by but were never actually *told* to them, and when that is combined with inconsistent enforcement, it’s a problem.
SPEAKING OF THOSE STAIRS:
The area at the bottom of the stairway by my room (with the faux fireplace) is a perennial place for kids to hang out and screw around because other than Mx. Teacherhuman, there’s no adults near there and if they hide around the corner no one is going to see them. I recommend installing a wasp’s nest in the fireplace.
WATER:
For about the first 2/3 of the year last year we provided cups at the drinking fountains. That was convenient but typically a sleeve of cups would have to be replaced a couple of times a day and the kids weren’t good about not blatantly wasting them. Some teachers brought their own cups to hand out and we started selling water bottles as well through the office. The office also sometimes had cups and the water bottles didn’t work great because you would have five of them in a classroom and no one knew whose belonged to who, and teachers sending their kids down to the office to get cups in the middle of class became a serious annoyance to front office staff.
Personally, I provided cups to my own students (and occasionally other kids who asked nicely for them) and allowed anyone to have clear water bottles in class with them. Other teachers didn’t allow any water in class at all, which would occasionally lead to conflicts of various kinds. I decided it wasn’t a hill I was willing to die on.
BATHROOM BREAKS:
Inconsistent. Some teachers took their entire classes on bathroom breaks during certain periods; each grade was supposed to pick two hours where their kids would get a break. My classroom is directly across the hall from the boys’ bathroom and not far from the girls’ so I would just let them go (with a pass) if they needed to. I regularly need a bathroom break half an hour after I eat and I wasn’t about to tell a kid in sixth hour they couldn’t pee because 8th grade’s “official” break wasn’t until 7th hour.
DRESS CODE:
This is a big one, and the biggest issue is going to be hoodies. The TLT members who were able to make the meeting at my place (names of teachers) came to an agreement that we were all comfortable with allowing hoodies and/or flannel zip-ups in class provided that 1) they were solid color (otherwise complying with polo shirt colors) and 2) hoods were never up. In general the rule about tucking shirts in was not followed and I would recommend it be eliminated, especially since the combination of the amount of poverty in the building and the fact that middle schoolers grow like weeds means that a lot of the time their shirts were juuuuuust too short to be tucked in– which, a lot of the time, explained why especially our bigger kids wanted to keep their hoodies and/or jackets on. Last year the rule was hoodies were not to be worn, period, and my GOD did it cause a lot of disruption. I will admit to being firmly on the pro-hoodie side; I remember what being a fat kid in middle school was like, but enforcing it was a daily and constant struggle.
CELL PHONES:
Speaking of daily and constant struggles. This is a whole email all to itself; my suggestion is that we figure out exactly where the line is that we’re not willing to cross (ie, They Are Not To Be Seen And Must Be In Lockers vs They Are Never To Be Removed From Your Pocket vs whatever other policy you might have). The TLT went around and around on this and didn’t really come to a consensus; my suggestion is that we set a baseline expectation for hallways and common areas that all of us follow and we make it clear that individual teachers’ policies may vary in their classrooms. I have more thoughts (and so does everyone else) but this is already a long email.
LUNCH:
I think each grade needs to have a firm plan about how to conduct the kids to and from lunch, and I don’t think those plans each need to be the same plan. I think a fair number of lunch-related problems will be solved by returning the cafeteria to its pre-COVID borders, closing the wall behind it, and (especially with the older kids) reinforcing that You Are Never Getting Your Lunch Delivered, Ever. If we turn DoorDash away at the front doors enough times they’ll figure it out themselves. I have absolutely no problem with picking the kids up from lunch and I think if we start doing that from Day One it’ll be less of a problem than it was last year. The problem we have here is potentially running afoul of the mandated 30-minute duty free lunch.
LOCKERS:
We have got to have locker assignments ready on day one. This also killed us last year because lockers weren’t ready for forever and so kids got used to just having whatever they wanted with them because they “didn’t have a locker.” I recommend assigning blocks of lockers to the advisory teachers and letting us handle it rather than trying to centralize assignments through the office.
DISMISSAL:
From my lofty perch at the far corner of the second floor, with an 8th hour prep, dismissal mostly seemed to go pretty smoothly; announcements at the end of the day followed by dismissal. Walkers and bus and car riders were dismissed in waves; I don’t know how well that worked because I didn’t have an 8th hour. Others may have more useful perspectives on this than me.
LESSON PLANS:
Teachers have not been asked to provide lesson plans to administration at all since I have been at SCHOOLNAME. We were occasionally reminded that we were supposed to have them on our desks at all times. I don’t think most of us did. I don’t know what your expectations are here (nor do I know what contractual obligations there may be) but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what we were used to.
SUBS:
Don’t exist. Classroom coverage was all we had, all year.
OK, I’M DONE NOW:
I’ll come up with something I forgot in ten minutes, though.
There’s a whole story, or at least I could make it a whole story, but let’s be done with it: I didn’t get the job at Nearby District and somehow some of the shittiest “professional development” I have ever encountered today has settled my mind; I will be back at my previous school in two weeks and I’m fine with that. So be it. I’m not even going to complain about the PD. Y’all have seen it. I can’t write it any different.
I actually cancelled another interview that would have been taking place right about now, at yet another school; this principal was open from the very first phone conversation that I was looking at a five-figure pay cut. That in and of itself was not necessarily a deal-killer, although it was pretty fucking close, and then I looked a bit harder and discovered that the commute was nearly an hour each way and that their district started a lot earlier than mine does, meaning that the boy would need at least an hour of either after school or before school child care. One way or another that moved it past the point where it felt like it was feasible, so I cancelled, and the principal didn’t seem especially surprised by it.
But yeah. I’m going to do my damnedest to not complain about anything work-related for the next two weeks. My head is noticeably on straighter than it was this morning and I intend to continue making progress in that direction. I’ve done this eighteen fucking times. I can do one more.
The Book of the Month is going to be Ciel Pierlot’s Bluebird, I think, although you can probably imagine there was some steep competition.
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