In which I’ve wasted the weekend

On November 20, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Welp.

Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.

I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.

Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.

I have been sitting at my computer for an hour

On November 18, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

…and I haven’t done a damned thing, so I’m going to go read a book. Happy Friday!

The difference

On November 16, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I am very curious to see just how many of you recognize the significance of this photo:

Actually, looking at it, that tape dispenser is in fact sitting flat on top of my desk calendar and, despite a really weird and unintentional trick of the shadows, is not floating a couple of inches above it.

A bit of necessary, but possibly not sufficient, context: my current classroom has been unoccupied for a month in between the resignation of the previous teacher and my arrival on Monday. There was a surprising amount of stuff on my desk when I moved in, including that tape dispenser. This afternoon, finally finding a roll of Scotch tape in the boxes I brought over, I picked the little wheel out of the dispenser, attached the roll of tape to it, and put it back on my desk.

This photo, in a nutshell, is why, so far, I love my new building.

IYKYK.

Uh-oh

On November 15, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

We may, or may not, have a blizzard coming, depending on which weather service you’re looking at right now and whether you’re looking at where I live or where I work. The weird thing is that where I live is under a winter storm warning for tomorrow at 4 AM through Thursday at 10 AM, during which we might get five to ten inches of snow, but the forecast doesn’t predict that. Where I work has word-for-word the exact same forecast but without the winter storm warning.

I am assuming that lake effect fuckery is involved somehow, as lake effect snow is famous for dumping a foot of snow on a path two miles wide and barely touching anything on either side. This leads one to wonder, though, just how screwed I’m going to be if the lake effect band lands on my house, or between me and work, but not at work.

I’d kind of prefer it to move a bit to the east, is what I’m saying.

Honestly, I’d kind of prefer to not have a snow day this early in my tenure at the new school, particularly since, for various bad reasons, I have to prepare 2/3 of my kids tomorrow for a test on Thursday, one that was scheduled before I arrived and which they have to take anyway. I had talks with all of my classes today about how I was planning on integrating their previous (miserable) grades with the Post-My-Arrival grades, as they’re all surprisingly concerned about it. And it’s 7:08 and I really ought to get to writing tomorrow’s lesson plans so that we can have a snow day or a two hour delay and everything can be all screwed up.

Whee!

(Day 2 proceeded with much the same pleasantry as Day 1. So far? This was absolutely the right call, other than the fucking commute.)

Woohoo, and advice to the Democrats

On November 14, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today went exactly as I thought it would, as opposed to how I feared it would. Everybody, from the building principal to the security guards to the kids, seemed really nice, and there don’t seem to be any shouty people in my hallway yet, and other than some casual profanity in the hallway I didn’t even see any misbehavior. Learning the LMS system the new district uses is going to crack my skull open, and right now I kind of hate it, and I talked all day so my throat feels like somebody ran an electric mixer in it for a couple of minutes, but other than that? No complaints.

I had a whole bit here about the Speaker of the House but having written half of it, I’ve decided it’s dumb and I need to learn more before I put anything dumb where people can read it. So … yeah. My advice to the Democrats is to listen to people who are smarter than me.

Anxiety Dump 2

On November 13, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

It’s absolutely wonderful, this feeling that your brain is betraying you. I know how tomorrow is going to go. It’s going to be fine. I might have a minor technical hiccup or two, possibly involving a photocopier or the ancient projector in my classroom or the fact that I haven’t touched a Windows device in, probably, literal decades. That’s the worst that’s going to happen. The kids are going to be fine. It’s going to be honeymoon time and beyond that I took some time today to go through my kids’ discipline records and something like 75% of them have no referrals at all, and my worst kids have maybe one a week, with a lot of those being something called “refusal to identify self,” which … well, I’m actually going to ask them tomorrow or Tuesday how it is that I have kids who have no referrals other than five or six refusals to identify themselves, because that doesn’t make any sense to me– if I’m mad at a kid for refusing to identify him- or herself, I feel like there’s probably something else going on that I could have put on that referral? Something that maybe trumps the refusal to identify?

I dunno. At the moment it’s a minor mystery.

And nonetheless, despite the fact that I have changed schools many times, despite the fact that I have had nineteen first days of school and this will be the twentieth and I can do these things in my sleep, I am crawling out of my skin with anxiety right now. Like, I’m getting physical manifestations of it. I’m sweatier than I ought to be and jumpy as fuck. I’d take a brain pill except that the newer emergency pills have a bad habit of turning me into a slug the day after I take them (they are listed for “up to four times a day” on the bottle, and I cannot imagine what the fuck would happen if I took four of them in a day) and I cannot be a slug tomorrow.

I’m also being deeply stupid about having to get to work earlier than normal. I generally got to my previous school at 8:30; I have to be at this one at 7:30. That’s an hour earlier, and I don’t have to drop my son off. So I get up an hour earlier. This isn’t complicated. I’ve already changed my alarm and everything. And yet, bullshit abounds regardless. It’s just before 8:00 right now and I’m genuinely concerned that I should be starting to get ready to bed.

Just shut up, brain, I’m tired of you. I know it’s been a stressful week and realistically it’s about to be another one, but Christ, enough. We know how to do this. It’s going to be fine.

It ain’t much but it’s mine

On November 12, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, TeachingLeave a comment

Dropped off my stuff in the new classroom today. I don’t love it, but it’ll do, especially if I come up with some ways to liven the space up a bit, and the fact that every single square inch of wall can have stuff attached to it is encouraging. I haven’t done any actual decorating– everything on the walls was there when I walked in today, including the (genuinely appreciated) welcome message on the bulletin board, but here’s what we’ve got:

The view from my desk. My biggest class is only twenty-four kids, which is spectacular, as I have way more desks than that, but they’re armchair style and they’re currently in rows. I’ll rearrange them eventually but for now that’s what we’ve got.

Major disadvantage #1: the classroom has no windows and therefore no natural light, which is going to murder me during the winter. I’m never going to see the fucking sun, and I predict I go out a lot for lunch, especially since my lunch and prep periods run together so I’ve got a longer contiguous break than usual.

The desk area itself. There’s a nice open space in front of it; I could put a group work table there or I could see if somebody has a couch or a chair they don’t want or something like that. There’s plenty of space in the room, especially with a max of 24 kids.

Problem the second: that teeny little whiteboard is all the space I have in the room, and I can apparently choose between using it as a whiteboard or using it to project on, but not both, which is … suboptimal. Now, on the plus side, I did ask the principal if it was possible to put whiteboards on the entire back wall of the room and she didn’t blink. I’m not getting it tomorrow or anything but it wasn’t immediately shot down, so hopefully I won’t have to deal with this for too much longer, as that’s an instructional handicap and not an environmental one. I can cope with no windows; I’ve had windowless classrooms before and there are ways to deal with them. No whiteboard space? That’s a genuine problem.

And then the final view of the room. There’s a doorway to the classroom next to me in the back there, which … okay, that’s fine, I guess. If I’m not getting new whiteboards right away I need to come up with something good for that back wall. We’ll see.