So tired I might already be dead

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… and taking the night off.

I’ll stop talking about school soon, I promise

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I was rudely tricked into doing classroom coverage today, when I made the mistake of walking past a classroom that did not have a teacher because she had gone home with a sudden illness. Apparently the office had not sent anyone to the room yet. I guess I’m not the type to just walk off when a kid comes out into the hallway and tells me there’s no adult in the room.

I’m sure it would have been fine.

At any rate, tomorrow will somehow be the first day of the school year with a completely normal schedule, and my lesson plans currently include a quiz about me and then a bunch of attempting to learn names. My retention rates run from 90-100% in the mornings to less than 50% with my sixth hour, so apparently I need to do some work on that. I tell the kids that I get the first two weeks of the school year for free and after that they get a piece of candy every time I can’t remember their names. I usually learn the girls’ names faster but the girls are also more likely to be the two kids in every class where it’s May and I’m still calling two of them by the same name. I think I’m also going to put my seating charts together tomorrow; that’ll help.

Also, for the first time this year I’ve decided to keep a running count on the board of 1) what day in the school year it is, 2) how much of the school year is gone, and 3) how much of the school year is left. Only I’m doing it using fractions, and I feel like if I make a biggish deal at the beginning of each class period I might do some good in teaching them how to reduce fractions, especially since there are exactly 180 days in the school year and 180 has a lot of factors. So, just as an example, since this is day 3 (and I’ve decided, arbitrarily, to consider the current day “done” for the purposes of the fractions):

3rd Day of the school year
1/60 of the year completed
59/60 of the year remaining

And tomorrow will be:

4th Day of the school year
1/45 of the year completed
44/45 of the year remaining

… and so on. I dunno, it’ll entertain me, and fully 2/3 of what I do every day is done with the explicit goal of entertaining myself.

I’d give y’all the quiz just for the hell of it, but there’s too many pictures of people I don’t have permission to post pictures of online, so it’s not going to work. It ought to be a fun day, though, which I will make up for by throwing a diagnostic test at them on Wednesday that’s going to be … discouraging. For all of us.

Sunday/Not Sunday

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I’m pleased to announce that the sense of impending dread that most teachers associate with Sundays is not currently afflicting me. I’ve been sickish all day again, as has been typical of Sundays for a while now, but beyond that, we’re prepped for class tomorrow and we’re all good. I actually got a major (sort of) task done today; our mailbox has only been tenuously attached to its base since we installed it after buying the house in 2011 and I finally bought a piece of wood of an appropriate side to attach the thing properly today. Fourteen and a half years, y’all, but the mailbox no longer wiggles when you open it. I am amazed that in all this time we’ve never had a complaint from a mail carrier; I am sure that he will notice the difference when the mail gets delivered tomorrow. Maybe there will be a thank-you note in there! It would be nice.

I also sent out the first of my roughly-biweekly parent newsletters and got a barrage of responses in rapid succession, which I suppose I should see as a good thing but which might actually have the effect of decreasing how often I send such things out. Or maybe in the future I’ll just make sure I’m somewhere where I can instantly reply to a ton of emails if necessary.

That means that it’s 7:12 PM and, since this blog post is written and my Duolingo obligations are fulfilled, I’m free to spend the rest of the night reading or playing video games. Huzzah!

This has been a weird day

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I got plenty of sleep last night but it feels like it didn’t count for some reason, my wife and I went out shopping for a while in the afternoon, the heat got to me way more than it should have, and now I’m staring out the window waiting to see if apocalypse storm is going to hit us or not. My brother is in the north Chicago suburbs and sent me video of the ridiculous hailstorm that hit his place; I think what smacked him is going south of us, but it’s supposed to get fun soon and the internet’s already gone out once just for shits and giggles.

A long way of saying I’m not bothering with a full post tonight again because if I do the internet will likely cut out part way through it anyway. See y’all tomorrow.

On the first 1/90th of the school year

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No complaints.

Seriously. I walked into this year with a bad attitude and my kids are swiftly turning me around. Hopefully the era of good feelings lasts at least a couple of weeks.

That said, I’m gonna chill and finish a book tonight, so y’all behave yourselves.

One down, 179 to go

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My 23rd first day of school is in the history books. One of the better ones, I think. My 5th hour is probably going to develop into an issue but 5th hour is always an issue for some reason and there were some external reasons they might have been more nuts than usual today that I’m not going to get into.

Actually, hell, I might as well: we changed vendors for our school lunches this year, and to put it charitably there are some kinks to be worked out. Lunch took so long that 5th and 6th hour were about 18 minutes long each. Given the circumstances, the kids being nuts is something I’ll excuse.

But yeah. The switch in my head finally flipped, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Hooray!

And now I’m going to sleep.

God, people, at least try

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

So I’ve taken on an informal building tech nerd role this year, and in doing so I made a slight miscalculation: we have a lot of new staff this year, and on top of that there was a whole-building renovation over the summer. As it turns out, some of our contractors were not tremendously diligent about making sure that everything was connected properly, especially wiring in the wall that I can’t get at? It’s been fun.

On the other hand, four different people, all adults with college degrees, summoned me to their rooms today because Something Didn’t Work, only for me to discover in three of the four cases that Something wasn’t plugged in, and in the fourth case it lacked a power cord entirely.

Electronics need those!

I told everyone that shit happens and we were all a little stressed out and manic, so no big deal, but that if it happened a second time, I’d be charging my consulting rate.

Had dinner with some family from out of town tonight, and everyone was surprised to see me, which was kind of funny; that said, I’m planning on going to bed early tonight.

As promised

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Teaching2 Comments

It was an insanely long day– I looked at my watch at one point, fully expecting it to be 7:30, and it was 2:30– but I am home now, and I can sleep, and somehow it is not Friday and I have to go back to work tomorrow. In the meantime, though, have classroom pictures. In some ways it’s very similar to last year, but I like the tweaks I’ve made an awful lot.