Month: December 2024

In which tomorrow is a new day

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.

I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.

Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”

And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.

I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.

In which I want to vomit forever

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I got hammered by the digestive side effects that Mounjaro is famous for so hard this morning that I had to stay home. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the morning in the bathroom and at least once seriously contemplated taking a picture of my bodily effluvia so that I could submit it to Guinness. I have never witnessed anything of the quantity that I was producing this morning. I’ll leave it at that.

Just now, I looked up my scores for the second ILEARN checkpoint, and really, there’s no reason for me to go to work tomorrow, because my kids are clearly learning not a Goddamn thing from me this year.

And tomorrow they’re going to take a test, and then I can start preparing them for the final, which 85% of them are going to fail.

So, yeah, I hate everything, how are you?

In which I am annoyed, also anal

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Can’t wait to see what sort of suggested tags the system throws up for this one.

So I’m definitely doing this stupid “read the entire Stormlight Archives in January” contest with myself, and I decided to make it even harder, because there are two novellas alongside the five canonical novels, and I decided I’m going to read those motherfuckers too. Pictured there is the doorstop-ass hardback copy of Wind and Truth, weighing in at 1344 pages and 2.31 pounds. Worth pointing out: while this is the longest book of the series, it is not the physically largest of the series, which still goes to Words of Radiance, the second book, which is about 300 pages shorter but presumably uses thicker paper.

Pictured next to it: the two novellas, which are somehow smaller than they look there.

And if you are like me you are already aware of why I want to have a conversation with someone about this, and why that conversation might involve hitting them upside their fool heads with one of those three books, or perhaps all three of those books stuffed into a pillowcase.

Because come on.

Oops

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I’m out of town, and it’s too dark for a View from my Window post, and I damn near forgot to post at all. Who knows what sort of geopolitical nonsense might have ensued if I’d broken my streak!

Taking the night off

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It’s 7:30 and somehow I haven’t had dinner yet and my brain is melty and I’m hungry enough that I’m going to transition into angry soon if I don’t do something about it, so I’m going to cross “write a coherent blog post” off my to-do list tonight in favor of keeping myself alive. G’night.

In which it got brought

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We ended up with a two-hour delay this morning, which didn’t get me any extra sleep but did mean I could sit in my comfy chair and drink a leisurely cup of coffee before leaving for work, and then buy a second cup of coffee on the way to work. It took about twice as long to get there as usual, but the drive itself wasn’t scary, just slow.

Then somehow it spent all day snowing like hell but without any significant accumulation at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how that happened. It snowed hard today, and the two inches or so that was on my driveway when I got home was the deepest snow I saw all day. I feel like at least four or five inches of snow fell. I’m just not sure what the hell happened to it once it hit the ground.

There’s a slight chance of a second delay tomorrow– the storm is supposed to end late tonight, but it’s still going to be cold as hell in the morning– but I think I’d prefer to just have a regular day. Either way, we’re about to hit the two-weeks-until-winter-break point, and so far, so good.

Bring it, bitches

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The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.

So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.

The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.

Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.

There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.

It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.

For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.

What do you think? Should I do it?

Tomorrow

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I get to spend my entire day tomorrow giving my students standardized tests, and I mean that literally– every single one of my classes, all day, except for my 30-minute lunch, which is going to be delayed a bit from its usual time because of Reasons. I will have to read several pages of instructions six times and ask over a hundred and thirty students “Do you have a cell phone?” and hope none of them are lying to me, because I get to catch all the bullshit from everybody if we have to invalidate a test.

You’ve all heard the rants before; I’m tired and I don’t wanna. I’m going to predict my sixth-hour kids have the worst test scores I’ve ever seen, though, because giving a standardized test at the end of the day is fucking professional malpractice.

And then Thursday the process will repeat, with the ELA teachers giving their half of the test, and I’ll be in my classroom instead, trying to figure out how to keep the bastards busy and quiet for class periods that are ten or so minutes longer than usual. I’m thinking color by numbers. I’m already pre-annoyed by Thursday behavior issues that haven’t even happened yet– that ten minutes don’t sound like much but they’re going to be. My current ability to tolerate bullshit, as well as the ability of the other adults in the building, is calibrated for 53-minute blocks. There will be a lot of damn referrals during the last ten minutes of class over the next couple of days.

Also, I just ate about two thousand calories of deep dish pizza, and it was a bad idea.

The end.