Month: December 2022

It never stops

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

To the best of my knowledge, our new friend who I discussed the other day has not appeared in my building yet; I feel like someone would have mentioned it at some point, and no one has, and I certainly didn’t see him in the halls. So naturally I’ve had another situation crop up, this one dumped in my lap and a direct result of my idiotic inability to keep my damn ears shut when my students are talking. I really don’t want to get into details, but it’s ugly enough that I had to spend a minute looking at mandatory reporter rules, and it just skirts everything that triggers mandatory reporting rules right now, mostly because it’s a hideous mess of Billy telling Sally that Jimmy said something happened to Allie, only it might be that Jimmy is picking on Allie and it might also be that something got mangled in the rumor mill, and on top of that replace a couple of names in that chain with a nice, vague “somebody.” A big fucking mess, in other words.

I think once I’m done with this blog post I’m going to dump this in the laps of the counselor and the principal and AP and let them unravel it if they want to.

… and, of course, now that I’ve written that, the second thing this post was going to be about has completely fled my mind, because that’s how my fucking goldfish brain works now. Fuck it, I’mma go write this email and then make sure I’m ready for tomorrow.

A miracle

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I have written lesson plans– well, okay, I have planned– well, okay, I have determined subject matter— for every day of school between now and Winter Break, which — especially the way I’ve phrased it– may not sound like the miracle that it is.

That was a very complicated sentence and I dare you to diagram it.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this job long enough that for the most part the difficulty in “lesson planning” is just deciding what to do, and the actual doing is all muscle memory by now even if I’m doing a lesson I’ve never done before, or changing up an old one. I can spin a couple of sentences of “plan” into a 47-minute lesson with next to no difficulty at all, but the actual process, the this-before-this-and-don’t-forget-this of it all is the difficult part. I’ll need to devote some time to actually writing the assignments for tomorrow for both my Algebra and Pre-Algebra classes, which will take a few minutes, but that calendar on Canvas? That shit’s filled out. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

I might even put it all up on the wall for the kids tomorrow so they can look at it. I went out and bought some stuff for the classroom today, as I’ve got most of my setup done and it’s time to turn my attention to the walls. The room’s feeling more like me with every passing day, although the lack of windows still hurts my soul, and I need another lamp. One more lamp in there and I can start turning the lights off while they work and rely on the LEDs and the lamps to keep the room lit enough that my ancient-ass eyes can see. Right now I’m still just too blind for it.

In which I’m not there yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

If you have never seen someone wearing a CPAP mask, be aware that it is impossible to overstate just how completely fucking ridiculous they look. Prince couldn’t look cool in one of these fucking things. Bowie couldn’t look cool in a CPAP mask. It’s just impossible, and it’s driven home by the fact that if you Google the masks you get a bunch of pictures of attractive people and models and they still look completely ridiculous– none of them are dressed for bed, and critically, none of them are giant, hairy fat men, which by my understanding are the main clients for these things, as our bodies are tired of us and thus try to strangle us in our sleep.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I haven’t given an update for the CPAPpery yet, and the reason is that I haven’t got one to give. I’ve got my machine, but the mask they sent me … isn’t working. At any size. It is absolutely impossible (I’ve said that a lot in this post already, but it remains true) to get the mask they sent me, at any size, to seal properly– my unit will work for no more than five to ten minutes before stopping because of a “major airflow leak” and tell me to reattach my hoses, which have never been detached and do not have any holes in them, nor are they attached improperly.

We’re trying a different mask of another style, one that is close to the diagram to the right but I think doesn’t feature the idiotic top-of-the-head air tube attachment, and I fully expect to find out when that gets here that there’s something wrong with my machine. Looking forward to it, even, because when you try three different versions of the same mask with three different people, two of whom do not have beards, and remain entirely unable to achieve a proper seal even once, it’s probably a sensor issue somewhere and not the mask’s fault.

I get the new masks on Thursday next week, supposedly, because they are apparently being sent by camel. I feel like given that the insurance company is already hassling me for “noncompliance with my therapy,” which I currently can’t do because my shit doesn’t work, and my respiratory therapist was supposedly going to take care of this exact problem, they maybe could have shipped the equipment faster. Maybe just, like, a guy, on foot. He could have gotten it here before next Thursday, I’m certain of that.

Anyway, if I ever get to attempt to sleep in one of these things, I’ll tell you all about it. It hasn’t happened yet.

Super, can’t wait

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Yesterday, as I’ve said, was a day of meetings, one of which was a more or less bog-standard staff meeting at the end of the day. One of the lines on the agenda just read “new student,” which got a bit of a raised eyebrow out of me, as that’s not normally something that’s considered a big enough deal to be with discussing at a staff meeting. Students come and go all the time, so the notion that the entire staff needed to discuss one was a sign that something not especially good was on the way.

Sometimes I hate it when I’m right.

I’ve gone back and forth a couple of times on whether I want to go into detail on how the meeting actually went, but suffice it to say that it was one of those meetings where an awful lot of reading between the lines was necessary, as for various reasons, some of them even reasonable, I think the special ed teacher and the principal both felt somewhat restricted on, shall we say, deploying the full measure of their honesty. I’m an idiot with a website who isn’t even naming the city my school is in, though, so I can be somewhat more direct.

We have a new student coming in Monday. That’s not a problem. He’s autistic. That’s also not a problem.

He’s a sex offender with litigious parents, and that very much is a problem. Two separate problems, in fact.

I am fairly certain of those last two points. Slightly less certain but still likely is that the kid is a porn addict and quite possibly a compulsive masturbator. We are required to keep an adult literally at his side for one hundred percent of the time he is in the building except when he is in the bathroom, and when he is in the bathroom he is to use either a one-seat faculty bathroom or the bathroom in the nurse’s office– he is not allowed in any of the student bathrooms under any circumstances. Furthermore, when they tell us the adult needs to be “at his side” for “100% of the time,” what that means is that if that adult happens to need the bathroom, they must get someone to come relieve them at the boy’s side before they leave the room, and it cannot be the classroom teacher. He must have his own, separate adult. He is not allowed to touch other students.

Oh, and he is to be “encouraged” to exit the bathroom immediately if he is in there for more than three minutes. There might be other explanations beyond “he’s in there jerking off,” but … well.

Dad has apparently already threatened to sue the district on more than one occasion and the boy has not started yet, nor have we managed to hire someone to be his full-time minder, so the schedules of every other special ed student in the building are getting fucked over so we can accommodate this one kid. And again, this is all conjecture, but I’ve been in teaching long enough to be able to hear people telling me without telling me. I’d bet money that the kid got caught doing something with a younger cousin or something similar. I’ve never even heard of anyone needing this level of special ed support in mainstream classes. It’s fucking ludicrous.

Luckily for me, he’s a seventh grader, so I won’t have to deal with him until next year, if he sticks around, and … well, I’ve already indulged my inner gambler, so I’m going to climb back out on that limb and suggest that he won’t last that long one way or another. He’ll either do something that justifies us expelling him or his parents will get pissed at us and yank him.

*cough*

That wasn’t on purpose.

Either way, I’m so excited about this.

Oh for crying out loud

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am rapidly reaching the point where getting a post started on here is almost as difficult as writing fiction, and that’s something that’s never been true before. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t get to the word “true” in that last sentence and glaze out for a couple of minutes to stare off into space. I had a day of teacher meetings today, with no students– they had an e-learning day– and it actually went pretty well, which probably isn’t an actual first but feels like it. Tomorrow I’m having grade conferences with every student and then it’s the weekend, and then I only have nine more days of school before winter break.

I’m going to blame end-of-semester brain drain and just go with that.

Sure, that’ll be easy

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Another postlet tonight, as I had a meeting this evening regarding a literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for my son and I. Only thing is I have to talk my wife into it and then find $12,000.

No problem.

A quick point

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that in a lot of ways I am happier right now than I have been in a really long time. The new job is going great– I have some philosophical objections to certain aspects of how the new district works, particularly related to grading, and I’m doing what I can to blunt the edges of what I’m “supposed” to be doing while still technically staying within what for-the-record-they-haven’t-explicitly-mandated-I do, but it’s still kind of annoying. The kids are a fucking delight, and I’m actually getting to teach in every class, which is something I haven’t been able to say in years, if really even at all. I’ve not raised my voice in two weeks and some change. It’s amazing.

I’m just tired, and my nights are stuffed, and the simple fact is I write better when I’m pissed off. And right now I’m not writing a lot because I’m not as angry. And I gotta feel like, blog statistics be damned, that’s a good thing.

In which I don’t have time

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I’m teaching myself Arabic, finally fulfilling a promise I made to myself when I dropped out of the class a couple of weeks into my freshman year of college. I’ve been using Duolingo fairly religiously and I just bought a “basics” type of textbook, and looking at the image above I can almost parse some letters? Regular Arabic writing is complicated enough for the unskilled Westerner; Arabic calligraphy is a level of insane that I am not yet remotely prepared to deal with. I am aware that English calligraphy is probably harder to decipher than regular English print, but Arabic doesn’t have print, and each letter has three forms depending on where it is in the word, plus the several letters that English has no equivalent for in the first place, so I feel fairly confident in asserting that there is a real difficulty difference here.

I mean, it’s not Russian cursive, which is apparently not a hoax, somehow:

I mean … come the fuck on. I believe Arabic calligraphy is words. I don’t know that I can really convince myself that that shit is legible script to anyone, Russian-speaking or not.

Anyway. Point is, between lesson planning, blogging, eating dinner, learning an extraordinarily difficult foreign language for no Goddamn reason, trying to record a little bit of YouTube video, and, oh, right, interacting with my family, my evenings have been feeling unreasonably stuffed lately, which I think has been a major contributing factor to 1) how brief my posts have been and 2) how late my posts have been, as it’s currently 8:30 PM and I’ve just stopped writing to stare at my phone for ten minutes. I’m not complaining, as I’m still more or less enjoying all these activities and it’s not like Winter Break isn’t right around the corner, but … man.

There’s a lot going on.