The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I was gonna rant about the HIMYM finale tonight, but one of my DC kids got hit by a car today. She’s in the hospital. (A few things broken, currently in the “could have been way worse” stage of “bad.”)
Not especially in the mood any longer. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tomorrow, but… nah, not today.
I’m at OtherJob, as I tend to be on Saturday nights, and I’m working on finishing the week’s grading, as I also tend to be on Saturday nights. I have three assignments left: a workbook assignment for one of my seventh grade classes, a workbook assignment for my honors Algebra class, and a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class. They’re stacked together, slightly overlapping, on the counter next to me. Our counter is bar-style, sorta; there are two– the one that customers touch is higher, and the one by me with the register on it is about six inches lower, so it’s not like I’ve got my school work all spread out where customers will have to deal with it.
Anyway, a customer orders a couple of large drinks. I prepare them and put them on the (higher) counter in front of him then go to the register to ring him up. He slides the drinks down closer to the register and pays me, at which point I notice that there are also some people outside. I go outside to deal with them. It’s chilly but a decent night outside, for late October at least, and I chat with the outdoor couple (the girl is cute) for a couple of minutes, then stand out there for no good reason for a few minutes more and then head back inside.
To carnage.
The customer has either accidentally spilled (charitable) or deliberately poured (which is what it looks like, but seems unnecessary) at least one of his large drinks all over the counter and thus all over everything else I have left to grade. A large drink here is 32 ounces, which means probably 20 ounces of liquid and another 12 ounces of ice which has had a fair amount of time to melt all over the rest of my grading for the evening. The customer, who managed to do this without any sort of loud exclamation of surprise or anything like that (which may be a sign of deliberateness or may just mean that I have bad ears) has disappeared, not spending any of the tokens that he also bought when he got his drinks. The lady he was with is also gone. Nowhere is there any sign that he made any attempt to rescue any of my shit from the pool of spreading apocalypse and it’s managed to migrate its way under the register and is damn close to my computer by the time I get into the room. Also all over the floor.
Ten minutes of swearing and cleaning later, I decide that rather than trying to sort any of this shit out I’m just going to give any kid who was in class the day the assignments got collected full credit; it probably makes more sense to simply throw them out altogether but screw it, it’s late in the quarter and there are already enough points in play that giving them full credit is only giving them a tiny grade boost.
The punchline: this is the second time I’ve had to throw out the results of a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class, and I’ve only given two of them. I’m not doing any more of them anymore; they’re bad luck.
I just found out that my bathroom is going to cost me one million dollars, so today’s post is basically gonna be a couple of links and some whining. Y’all are okay with that, right? Good.
I found this article when a friend of mine shared it on Facebook. I need to spend some time reading up on disciplining toddlers; I flat-out asked my wife the other day how long I had to wait before I could expect the boy to understand that when I tell him to do something I actually want it done promptly, and furthermore am deeply uninterested in a prolonged explanation/negotiation process. The boy is actually pretty well-behaved in general so far, but he’s still not quite two yet, so I understand the next year or sixteen will be a time of limit-testing and tantrums. I am old school enough to want to believe that creating an atmosphere of Do This or Daddy Smash will be sufficient but I suspect that something somewhat more nuanced and, well, humane will probably be necessary. I’m generally pretty good at getting older kids to do what I want them to do, but dealing with middle-schoolers who are capable of seeing reason (or at least understanding I Will Kill You Boy) is somewhat different than raising a toddler. I like the way this Janet Lansbury person thinks, for the most part (that’s the lady who wrote the article at the link you didn’t click on) so I’ll start by digging more deeply into her website in the near future.
Oh, and my mom asked when we were gonna start potty training him the other day. Can I just say that potty training is the part of parenting I’m least looking forward to? Another Facebook friend posted a picture of his kid standing on his shoes so that he could reach the urinal in a public bathroom and it made me suicidal. Can’t we just get him a litterbox or something? Is that okay?
I don’t know if I’ve claimed that being a parent hasn’t changed me much, but I certainly feel like being a parent hasn’t changed me much. One way in which it absolutely has is that reading this article made me an absolute wreck, and it certainly wouldn’t have had that effect before the boy was born. I’m occasionally surprised to find myself jumpier about safety-related stuff than my wife or parents or in-laws are; I wouldn’t have expected that, but it’s happened anyway. What gets me the most is the sense that Horrible Shit Can and Will Happen at Any Goddamned Time that pervades the entire article. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of this before having a kid, but it’s more likely to mess with my head now that I do. I will say that I can’t wait until the moment when we can flip that damn car seat around so that I can actually see him from the front seat.
I’ll bitch more about the house once I have a better sense of what we’re in for. It’s gonna be ugly.
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