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.
I told my principal and my assistant principal today that I was going to be instantly writing up any student who I heard say the word “fuck” tomorrow, and that they should expect fifty or sixty referrals by the end of the day.
Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.
He was an eighth grader at the time.
At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.
Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:
“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:
So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.
One of my most unfortunate popular posts is this one, where I found a certain article of feminine attire in an excitingly vivid color in a place where articles of feminine attire should never be found. It did not occur to me that putting a more, uh, punchy description of the clothing item in question directly in the title of the post was going to lead to a lot of idiots who would search for that particular clothing item and then literally click on every single post that showed up on Google.
People actually do that, by the way. That’s the only way to explain some of my search results.
Anyway, my day got completely derailed by a massive child porn investigation, how was yours?
So remember last week, where two days in a row I had “man, today was a long week” posts?
I wrote up eight kids today– at least one in each class except for first and fifth hour, including four in sixth hour, and let’s be real, the only reason I didn’t write anyone up in fifth is because my chief shithead had gotten suspended earlier in the day– and in between fourth and fifth hour I broke up a literal fucking stampede of probably a hundred adolescent assholes by shouting “Get your asses back to class” so loudly that I think I damaged a vocal cord.
I wonder if that counts as a workplace injury?
It was not a good day, and if tomorrow is remotely as shitty as today was, there is a very real chance that I’m not showing up for work on Friday. I have four more days of teaching between now and Fall Break. Unfortunately, I also have twelve hours of parent/teacher conferences between now and then, during which, in accordance with prophecy, I will see none of the unconcerned, uninvolved, negligent-ass, ignorant-ass, broke-ass useless parents of my shitheads, and only parents of kids who I have good things to say about.
I literally told one of my APs today that we could drastically improve the building if we just expelled about twenty of them on the spot. Their parents think we’re babysitters. You know what babysitters can do? Quit.
Fuck teaching. I’m going to go write some fucking postcards.
EDIT: What the fucking fuck, WordPress?
I mean, okay, I put “assholes” in the tags, but still, are you fucking kidding??
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken 8th graders on a field trip or not. I suspect you probably haven’t. And since I was primarily responsible just for my advisory, who I love, and about four other kids who I didn’t hand-select but I might as well have, it really wasn’t a bad or stressful field trip at all. The kids behaved admirably and I was proud of them. But Jesus, trying to keep constant track of 21 people out in public all at the same time is exhausting, and once we got back to school they (entirely predictably) decided that they’d all collectively had enough of their best behavior for the day, and then actual fucking sex assault drama blew up in the 8th grade, and … yeah, I wanted to talk about LL Cool J tonight and I just don’t have the spoons.
That said, watch this, especially the verse that starts at about 58 seconds, and see if you can figure out when this motherfucker is breathing. Dude has been rapping since 1985 and I’ve never seen anything from him like this.
Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.
He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.
Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that hewas still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.
The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.
Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:
I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)
Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.
68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.
I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.
(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)
I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.
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