The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I ended instruction early with my sixth period class, with the words “To hell with this, you’re on your own,” went to my desk and put in for a personal day tomorrow on the spot. When you put in for a personal day you’re supposed to include a note to your administrator explaining what’s going on. Here’s mine:
My initial draft, “fuck this and fuck them,” was lightly edited by AI.
I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?
FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.
SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?
THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.
…
Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.
Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.
The weird thing is I don’t even know why. I mean, I do sort of; it’s spring and I teach 8th grade, and Spring Break is six days away. And there was a field trip for all the band and orchestra kids today, which should have led to an easier day and somehow didn’t.
I am so tired of 8th grade boys that I’m starting to genuinely lose my shit about it, and something about today made that a much bigger problem than it has been. I literally told two of my boys to “sit the fuck down” in fourth hour. In my defense, the previous thirteen times I had told them to sit down apparently didn’t take. Tomorrow, “won’t sit down” will become an office-referral level event, because I need to be done for a while. If I have to be a complete asshole for the rest of the time before Spring Break, I’m perfectly happy to do that. It’ll be fine.
Anyway.
I was gonna shoot Nazis some more– I’m in the final level of Sniper Elite 6, so I’m starting to think about the next game after that– but somehow it’s 8:53 already, so maybe I’ll go to bed a little early and read instead. I have a meeting tomorrow morning to help pick the building’s Teacher of the Year, which is disappointing because presumably I’m not being invited to vote on an award I’m up for, but it’ll mean having to get to work a little early and eight or nine seven or eight hours of sleep tonight might be a pleasant change of pace.
I walked into my house after getting home from work with a good idea for a post in my head, did a couple of quick around-the-house tasks, and then promptly completely forgot what the hell I wanted to post about, and despite spending several hours since then trying to reconstruct my thought process, it’s completely gone.
So screw it, I’m going to complain about my job instead. Have you ever been asked your opinion on something and immediately realized from the way you were asked about your opinion that there was no way on God’s green earth that anyone was going to actually pay attention to what you thought? We had a teacher inservice day yesterday, and the math department’s big job in the morning was to go through a bunch of vendor kits for next year’s new textbook adoption. There were, I dunno, nine of them to go through? All of them with, bare minimum, 7th and 8th grade teacher editions and copies of whatever materials the students got, some with access to websites and digital tools and pacing guides and various and sundry other things that I won’t get into because they’re probably a touch too inside baseball for a non-teacher crowd. Many of them also included 6th grade materials and Algebra 1 as well.
Now, this is actually a pretty decent use of an inservice day, don’t get me wrong. There was no world where any of us were going to have time to do this on our own– remember, every math teacher in my building is on an overload right now because we’re so understaffed, so all of us teach for every second of the day except for our lunch breaks. (And I generally have a dozen students in my room during lunch, too, but that’s another story.)
Basically what we were doing was taking 20-30 minutes for each publisher, looking through the books and making notes. My notes were mostly bullet points. Some publishers were out immediately, sometimes for reasons having little to do with the actual quality of instruction– for example, one of them was not only organized in a way that made absolutely no sense to any of us and didn’t really seem to conform to Indiana standards, but had seven different thick consumable workbooks (250-300 pages each) for the kids, one for each major unit of study.
Now seven different workbooks is already impossible even before you get to the ridiculousness of the idea that you’d get through even one 300-page workbook in a single school year. I have about 175 students right now, total. 175 students times seven workbooks is 1225 workbooks. Each was, conservatively, an inch thick. That’s a hundred and two linear feet of workbooks.
Where the fuck am I supposed to keep all of that? Giving them to the kids is not an option. I will never see them again. Furthermore, since nothing is in the right order, we might be in Workbook 1 this week and then need Workbook 5 next week and Workbook 3 the week after that.
I don’t need a lot of notes for this one! It’s literally a physical impossibility. It’s a non-starter. The second I see seven workbooks per kid where everything is in an order that doesn’t match what the State of Indiana needs, I’m done.
You can imagine the shit fit that was thrown when our department head found out later that afternoon that we– as in each of us– were supposed to complete a seventy item rubric for, not each publisher, but each grade level for each publisher.
That’ll be the last animated .gif, I promise, but it felt appropriate. Not only were the rubrics huge, but they were Google forms, and they were written in eduspeak so ridiculously arcane that none of the three of us, nearly seventy years of teaching experience among us, could really parse what the hell some of the items were actually asking. And to do that for all grade levels for nine different publishers? Fuck you. Fuck you a lot. Two days of work, bare minimum. We had three hours, and by the time we saw the rubric the three hours were already over.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a complicated Google form looks like when it spits out its results, but it’s a completely ridiculous spreadsheet. They’re terrible, and they’re user-unfriendly as hell. So to come back around to what I asked earlier in this post, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to attempt to look at what we were doing, because not only does no one have any time for that shit– remember the three teachers at our school are not the only ones being asked to complete this task– but it’s being generated in a way that makes pulling useful information out of it virtually impossible.
We all suspected the board was just going to order the cheapest curriculum anyway. So we sent in our notes and a tiered list of the ones we liked, the ones we were indifferent to, and the ones we actively didn’t like. If the people in charge want more than that they can find all of us subs for a couple of days.
I fully anticipate being told to find somewhere to put 1200 workbooks this fall.
I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:
And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.
I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.
Okay, y’all, see that lane I’ve marked with a blue arrow?
If you are driving in that lane, and there are stopped cars in front of you because of a light or a stop sign or whatever, and someone is waiting to turn left across traffic into a parking lot or a retail establishment or whatthefuck ever, do not ever ever ever under any circumstances stop early to let that motherfucker turn left in front of you.
Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. You’re not being nice. You’re trying to cause a fucking car accident, and I hate you because you’re an idiot and you shouldn’t be driving.
Had some dipshit pull this move on me this morning, while I was in the lane on the far left, and of course that fucking slapnuts was driving a F4500 or whatever the fuck the big truck for guys with tiny dicks is, and because the yellow car can’t see through the car that is waiting for them, and the oncoming traffic in the far left lane can’t see the yellow car either, that stupid son of a bitch turned directly in front of me and damn near got T-boned for his trouble. Even a tiny bit of ice on the roads or the slightest bit of distraction and my ass would have totaled my car and his.
And, I tell you what, if I get into an accident under those circumstances, and I live through it? I’m not gonna blame the person I hit, even though they’re also a moron for turning directly into a blind spot. I’m coming after the idiot who stopped and let them through. I will flip your Goddamned car over with my bare hands.
You’re not being nice. You’re going to get someone killed. Anyone who needs to turn left should expect to have to wait until it’s clear.
Don’t fucking do it.
Pictured: Not my TV.
I think I am entirely giving up on the idea of television. It’s been a minimal part of my life for years, but I don’t even want the concept around any longer. I don’t give a shit about the Super Bowl but I’d kind of like to watch Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, and it appears to be completely impossible to watch the Super Bowl on the television in my office without either purchase of additional equipment (the TV is not currently hooked up to any sort of antenna, since it’s almost exclusively for gaming) or signing up for something. I tried to download something called Fubo, where apparently the game is being streamed for free, and my TV told me that I had to sign into it– as in sign into the television— in order to download the software.
No. I’m not signing into my television. No thank you.
So, yeah, fuck it. I’m going to hit “publish,” make a very cursory attempt to stream the game on my computer instead of my TV, and if I don’t have it up and running in under a minute, it’s YouTube tomorrow for me. Things were better when you could just turn the Goddamned TV on and watch one of the five things that were on. I don’t give a fuck if that makes me a Boomer or a Luddite or whatever; television is so thoroughly enshittified at this point that I’m simply opting out of it altogether. I’m tired of idly thinking that maybe I’d like to watch a certain specific thing and then inevitably discovering that despite the ten fucking million options out there and the fifteen things we’re already signed up for, I can’t watch that thing because Reasons. It literally happens every time I decide I want to watch something specific.
I absolutely refuse to create a login for my television. That’s the line, apparently.
Fuck it.
Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.
I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.
Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”
And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.
I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.