Slept amazingly well last night. Then went and had breakfast with The Cousins again, and it turns out that, somehow unbeknownst to me until today, one of them and her husband are astonishingly rich (like, Eames chair in the living room where the dogs can sit on it rich) and they also cook up a damn good brunch. And this isn’t quite a “rich” thing, as the object in question is less than $20, but I tried to put butter on a piece of sourdough bread and their butter dish called me poor. I have never tried to put butter on something, been shown the place where the butter was, and still been unable to find the butter. Not once in almost fifty years. Until today.
I have melted into my chair since we got home, I just had Frosted Mini-Wheats for dinner, and I am now girding my loins for the third-to-last week of school. This will involve going to bed early and not much else.
All of it. Forever. Forever and ever, and ever and ever.
This is a review of a local high school, and I hope the author steps on a Lego every time she gets out of bed for the rest of her stupid life, and I hope her mattress is lumpy and her pillow is fifteen degrees warmer than her room:
Also, guess what LMS my district uses?
There’s currently a screen up saying Canvas is undergoing “scheduled” maintenance, which … no. No, it isn’t.
The Task remains incomplete, mostly because we devoted the evening to getting other tasks completed, among which: purchasing new glasses for the boy and I (I am about to, for the first time since I was a child, transition to plastic frames) and a new graduation suit for the boy. Didn’t get home until 8, and I have been diligently pecking away but it’s not done yet. Maybe we’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.
I was going to write a post about an annoying-but-hopefully-ultimately-rewarding task that I set myself to complete tonight (take the word “task” with salt) except, oops, I didn’t actually finish it. Which kind of leaves me without a post and without the possible “ultimately rewarding” bit, because I think I might die if I continue working on said task.
On the plus side, I had a meeting tomorrow that I wasn’t looking forward to, and then I realized that I was the chairperson of the committee that I don’t want to go to the meeting of, so I emailed everybody and said “Hey, I’ve really got nothing to say tomorrow. Y’all mind if the meeting is an email?” So far the only person to respond is the principal, who was fine with cancelling (she hasn’t attended the last few anyway) but she’s the big boss so we are totally making the meeting an email.
Anyway, maybe we’ll do that post tomorrow night. We’ll see if The Task gets completed or not.
Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.
(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)
I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.
A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.
Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.
And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.
I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.
(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.
I had a plan to present you with the third book review of the last three days tonight, but … um … it turns out I haven’t finished the book! I mean, it’s the fourth book in the series, and I liked the first three, and I’ve liked the first 250 of its 340-some-odd pages, so I could probably guess where my opinions are gonna go, but that seems kind of unfair. So I’m gonna go read, and y’all just hang out for a while. If you want, go buy the first three books in the series so that maybe you can be caught up by tomorrow.
Three Billy bookcases from Ikea showed up on my front porch today.(*) I’m not sure at the moment where the third is going. My wife said she had “bookshelf fatigue” a bit ago when I called her into the bedroom to ask for opinions. I don’t blame her; I have Me Fatigue, which is a close variant. I have Entirely Too Much Shit, and I keep acquiring more shit, and I looked at those filled bookshelves (which won’t look like that forever, as they’re going to be organized better sooner or later) and started musing about how my house burning down might solve some of my problems.
Not all of the books in the picture are mine, for the record. But enough of them are, and when you widen the scope to the whole house, I’m not exactly a hoarder, because I’m too organized for that, but Jesus, I have a damn problem.
Also, I need a second Spring Break where all I do is read. Like, 24/7, without breaking for food, bathroom, or sleep. Either that or I need All the Writers to take, like, a year off. I understand that writing is how they feed themselves but if everybody could just take a little hit on behalf of my mental health and the success of my marriage I’d appreciate it.
(*) Initial review is that at their price point they are excellent bookcases, which is basically what everyone I’ve ever heard mention them has said. We’ll see how well they hold up; that shelf on the far left is effectively made of cardboard and probably ought to go as soon as possible, so what might happen is I get rid of it, slide the other tall one down and stick the third Billy in between it and the two that are already on the wall. We’ll see.
I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.
Ha.
I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …
… fuck.
The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.
