You can never tell nowadays, what with deepfakes and such, but if this is a real picture I insist that somebody ask this creepy motherfucker what he did with Déagol.
Month: October 2023
Somehow
I made it through today alive, and tomorrow ought to actually be pretty easy. I spent the morning howling like a banshee and throwing shit at the walls until somebody finally figured out the field trip tomorrow, and in accordance with my preferences, I don’t have to go. I will have two hours in my classroom– probably a bit more, honestly– covering 25 or so kids who aren’t going on the trip, but that’s nothing, really– a bunch of them won’t show up and I can literally just tell them to go fuck around on their iPads and leave me alone and it’ll be fine. It’s the second day of the quarter so it’s not like they have any work to do. Hell, we can probably even get some work done on the damn door thing. I’ve decided we’re doing the absolute minimum rather than just not participating– I’m going to throw some dark purple paper on the door and find some vaguely Fall-appropriate decorations and maybe have the advisory kids color something and we’re calling it a day. The target here is literally “better than nothing.”
Only two of my classes– maybe two and a half– are actually meeting, and today’s assignment genuinely bit off more than they could chew, so I’ll give them the time to finish off today’s assignment. Maybe a quick extra credit assignment for the ones who are done, we’ll see.
Oh, and I had an actual sex offender added to my classes today, but we’re choosing not to think about that right now. I made it through the day and I only have six more until Fall break. Maybe we’ll think about the sex offender tomorrow.
OK. We can do this. Or not! Fuck it.
I spent a good part of the day today— five hours, maybe– getting prepared for next week and the two-eleven-hour-days-plus-an-elearning-day stint following, and while I’ve been mostly immune to Sundaying since starting this new job I have been a mess all day today. There’s just too goddamned much going on over the next couple of weeks, most of it related to not math, and I want to do Math, and not Not Math. But I’ve got twelve thousand other things to worry about this week, and I care about exactly zero of them– I don’t give a shit if the kids have a little Slides presentation to show their parents at parent/teacher conferences, because the only kids who will actually do those are the ones whose parents I don’t need to see, and I don’t give a shit about the door decorating contest that they gave us a week to do and then promptly filled every advisory period in between the day they told us about the contest and the day they were judging it, and I don’t give a shit about the schedule for Advisory they dropped on us today(*), and I don’t give a shit about the fucking lesson that I’m supposed to teach, which was clearly written by a non-educator(**), so that the kids are “prepared” for the field trip they’re taking on Tuesday that I also don’t care about.
Christ and fuck.
I need to clear this mood before first contact with the kids tomorrow or it’s going to be a rougher seven days than I already think it’s going to be. I don’t need any of this shit. Just get the fuck out of my way and let me fucking teach.
(*) “But Luther, isn’t it Sunday?” you ask. Yes. They dropped a new Advisory schedule on us on a Sunday that is supposed to be implemented Monday, and to hell with the seventeen other things we are supposed to do this week, all of which are supposed to be done in Advisory. Fuck Advisory. Fuck the entire concept. Get rid of it and give me more class time. I hate it.
(**) How do I know, you may ask? It’s a lesson plan for eighth graders that changes tasks seven times over the course of the lesson, with each section ranging from three to eight minutes in length.(***) Fuck you. You teach it.
(***) A sample task: “Put the students in pairs and have them write the letters A-Z on a piece of paper. Have them read whateverthefuck and list things by their first letter that are manufactured in this county.” Total time for this activity: five to eight minutes, which is insufficient time just to get them in groups and have them all write out the list of letters. Suck a cock.
Not gonna try too hard
We’re a quarter of the way through the school year, I’m a week and a half from a five-day fall break, the world is more or less falling apart, and it’s gonna rain all day tomorrow.
Sounds like a good night for video games.
I’m wealthy and I don’t like it
Okay, let’s put this right out there for everybody: I’m about to gripe about getting handed a whole pile of money, and we’re all just going to have to figure out how to live with that, okay? This is probably a pretty good stroke of fortune, but I’m still less than completely happy about it. Just prepare yourself, I guess.
Last week we had to fire a permanent substitute for several of our Social Studies classes. We never found a full-time teacher for that class, but this guy was showing up to work every day so he may as well have been the “real” teacher. I am not privy to the reasons for the firing, although I have reason to believe that they were of the “you aren’t very good at this” variety and possibly also the “you are not getting along with the other adults, who are better at their jobs than you” variety, but not anything more nefarious than that. At any rate, since I’m certified to teach middle school social studies, I spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to volunteer to pick up one of this guy’s sections and ended up deciding against it. The group he had during my prep period seemed like a pretty decent group of kids, but it would mean a whole lot of extra prep time for just one extra section of kids, and, well, it would eat my one prep period. That would mean teaching from 8:15 to 3:20 every day with nothing but a half hour break for lunch. I didn’t exactly turn it down, because it wasn’t offered to me, but I did decide I wasn’t going to put my name forward for it.
So naturally today one of our math teachers resigned, and while I could still turn down an overload, it feels a lot sketchier to refuse to teach an extra section of the course I’m already teaching, and I’ve covered her class before and it’s a reasonably easy group of kids. But it means, again, no preps ever, and less time for a bathroom break– and you’d best believe my bowels have gotten used to being evacuated promptly at 10:08 every morning when I send second hour away– and I can’t run out for lunch any longer.
My biggest complaint, though, is the notion that I have to bring my lunch every day for the rest of the year. The thought is crushing. I mean, I can order Jimmy John’s once in a while, and I can probably afford to Doordash every now and again, but that shit adds up quick and I don’t want to spend money on food all the Goddamn time, especially since if the delivery person is even a little late I’m racing through my lunch even faster than usual, which is deeply fucking annoying.
On the other hand, depending on exactly how they run the numbers I’m going to make somewhere between eight and eleven thousand dollars extra for covering the class. I get my hourly rate, so basically 3/4 of an extra 1/6 of my salary over the course of the year, although that sixth may be a little smaller than that because I’m not sure if Advisory counts as instructional time or they just divide my day into six classes or what.
One way or another, it’s a whole Goddamn lot of money. I have this plan going right now where other than the house I’m going to be completely out of debt by the end of this school year. Completely out. An extra nine grand– the most likely figure is roughly $8900 if you want specificity– over the course of the rest of the school year would move that timetable up pretty considerably. How much can I really gripe about doing a little bit more of something I was already doing when it has that level of compensation attached to it? But the fucking lunch thing has me all twisted up about it for some reason.
My brain makes no damn sense at all sometimes.
I’m awake and I don’t like it
I didn’t post on Monday because I wanted to give the Israel post a little bit of time to simmer, and truth be told I’ve almost deleted it a couple of times since writing it. That would be the first time in over ten years that I’ve deleted a post, or at least deleted a post that didn’t include subsequently-published fiction. I didn’t post yesterday because I got home from work and went more or less directly to bed. I was in bed before seven yesterday evening. I’m not sick, I’m just tired as hell, and as I’m writing this it’s 7:40 PM and I’m pretty sure I can go straight to bed once I’m done and not feel bad about it at all.
This has been another week of Always Thursday, and I’m pretty sure (again) that tomorrow is Actual Thursday, which is generally followed by Friday, although I’m not convinced that’s actually going to happen. At least seven of the last fourteen days have been Thursday so I really don’t think there’s any chance that Friday will follow Actual Thursday like it’s supposed to this week. We’ll see, I guess.
There is probably another Israel post coming once my brain settles down and I get home not so exhausted that I can’t think. It’s been amazing how tired everyone has been lately; I think if the building dropped fourth hour in favor of Nap Time it would be the quietest place on the planet for those 55 minutes.
Not that anyone asked
I don’t have any idea what the hell can be done about the current iteration of the war between Israel and Hamas. Americans like to pick sides during a war, and assign “good guys” and “bad guys,” and as near as I can tell this is a situation where both sides gave up any pretense to the moral high ground quite a while ago. It’s bad guys all the way down. I have said in the past, both in this space and others, that any time I see an unarmed person throwing a rock at a tank, my general inclination is to support the person throwing the rock. And Israel has operated as a de facto apartheid state for most of its existence, and particularly so since fucking Netanyahu came into power. I believe all of that is true, and I believe that both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. But the Palestinians are controlled by fucking lunatics too, and I refuse to hold people who murder and kidnap civilians at a fucking music festival up as someone who should be supported. I have said before, and I think I still believe this, that Palestine’s only chance at ever actually achieving a two-state solution is to bring forth a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. The problem is that the hardliners would kill him before the world found out he existed. The closest Israel can claim is Yitzhak Rabin, and he was assassinated by an Israeli.
Neither side wants peace. I’m entirely willing to believe that the people of both Israel and Palestine want peace, and the Palestinian people have absolutely and undeniably gotten the short end of the stick here; I probably can’t honestly say that I understand their rage, having never had to live under apartheid, but I’m at least willing to try. But none of their leaders want peace right now, and there isn’t going to be peace until that changes. Neither side really believes in the other’s right to exist. That’s not something you can really find a compromise on. Palestine will continue to have a steady supply of hopeless, angry young men for as long as Israel denies their right to live freely, and the Israeli government will accept nothing short of full second-class, boot-on-their-necks subjugation for the Palestinians, which guarantees that supply of hopeless, angry young men will never end.
This will end in genocide, eventually. It’s close enough as it is, but that’s where it’s headed. Again.
I got nothing
I downloaded a new Darius Rucker album today, mostly because my vocal range matches his pretty well and I can sing along with his music. I’ve spent the last half hour playing Crash Test Dummies and singing along, because my vocal range also matches Brad Roberts’ pretty well.
It’s finally fall weather outside. I look forward to a week of that until it jumps back up to 95 and then starts snowing.
Quiet Saturday, I guess.
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