I have a student who has missed a lot of school lately because of mononucleosis, but as far as I know that’s not traditionally contagious and I’m reasonably certain I have not been making out with him. But god damn, the last time I was this consistently tired several days running was after major changes in my brain meds and there haven’t been any of those lately either. I was yawning uncontrollably during my last class today. Giant, jaw-cracking yawns. The first thing one of my students said to me on Tuesday was “Are you okay?” Not a thing that happens often, y’know?
I’ll bet you a dollar I wake up at 5 am tomorrow and can’t get back to sleep, just like I have for damn near every weekend morning since school started. Sigh.
I had a post all ready for you and then I had an accidental eleven-hour day and it’s 7:34 and I’m ready to die or collapse into bed, whichever comes first.
Last year I put out a public beg for people to donate calculators to my classroom. I did that because keeping calculators in working condition and also literally keeping them is far, far more difficult than it ought to be. They’d get broken, the batteries would get stolen, the battery covers would get torn off and disappear, the screens scratched up, etcetera etcetera. 8th graders are savages. This is known.
I got a bunch of new calculators and spent the summer trying to figure out a way to keep them in working condition and in my classroom that was actually going to work for me.
Y’all.
At the beginning of the year I asked each of my five classes to nominate names for six calculators. You can see the names in the pictures. I vetoed a couple of their choices and instituted a rule that if a calculator was named after a person currently in one of my classes then that person had to give permission, but other than that those are all student-chosen names. There’s a decent variety to them; some of them are regular human names, a couple are named after celebrities, and some of them (“Tacotuesday,” “Caprisun”) are just kind of nonsense.
Y’see, now, if a calculator is missing, I don’t just have a missing calculator. Someone has kidnapped Stella. You didn’t steal the batteries out of a calculator! You killed Unc.
There are a ton of them that have their favorite calculator now and they refuse to use any others. Amazingly, I’ve never had to adjudicate any arguments over who gets what calculator. I was worried about that, but it’s never happened.
LaShawnda’s screen is scratched up. It happened before she (yes! “She”!) was LaShawnda. Someone brings LaShawnda to me at least once a week to report that her screen is scratched up. And we are on the sixty-first day of school and, until today, not one calculator had gone missing or been destroyed. You will note that LaJeff is technically LaJeff 2; that was due to a bad battery that corroded a terminal and can’t be blamed on a student– but again, once LaJeff stopped working I found out about it immediately. Last year someone would have thrown it away and then denied doing it.
The calculators get put back in the right places at the end of every class, without me needing to make an issue out of it. If one of them is missing, I say “Hey, who’s got Fredricson?” and Fredricson will be produced.
Hell, those names and numbers are written on with paint markers and none of them have even been scratched off. That’s stunning. That’s how careful they’re being with these calculators. Billy’s 5 isn’t really much of a 5 anymore but that’s it. Everything is still legible.
On that “until today” bit two paragraphs up: sadly, as of the end of the day today, Alex is missing. I have written “ALEX IS MISSING” in huge letters on my board and I would bet a hundred bucks that I’ll have Alex back by the end of the day, either because the kids will tear my room apart until they find him or whoever walked off with him by accident will bring him back. But even if I never see that particular calculator again, to only lose one in the first third of the school year is amazing. I’m going to name my calculators for the rest of my career. This is the best idea I’ve ever had.
…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.
Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:
Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:
The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?
Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.
In April of last year, I reviewed Laura R. Samotin’s The Sins on their Bones, which I was sent an eArc of by a publicist. I liked it enough that I finished it in six hours and immediately ordered a physical copy of it, and while it’s been sitting on my shelves for a minute or two, I got the sequel on release day as well.
And … well, I could literally rewrite the previous review more or less word for word for this book. I finished The Lure of their Graves in an hour before going to sleep last night and a few hours across this morning and afternoon– less than a day, easily– and if I talk about it much it’s going to seem like I hated it. My gripes about the first book still apply to the sequel; everyone’s obviously Jewish but the word “Jewish” never appears; Russian only exists for the phrase moy tzar, the main character is kind of a lot, the characters in the book are supposed to be the main figures of a government but come off more like a grad school polycule, etc, etc. I’m slightly revising my initial “holy shit, this book is gay as hell” assessment; it’s gay as hell, but what it actually is is a world where literally everyone is bisexual. Sexual orientation and possibly even sexual preference effectively doesn’t exist. Dmitri Alexeyev, the Tzar from the first book (and still the tzar of the second, although he’s never going to feel like a ruler of anything at all) spends most of the book trying to decide who he should marry to keep his country and the surrounding lands stable, and the three main candidates are a man, a woman, and a nonbinary person who makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that they are willing to swing any direction the vine can get to.
Also, I genuinely don’t get the title. It’s possible that I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.
That said, once again I enjoyed the hell out of this book and I will be reading more from Laura Samotin in the future. Yes, I know I just did nothing but complain. I contain multitudes. Deal with it.
I apparently didn’t review K.M. Enright’s Mistress of Lies when I read it back in July, but I liked it quite a lot, and I finished the sequel, Lord of Ruin, yesterday, and because any time I read a Laura Samotin book I have to have weird synchronicity with the book before it, it’s also super gay and involves a spymaster and a king and an attempt at a rebellion and a fair amount of explicit sex, although this one also involves the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered in a book (Oh, and the book before this, Coffin Moon, also involved vampires, so we’re all about the themes recently) and a Polynesian monstrosity called a manananggal that is not something that your nightmares need to be aware of in Donald Trump’s America.
Oh, and magical trans people. I’m deliberately withholding details. But transitioning at least can involve magic– it’s not clear if it has to– and you’re going to be confused at a couple of points in this book by who has what body parts, because being trans in these books does not work like it does in the real world. Just a heads-up. The Cursed Crown books are a duology that is now finished, and Enright’s series still has one more coming. I’m definitely in.
Fall’s over, apparently, after a delightful couple of weeks; there’s a winter storm scheduled to roll in tomorrow that in theory could deposit as much as a foot of snow. We got our annual “Here’s how we handle snow delays” email from the boy’s school– and, as he’s an 8th grader, had a moment of reflection as we realized we were never getting another one after eleven years. We’ve been parking both cars in the driveway since March as the garage has gotten filled with bullshit, so the big task today was to de-bullshitify said garage and make it able to harbor motor vehicles again. The snowblower and mower have switched positions for the season.
You may remember that we had a synchronous e-learning day recently so that we could basically rehearse for snow days; I am entertained that one looks at least distinctly possible if not likely (“Hazardous conditions could affect Monday morning commutes” is a danger sign in a winter storm alert) and absolutely no one was warned to bring devices home over the weekend. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
Tomorrow I am hanging the new curtains if it kills me. I will not go another day with the general public being able to see into my living room, God damn it. This may sound like it’s not much of a project, and it genuinely shouldn’t be, but I can’t believe I’ve been staring at these boxes on my dining room table for this long.
I learned a new word while reading a sex scene tonight, and I’m both surprised and a little alarmed by that. I thought I knew all the words for the different ways humans can rub their bits together! I did not.
(That’s all I’ve got. My students shit the bed on another test today. If someone can explain to me what I need to do to keep 8th graders from consistently, from year to year, underperforming on anything I call a test, I would absolutely love to hear it, because nothing I’ve ever tried has worked. You’ve seen this post before, and I’m pre-exhausted by it without even writing it.)
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