Month: August 2023

Wait, shit, I wasn’t ready

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Spent the weekend in Michigan visiting my aunt and my cousin, and between the drive and being “on” for family and the first week of school I am officially pre-exhausted for this upcoming week. On the other hand, my cousin had the good sense to marry a Lebanese woman, and Jesus Christ do I love absolutely every single fucking aspect of Lebanese cuisine, so we ate really well yesterday and brought a ton of food home, all of which I will have eaten by tomorrow.

Oh, oh, and I got a flurry of emails over the weekend and I have two new students coming in tomorrow, neither of whom can speak English and one of whom has spina bifida in addition to not speaking English, so that’s gonna be fun. Will I figure it out? Yes. Will I remember to create a sub folder so that I can put the legally-required evacuation order for the the spina bifida kid in it? Uh. Probably. Sure. Let’s stay positive. I have Monday and Tuesday planned out right now; surely that’s enough, right? Wednesday through Friday will take care of themselves.

Oh! Also! It’s going to be in the nineties all week and the high Thursday is supposed to be a hundred and one (101) degrees, after a summer that barely touched the nineties at all. Did I predict this state of affairs? Yes the fuck I did.

At least Kissinger’s going to die and TFG’s going to go to jail to make up for the rest of it, right?

Not bad

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I am so tired that I may actually be dead, but the first day of school went really well.

After work tomorrow we are heading to Michigan to visit my cousins and my aunt for the weekend, so if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, don’t panic.

Recording for posterity

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Two twelve-hour days later, I’m fucking exhausted, but I needed to get this written down before collapsing into bed, because I genuinely had one of the best moments of my career tonight while talking with parents at the 8th grade Open House. This is a very short story, but powerful nonetheless: one of my dads, on the way out of the room, stopped, looked around for a moment, then came back into the room and told me he really loved the way I’d set up my classroom.

“I was terrible at math as a kid,” he said. “I feel like I could actually have learned in here.”

It’s going to be a good year.

Back, but not back-back

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In accordance with our previous discussion, of course.

I am … unreasonably tired, and this is mostly a proof of life, written on either the day of or the eve of Indictmentpalooza 4. The next two days are going to be 12-hour days and I will have to bring a change of clothes along with me to both. Go ahead, place your hand on the screen; you’ll be able to feel my excitement.

Wait, what?

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Yesterday I said I was genuinely excited about school starting this week. Today I’ve mostly been a ball of anxiety, although I think I’ve been masking it pretty well, maybe? I don’t know. I did a better job keeping busy yesterday– for the most part I had no choice, being honest, as we went to a birthday party in Indianapolis, and driving back and forth to Indy in a single day is gonna keep you busy whether you want it to or not. Today … not so much. I have done a lot of sitting and staring. Finished the crossword and the Spelling Bee on the NYT app. I’ll probably finish the book I’m reading today. That’s about it.

I’m hoping to find out one of two things tomorrow– either that we hired a new math teacher and therefore the size of most of my classes are going to drop by about a third, or that they’ve agreed to split my Honors class into two classes, which will put me into an overload status (bad) but substantially increase my pay because of said overload (good). One of my current life goals, and it’s entirely reachable provided no major crises this year, is to be completely debt-free other than the house by the end of this school year. With the extra pay from an overage class it goes from “entirely reachable” to very close to easy. One way or another I should know by the end of the day. I’ll finish up the classroom tomorrow and then I can spend Tuesday and Wednesday worrying about curriculum. All good, right? Sure.

In which I am stunned and grateful

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

This table represents the largesse that the Internet has showered upon me from my wish list over the course of the last week or two, and y’all, I’m not exaggerating or joking at all when I tell you that this is probably about $350 worth of supplies. Those Post-It poster cards are like $120 a pack all by themselves. There are 600 pencils in those boxes, which is probably at least a semester’s worth. Two boxes of Expo markers will get me through most of the year. There are not many kids wearing masks any longer so 300 of them will probably set me for the rest of my career. (I will probably give at least one of those bags to the nurse so that she has more on hand, actually.) And you would be amazed at what an 8th grader will do for a sparkly gold star.

Shut up, I’m trying to be genuine here.

None of you had to shell out for any of this– from the number of packages I’ve received there have been several who didn’t reveal themselves either here or on Bluesky– and my appreciation is deep and real. Thank you.

The room is coming along:

Bored 6th grader, for scale.

The main innovation here is moving one of the semicircle tables to front and center from where it was last year, over by the green board, and it tended to be a haven for the kids who weren’t planning on doing a lot of work. I also stole the second one from a supply room, and some of the desks have changed orientation, giving me a decent middle area to stomp around in while I’m talking. In theory, at some point in the near future the wall on the left is going to be acquiring a full-length whiteboard, which is why there’s nothing on it right now, but who knows how long that will take. I’m required to be back on Monday; everything this week was off-contract, and I think I got enough done today that next week I can focus on fine-tuning the details (my desk is a useless mess right now) and actually worrying about curriculum and assignments and shit for the first couple of days of school.

Nerrrrrrrdddsssssss

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching2 Comments

I didn’t make it over to school today; I woke up this morning and the thought of getting out of bed was just unimaginable, much less driving a million thousand miles away and throwing desks around all afternoon. So I get to do it tomorrow! Hooray!

Instead, today got swallowed up by, to start, (other than lazing about, I mean) some research into what it would take to add high school mathematics to my teaching license. I don’t want to move up to high school but it’s come to my attention that I have a fair number of seventh graders in my honors algebra class, which is already a ninth-grade class, which means that those kids are going to take Geometry next year, which technically I’m not allowed to teach? So I’m looking into that. I have to learn enough calculus to pass an exam, though, which … eek. I may have dropped out of Calculus 3/4 of the way through my senior year of high school and not looked at it since then; don’t tell anybody.

Tonight was eaten up by a kind of ridiculous little project; I have 152 kids on my roster so far (that number will– is guaranteed— to change) but just for the sheer hell of it I went through last year’s Student of the Month database and compared that list of kids to my class roster. I discovered that 58% of the students who won SOTM last year are in my class, which is already a nice slant, probably accounted for by the fact that I have the Honors kids, and that of those 152 kids on roster eighty-four of them won SOTM at least once last year. 55%. And it’s not like that guarantees that the other 45% are knuckleheads, either. I have a couple– literally, two– who I know to keep an eye on from last year, but it’s literally two kids. I think I can handle two Project Kids(*) during the first few weeks while I figure out who the rest of my hot spots are.

(*) This looks kinda racist. I mean Kids Who I Have Decided To Make a Project Of, not Kids From Project Housing.

I’ll post classroom pictures tomorrow, especially if I make any serious changes from how the room looked last year. The problem is with the style of desks I have and the layout of the classroom I have, putting everything in straight rows is really the only solution that makes sense, or at least the only solution that I’ve been able to come up with so far, but maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration tomorrow. We’ll see.

Also, I think that everyone who spoke up the last time I mentioned having BlueSky invites is taken care of, but I got another code today, so if you’re still out in the cold and you need one (or if I missed you last time) let me know.

Fuck saving money

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If there are people– any people– working in schools during the summer, the Goddamned air conditioning in those buildings needs to be on, and it is bloody fucking insane that I’ve had to deal with this bullshit twice this week. It’s going to happen again tomorrow, but I’m going to show up prepared to be a sweaty fuck all afternoon, which I did not do today, because I had already forgotten the lessons Monday should have taught me. And the AC was off, and it was humid as fuck, and I was not dressed to be moving furniture in a windowless classroom with no moving air.

Tomorrow’s gonna suck too, but at least I’ll be prepared for it.