Unread Shelf: March 31, 2023

On March 31, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading2 Comments

Another month where I bought more books than I read, unfortunately.

LOL

On March 30, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

So the shitstain has been indicted. For, one hopes, the first of several times.

You’d think I would have something to say about it, but I’ve been staring at the screen for twenty minutes and I just took a break after the word “but” to read a couple comic books.

I just want to never hear his name again.

I just want to never see his stupid sneering face again.

I just want an America that never embraced this vile creature.

And I’m not going to get what I want no matter what happens to him.

Two more days

On March 29, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I know I’ve been a broken record this week, but holy God, am I tired. It is utter madness that this week has been six weeks long and yet somehow it is still only Wednesday. Like … I just … what?

We have been doing the exact same type of assignment all week, and the sameness of that combined with the fact that, yes, still, I’m teaching the exact same lesson to all of my classes means that the week has taken on this insane Groundhog’s Day flavor, which is no doubt contributing to the fact that Monday through Wednesday have taken nineteen years. I’m also doing this thing where I’m coming up with good ideas for posts during the day then sitting down at my desk in the evenings and just … staring. I do remember a couple– I need to talk more about the new desk and I want to review Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell, which I really enjoyed, but I’m too knackered to do either of those things right now. So instead I’m just gonna complain for a couple of paragraphs and then go sit in a room with my wife and son for a while.

Two more. I can do this.

I survived, mostly

On March 28, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Managed to make it through the ILEARN practice test without any particular drama, other than that which is inherent to the genre of “practice versions of standardized tests,” then made it through the shortened blitz of the rest of my classes, once again teaching the exact same thing seven times in a row. I’ve been talking a lot more in the last two days than I usually do, and I got home and fell asleep on the couch for a couple hours. It was, indeed, a very good nap.

Oh, and I had a kid casually confess to me this morning that he came to school high, not because he’d been smoking or he wanted to but because those brownies that his mom left out, as he put it, “weren’t breakfast brownies.” He was over it by the time I saw him and he didn’t appear to have especially enjoyed the experience, so … I think I’m just gonna sit on it, and keep a close eye on him in the mornings? As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise I’m sure at least a third of these kids have weed out in the open in their houses at any given time, and this isn’t something that CPS or any other government agency is going to be interested in, and I have no particular interest in getting the kid in trouble for something that a) apparently no adult noticed; b) he admitted doing, c) caused no particular harm, and d) he didn’t seem likely to repeat. I’ll give it some more thought over the next few days, but I think this is going to stay as a “between me and you” thing for now.

(For the record, I almost always see him in the morning, and I didn’t today, so he probably either got to school late or without his iPad, and would probably therefore have spent the morning in the cafeteria being babysat with the other kids who weren’t able to take the practice test. Under ordinary circumstances I’d have had him second hour and you can for damn sure bet I’d have noticed if he’d come into class lifted. I don’t think I’m necessarily mad at the folks covering the caf for not noticing, though. There were a ton of kids in there and being high isn’t going to make him cause trouble and get noticed.)

I should have known

On March 27, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I got to work this morning to discover a thirty foot long, 10′ wide, 8′ high pile of ~~bullshit~~ ~~manure~~ mulch piled in the fucking teacher’s parking lot outside my building. Given that we were due to start official ILEARN prep today, and that tomorrow is the ILEARN practice test– which is reliably my least favorite fucking day of the year– I should have taken the hint, and turned around and gone home. Not only did my advisory– fucking advisory– have to meet the guy who worked at Previous District, not only did I have to teach through advisory, teach the exact same lesson seven times to my other classes, but I had to cover fucking ISS on my lunch break, and God damn it, I’m exhausted.

Then I got home and found out there was another fucking school shooting today– because of course there was– and do two hours of grading, and not it’s 7:22 PM and I guess I can relax for an hour or two before it’s time for bed and I have to go in tomorrow and administer the cursed fucking practice test. Which is literally two hours of me reading instructions out loud.

You can probably imagine how much the kids look forward to two hours of having instructions read to them.

Christ and fuck, I hate standardized testing.

We’re all doomed

On March 26, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

I hadn’t Tweeted in weeks, not since January 23rd, other than RTing an announcement that my buddy Daniel Ford’s book is coming out soon and that you ought to pre-order it, and that was a pure RT; I didn’t even add anything to what he’d said. But I couldn’t resist a quick RT of this picture of the Pope. It was fucking hilarious, and I didn’t see any harm in it; there’s no one out there who is going to go after me for the massive hypocrisy of Leaving Twitter and then jumping back for one silly RT of a viral image that made me laugh.

The Goddamn thing is completely fake, and I didn’t notice it, and that alarms the shit out of me. Not only did I not notice it, I didn’t even suspect it. Nothing about the image set off any kind of bullshit detector. Is it ridiculous? Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but it’s the Pope, and dressing ridiculously is kind of part of his thing. Granted, the last guy was worse about it than Francis, but … surely he goes outside when it’s cold, right? He has to have a coat. So maybe he has a ridiculous coat? Hell, I don’t know.

I had noticed his right hand, but it didn’t scream FAKE IMAGE to me, although I almost asked why he was holding a jar of syrup from IHOP when I RTed the picture. It just looks kind of funny, at least at first glance, like the angle is weird or something, and the hand is halfway inside the sleeve, after all. Only later (just before writing this, in fact) did I zoom in a bit and notice that his right eye and glasses are definitely not right and his right ear is partially doubled. But that and his hand are it. I can’t see anything else about the image that might have tipped someone off that it was fake other than that it’s ridiculous.

There were viral faked pictures of That Man being arrested circulating around earlier this week too, but those are all obvious fakes from the jump, but those are all immediately and obviously fake. Like, I’d make fun of you if you didn’t realize they were fake within a minute or two. And you’d deserve it. But this? This is fucking scary.

We are rapidly entering– hell, we are clearly there already– an era where “photographic proof” of something simply isn’t going to be possible any longer, and I don’t know what the world looks like when there’s no reason to even really try to prove things to people any longer. I don’t remember asking for this when I was looking forward to Living in the Future when I was a kid, and I’m pretty sure it can’t be stopped, and it can’t be avoided either.

So. Yeah. Despair it is.

On Arabic and learning to read

On March 25, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

ليس لدي فكرة عما يقوله هذا

According to Duolingo, I have been studying Arabic daily for one hundred and forty-seven days. And Duolingo does a lot of things, but one of the things that Duolingo has not managed to do in 147 days of daily practice is teach me to read Arabic. One would think that would be an early priority! It is not. Duolingo teaches almost exclusively through word recognition– what teachers used to call the “whole language” method of teaching reading, and for the most part genuinely seems uninterested in actually providing explanations for things unless absolutely necessary. Even then it kind of hides them in corners of the app and finds ways to make them useless anyway. There is actually a “Learn the letters” section! I have been doing lessons in there for months and it still hasn’t gotten to half the letters.

Whole language is bullshit, y’all. Even as an interested adult it’s an insanely rough way to learn a new language. It means that in-context I can recognize words but if you throw a sentence at me with no context I may not even be able to figure out all the letters. After five months. Keep in mind I already read Hebrew and once taught myself to read German from essentially scratch over a weekend so that I could pass a mandatory translation exam for my degree. I’m good at languages! But this isn’t it. And I also take issue with some of Duolingo’s choices for the sentences and phrases they’re throwing at us. For example:

تلفازي داخل أسدي

Which means “My television is inside my lion” and I swear to God is a sentence that has shown up in my exercises, I believe in a unit called “Express a problem.” That’s not a joke. It’s a real thing. Or this one, during the unit on prepositions, which consisted exclusively of things being in front of or behind things:

هناك زوجتك مع رجل خلف المطعم

That means “There is your wife with a man behind the restaurant,” and … okay! Sure! That’s a thing that has probably happened. But I don’t know how to say “hello” or introduce myself yet. They have literally not taught “Hi, my name is _____, how are you?” but I can express trepidation about the eating habits of my lion.

Anyway, over the last few days– because there is no problem so minor that I won’t try to solve it by throwing money at it– I have acquired both a fine set of Arabic alphabet flash cards and a new textbook dedicated specifically to teaching reading. I have learned more about the alphabet in an hour of perusing that book between today and yesterday than I have in five months of Duolingo. Sadly, I have not received further instructions about how to express my feelings about my lion:

أنا أحب أسدي لكني لا أحب أسد جاري.

That’s “I love my lion but I do not love my neighbor’s lion,” and again, no, that’s not a joke.