Tag: adolescents

I can’t wait for Google to get ahold of this one

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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?

Today kinda sucked

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Trigger warning: suicide.

Spoiler alert: everybody is OK.

Note that, at least if you’re reading this on desktop, there’s a “pages” link underneath the like button at the bottom of the post. Or you can just click here, I guess.

Pages: 1 2

On holding back

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews3 Comments

wicther_3_oh_my_glob.jpgIf you’ve been paying attention to my posts lately, or to my Twitter feed, you can probably guess why I didn’t post yesterday, and I suspect you’d be right.  I’ve been trying to write about it and I’m not quite there yet, for a variety of reasons.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please forgive the vaguebooking; all will be made clear soon enough.

Instead, let’s talk about something how I’m either too old, too liberal, or both to play video games any more. Despite shit-talking it when it came out, The Witcher 3 went on a steep-ass discount a few weeks ago– I got the game and both expansion packs for $20, if I remember right– and I was in a period of mourning the lack of video games in my life at the time and so I went ahead and picked it up.  I mean, fuck it, right?  This thing got Game of the Year awards from basically everybody, and I’ve been wrong before, right?

Nah.

The Witcher 3 is exactly the game I thought it was before picking it up; it is not only bad in all the ways I thought it would be bad, it manages to be worse than I thought it was going to be in several critical areas.  I have been gaming for a very long time, so it is likely that I have played a more misogynistic game than this one at some point or another, but I can’t recall what that game might have been.  This is a game that very, very badly wants to be taken seriously, but the overgrown adolescents who coded it think that “serious” means that you get called a cunt everywhere you go, and mistake adult content— there are lots of tits, oh so many tits, and oh so many whores, and so many of the swear words– for adult complexity.

I would probably have really loved this when I was sixteen.  That’s who it’s aimed at, and regardless of the actual chronological ages of the designers, it’s who it was made by.  There are bits of the gameplay I do enjoy, but I commented to my wife this morning that the game’s greatest feat is managing to remain perfectly balanced on the razor’s edge where I’m enjoying it just enough that I’m still playing, but it’s not actually good enough to make me forget the parts that make me want to quit– so I’m still playing, but I hate the game for maybe half the time I’m playing it.

I don’t mind the stabbing.  I don’t even mind the crafting and alchemy, which is normally a part I do my best to ignore in most games.  It’s whenever I’m not in control of the character– ie, cutscenes– that I want to throw my PS4 out the window and cultivate a new hobby.

Blech.

The holy water story, plus some other stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

article-2185554-14656D19000005DC-909_306x423I have some really angry kids in my class this year.

That’s new.

I should explain.  I’ve had plenty of kids with anger management issues.  I’ve had plenty of kids who had explosive tempers.  That’s part and parcel of working in an urban middle school, and frankly is probably part and parcel of working with middle schoolers no matter where you find them.  But I’ve got a handful of girls in my afternoon class for whom pissed off at the world seems to be their only available emotional state.  They walk in angry and they somehow manage to stay angry for the entire time they’re in the room.  That’s the weird part.  Kids get angry all the time; they get angry at me all the time.  I’m used to that.  They don’t stay that way for long.  For a kid to keep up an angry mood for three successive class periods is exceptionally rare, and to do it for multiple days in a row practically unheard of.   Being mad is hard.  It takes work.  Most of them don’t have it in them.

And somehow in this group I have more than one of them.

I’m being weird today.  My son’s birthday was last Sunday, and today he got a gift card for Toys R’ Us in the mail from my aunt, so the three of us went to the comic shop (it’s Wednesday, after all) and to the toy store after I got home from work.  And the toy store managed to depress me.  I don’t even know why, but I’m still fighting it off.

I owe you two stories, I think.  The first one is the Holy Water story I teased the other day. One of my girls in my afternoon class– not one of the angry ones– came up to me on Monday and asked if she could go to her locker.  Later in the year this will be met with a near-automatic “no” except in case of emergencies, but they’re fifth graders and they’re not used to having to bring all of their stuff with them into classrooms so I’m being nice.  I do generally ask what they need, though.

“I need to put something in my locker,” she says.

Ah.  This is automatically lower-priority than needing to get something from a locker.  “What do you need to put in your locker?”

“My holy water.”

Um.

“You’re carrying holy water with you?”

“Yes.”

Parts of my brain immediately start a cage match with other parts of my brain, doing their best to starve the entire thing of any residual oxygen.

“Why, my dear, do you have holy water with you in class?”  Because Holy shit this is actually a new one.

“It helps me concentrate.”

“And… you have decided that you don’t need to concentrate any longer?  We still have an entire class period left after we finish with math.”

“No.  I’m tired and I think I’m done concentrating for today.”

“I think your holy water needs to stay with you, then.  Perhaps it could use a recharge this Sunday; it appears to be losing some of its potency.”

“So I need to keep concentrating?”

“Indeed.”

She stands there and stares at me for a minute.

“Back to your seat, dear.”

She turns and leaves.

Today, as we’re working on two-digit multiplication, a concept they all appeared to have a decent grasp of until I began trying to teach it, one of my girls came up to me and demanded that I yell at her.

“Why do you need me to do that?”

“Because you yelled at me yesterday and I went back to my seat and did my work.”

I think about this.  I didn’t yell at anyone yesterday.  In fact, I’ve made a big deal with this class that I didn’t even need to raise my voice on Monday or Tuesday after a reasonably rough first couple of days.

“I don’t remember yelling at you yesterday.”

She thinks for a minute.  “That was my teacher last year.  Sorry.  Can you yell at me anyway?”

Brain, cage match, starving, etc.

“Honey, I don’t think–”

“I really think it’ll help.”

What in the blue sadomasochistic fuck is going on right now.

She finally got me to bark GET AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW at her, at which point she smiled, thanked me, and literally skipped off back to her seat.  I watched her for a moment and then looked over my shoulder, fully convinced that one of my bosses would have taken that moment to appear in my classroom for the first time all year.  No one was there.  The kids all looked shocked for a moment, then realized what was going on and went back to what they were doing.  They were so blasé about it, in fact, that I find myself suspecting that this was a regular move that this kid pulled last year.  Which… hell, I don’t even know what to do about that.

I’ll stop being tired all the time soon, right?  How the fuck is it 9 PM already?

Stuff they don’t train you for

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I mentioned earlier that we discovered late last week that a close family member of two of our boys was recently found murdered.  The guy who killed her went to the cops and confessed and then led them to her body.  (Fun fact: he’s pleading innocent.  Figure that out.)

Bad enough, right?

Found out today that we also have relatives of the murderer in the building.  And that the various parties are reacting to each other… predictably.

When you take classes in ed school, they do not tell you what to do when the uncle of one student has murdered the sister of another student.

erwThat’s kinda heavy, so let me leave you with this: have you heard of the Charlie Charlie Challenge?  If not, stop reading this immediately, because you don’t need stupidity of this magnitude in your brain.

You’re still here, aren’t you?  Last warning.

Okay, fine.  The Charlie Charlie Challenge works thusly: Divide a piece of paper into four quadrants.  Write “Yes” in two of them and “No” in the other two.  Balance one pencil atop another in a roughly perpendicular fashion.  Ask the “Mexican demon” known as “Charlie Charlie” a question.

This part’s critical: Be too stupid to remember that gravity exists.

Then scream.

We had eight fucking kids in the office across three different incidents about this fucking nonsense yesterday, and from what I’m hearing, it’s nationwide.

Teenagers are morons.