Because, face it, some of them are dumb

On March 13, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching2 Comments

I am putting together a quick and it-should-be easy assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem right now, to make up for an assignment on the Pythagorean Theorem from late last week that did not turn out to be easy. It contains this question:

There is an absolutely 100% certainty that someone will come up to me and say something along the lines of “Why are there four numbers here?” And then I will say “Can you make a triangle with four sides?” And they will say “No.” And then I will say “Well, then, can those sides make a right triangle?” And they will not know the answer, and they will stare at me, with big, cow-like eyes.

I am tired and perhaps a bit crabby.

In other news

On March 11, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I suppose technically I’ve posted today, since yesterday’s post just went up (oops) but seeing as how I need two episodes to finish uploading to YouTube before I can do anything serious involving my computer I may as well go ahead and write the post I was going to post.

If I can remember what the hell it was going to be about, that is.

I nearly Tweeted tonight. I removed Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram and TikTok from my phone a couple of weeks (?) ago in a fit of social media hatred, leaving only a single Discord server to represent social media on my phone. I reinstalled TikTok a couple of days ago because my wife has been out of town and I was bored but I’m already tired of it and about to take it off again. My wife is back in town again as of this morning, so we’re starting to return to normal around here, which is good. I haven’t necessarily missed interacting with people on Twitter, but occasionally a thought occurs to me that I want to throw out into the void and I lack a place for stray thoughts at the moment.

(Yes, I know that not every stray thought I have needs to be shared with the world. Sure. I know. Still.)

At any rate, I deleted the proto-Tweet unsent.

Friday featured one of my girls telling one of my boys, with a fair degree of certainty in her voice, that yes, she did have a scrotum, and that it was in her lower back, just like everyone else’s. I pulled her over to my desk and explained the difference between an scrotum and a sacrum to her, and a few minutes later had to ban further use of the word scrotum by any of my students, whether they possessed one or not.

Ah, middle school.

The best way to blog

On March 11, 2023March 11, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

…is to put up a post at 9:14 at night, when it’s clear that no further rational thought is taking place, that states nothing more than that you’re not going to blog tonight. You literally could have not said that and people would have gotten the same information!

EDIT: Uh, whoops. This was, as you might guess, supposed to go up last night. At 9:14, even! And apparently I didn’t hit Publish.

I mean, I only had like an eleven day streak or something, which is nothing– I once blogged for something like two years straight without interruption– but it’s annoying to blow a streak on forgetting to publish the post.

Sigh.

Oh, Ricky, you’re so fine

On March 9, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t even think it’s raining outside yet— and you might notice the typical St. Joe Valley Weather Shield wrapped protectively around South Bend at the moment– but the snowfall tonight is supposed to be just ugly enough to raise thoughts of … well … The Good Thing Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. Go sacrifice something to Winter Storm Ricardo, please.

Decline!

On March 8, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

The most exciting thing that happened today was that I was driving home minding my own business and all the sudden everything was on fire. That’s not a joke; there was a series of brushfires on the side of the road over the course of a mile or two, at least three total, assuming none of them had grown together, and one of them had not been noticed by the fire department yet. Today was, to be honest, dreadfully boring, although it wasn’t actively insulting or anything– we just had more time available to spend in our rooms than I was expecting and I really didn’t have that much to do, as I got caught up on my grading over the weekend pretty thoroughly. So other than the parts where I was trying to not be on fire or impede the fire department, I was falling asleep, and I decided to not go to the comic shop today because the notion of driving back out there after picking the boy up just felt like a lot of work.

Still on a weird spate of not sleeping well, too, so I’m really going to try and fix that tonight.

In other news, they’re telling me to expect another winter storm Thursday night to Friday morning, so of course I’m trying to convince myself Friday will be a snow day. It won’t. It’s March. There are no snow days in March, it’s a rule.

Improvement!

On March 7, 2023March 7, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Today was better, and I’m blaming yesterday on Monday. Tomorrow is an inservice day so I have none of the childrens, then Thursday and Friday and then another weekend. Teaching: where the first quarter of the year features no five-day weeks. The great thing about tomorrow is whatever meetings or training or thing they have planned for us, it’s not going to be a waste of my time and at no point will I be blatantly and openly disrespected. It’s gonna be awesome!

My Big Important Task tonight is to get Isshin Ashina beaten so that my schedule on LutherPlaysGames doesn’t get messed with; I need Content tomorrow, so Content I must generate. Are you following me over there yet? You should be, if only because I’m getting tantalizingly close to 250 followers and that’s an important number psychologically. It’s 1/4 of the way to being eligible to get paid! It only took two years of daily videos to get here! I’m sure it’ll get faster soon.

(In case you’ve been around here for several years, Isshin Ashina is this guy, who took literal weeks to beat last time I fought him. I have, oh, a couple of hours, max. It’ll be fine.)

EDIT: Got ‘im. It’s too late to get the episode edited together for tomorrow, so there will just be Wo Long, but I’ll have it ready Thursday.

Now this

On March 6, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I may have picked the wrong weekend to completely redo my office, as this week my wife is out of town on business and I’m a single dad until Saturday morning. Really all I’ve done so far is get up half an hour early to make sure I have time to make the boy’s lunch and feed the cats before I take him to school and I’m ready to curl up and die already. I slept like hell last night, probably not related to the lack of a second person in the bed with me, but I took her to the train station quite late– we left after I would ordinarily have been in bed, and it’s a good 20 minutes away– and it just threw my schedule entirely off, and I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. Combine that with getting up early and … yuck.

And then it was Monday at work, and Mondays at work are never great, especially after three-day weekends. Today was really weird, though; first hour wanted to talk about anything and everything other than math– I rarely have to fend off questions about the afterlife from my students, but holy shit did they want to know every single thing about my opinion about what happens when we die today– and sixth hour was all about the what is this forrrrrrrrrr that I have a lot of trouble answering coherently for some reason.

Here’s the thing about algebra, right? You don’t use algebra, necessarily. Nobody majors in algebra in college. But if you don’t know algebra it locks you out of a whole lot of shit that may or may not have any direct connection to whether you can properly square a binomial or not. And if you want any future in a career involving math, forget it. I tried to make an analogy today to the alphabet. Imagine a kindergartner asking how they’re gonna “use” the alphabet in the future. Well … you don’t, really? Because the alphabet itself is just a baseline entry skill to a shitton of other stuff that is not, in and of itself, the alphabet. Do you want a career that involves reading or writing, kindergartner? Well, sure, or at least maybe, but what does that have to do with learning which letters are vowels right now? Am I gonna have a job in vowel-identifying later on?

You’re not gonna “use” a whole lot of algebra, honestly. You’ll need it because it’s building blocks to all future mathematics, which are useful to a whole lot of skills and careers, and even if you don’t go into those careers, I’m training your ass to think logically, which is useful to make you a more functional person.

But they don’t want that. They wanna know why they have to multiply binomials, and tomorrow they’re gonna be all about when am I gonna have to factor things, and my answer will be “Today, shut up,” and on we go.