This was a month where I bought several new books and then didn’t read very much, so … yeah. And I even pulled a couple of books off the shelf and decided I wasn’t reading them after all; I don’t do that very often.
Month: September 2022
My evening
Came home from work, immediately took a nap, woke up long enough to reheat a plate from the dinner that I slept through and now I’m going to bed.
In which I never get what I want
Honestly, today was set up pretty nicely to be an epic shitty day– the schedule was all fucked up because of an hour and a half long thing in the afternoon, so my kids ate lunch an hour and a half early, missed some classes, and went to others at different times, plus the whole “an hour and a half under the control of strangers” thing, so I was well and truly ready to be sick and tired of all of them by the end of the day.
And instead they did great at the thing and on top of that three different kids went out of their ways to let me know I was their favorite teacher today.
It’s like they know I’m thinking about leaving, the little bastards.
Gah.
Still tired
I dunno. I talked to the principal at The Other Building today, and I think it went well; in fact, I’m pretty sure that we’re clear so long as … well, so long as I decide to go, and assuming we can come to an agreement on salary. Now I just gotta decide if I want to go.
There were four fights in the building today. Four. I gotta do this.
Watch them give me a perfect Goddamn day tomorrow, the little brats.
I have an interview tomorrow
… for a job I’m pretty sure I don’t want, but I have an interview. I was originally looking at two other schools and I just sort of quietly stopped worrying about one of them; technically I sent the last email and haven’t heard back from the principal yet and oh well. I’m going to start the interview by acknowledging how conflicted I am about the whole thing and then we’ll go about the interview and we’ll see what happens next. Right now I don’t want to leave. Right now I am an idiot.
Also, I’ve just spent 20 minutes staring at the screen, so apparently I don’t have much to say tonight. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.
In which I don’t know what to do
As someone who cannot Art, this AI-art-generation phenomenon is completely fascinating to me; this is what the Wonder app came up with when I selected “Oil painting” and “very difficult decisions” as the prompt. Sometimes you get duds but I enjoy this one quite a bit.
Anyway, we lost two more teachers last week. Between the seventh and the eighth grade right now we have about six teachers. There are signs that downtown is starting to take our issues seriously but this game of chicken that everyone is playing is driving me slowly insane, and I just don’t know what to do if we, say, lose another language arts teacher, or if we end up down to one math teacher for the entire building, or whatever other bullshit might happen. I kind of think the folks who are likely to quit are mostly gone by now, but there are a couple that I’ve got an eye on.
And, well, I’ve got an interview on Tuesday and could potentially have a second soon too. And fuck me stupid if I didn’t get two good days in a row on Thursday and Friday and now I’m all oh, I can’t abandon these kids, wash wash blah blah blah. I fucking hate that I can’t make what is obviously the correct career decision, a decision I would have already made were I anything other than a teacher, and flee. And yet I had the whole weekend to finish the application for this other district and I haven’t done it yet. Because apparently I am a fucking moron. It’s not even goddamned October yet. This can still get so much fucking worse.
Well, this post ended up a little angrier than I thought it was going to be. Originally I was very much planning on Oh, I don’t know what to do and now I think I know what I’m going to do and I also know what I should do and I’m pretty sure those are two different things and I am making a stupid career decision again, and I am deeply, seriously, intensely angry with myself about it.
Meanwhile, this is my schedule tomorrow: Dentist appointment at 8:00 in the morning. Following that, go to school and do not teach first and second hour because my student observer is doing one of her mandatory lessons tomorrow. Then leave the building to go back to the doctor because, remember, I was injured breaking up a fight last week, spend however long that takes, then return to the building probably just in time for my prep periods and nothing else, because if I go home I have to take a half day and if I come back I basically don’t have to count the absence for anything since worker’s comp covers it. Remember that this building where I was just injured during a fight is the building that I feel like I can’t leave because waaah bjaaah the chiiiillllldrennnnn.
Fuck.
Oh, and also
I asked one of those AI art programs for your phone to create an image based on the words “Mr. Siler” and “Mr. Siler in his classroom,” and I find the results utterly delightful:
Time flies by
I mentioned to my boss this morning that my back was kinda twingey, and that turns out to have potentially been a mistake, because it got me bundled off to the doctor’s office that the district uses for worker’s comp, which led to a diagnosis of a sprained back and a genuinely shocking pile of medications. They want me back on Monday for a follow-up, too, and they scheduled it (yes, they scheduled it) for 12:15, which might literally be the most inconvenient time imaginable in terms of a two-hour appointment completely borking an eight-hour day. It also meant that I didn’t get home until way later than normal, and then somehow making a couple of baked potatoes for dinner took like a thousand years, and here it is 8:30 and I still have a complicated, annoying job application to fill out before bed, so all my loyal public gets from me tonight is a one-paragraph stream-of-consciousness update.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 