Tag: assholes

Choose your own post

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

You tell me what the worst part of my day was:

Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?

Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?

Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?

Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.

At least there’s meth?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I couldn’t pass this up.

Compulsive masturbator and God-botherer Mike Johnson is, according to this brief but hilarious CNN article, having trouble convincing fellow Republicans to come to the House GOP retreat scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday. Part of the problem, apparently, is that Johnson, who is so addicted to porn that he and his son share an app so that they can monitor each other’s special dinkie times, has booked a deliberately “family-friendly” resort in West Virginia for the retreat. The article does not explicitly say that the House members are pissed because they prefer their hookers to have more teeth than facial sores, but it comes awfully close for something from the mainstream media.

Yeah, well, what if I don’t wanna?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

Like most teachers, I absolutely fucking hate the question “When am I gonna use this?” The answer is never. Never. You, personally, as someone whose sole concern is defending your ability to remain as ignorant as much of the world as possible, are never going to use what we’re doing, because you’re never going to use anything. You live in a country that hates education and educated people, and you’re going to be forty and still using apostrophes like they’re an early defense system for the letter S, mixing up basic homonyms you should have been getting right in second grade, and telling people that you did terribly in school but it doesn’t matter because “you did all right” while hoping your shitty car gets you home to your trailer park and wondering where you’re gonna score your next dime bag from since your weed guy got arrested last week. You barely use the alphabet. You’re not gonna use algebra.

*Ahem.*

I may be a little unreasonable in my hatred of that question, actually.

I have to start teaching transformations this week, and I fucking hate teaching transformations. I have come to terms with teaching equations of lines and slope despite the disinclination of 8th graders to learn them because they genuinely are fundamental to a lot of more advanced stuff, and the correct response to an 8th grader who says they don’t wanna learn that stuff is that you don’t give a shit and you’re not about to let their futures be determined by what they wanted to do when they were thirteen and idiots. Siddown, shuddup and pay attention, you whiny little fucker.

They’re never gonna use transformations. They’re just not. I can’t even figure out what this shit leads toward in an abstract sort of way, and it depends on spatial reasoning to really be able to figure it out, and I don’t know how to teach that, and I have never once in years of teaching math been able to explain satisfactorily how to write a rule for a dilation or a reflection or especially, Jesus, fuck these things rotations, and my kids stare at me with flummoxed and slightly betrayed looks on their faces because they’re used to me making sense at least in theory and Christ do I hate this unit more than anything else in the curriculum. Ever.

I may just make a deal with my kids that I’m not gonna teach this, and they’re just gonna miss the one question that is guaranteed to involve transformations on the ILearn, and everything will be fine anyway, and the trick is don’t tell anybody that we’re watching movies and practicing fucking addition and subtraction and fractions for the next few weeks because God fuck me dead if any of these kids can add -17 and 23 without a calculator and they don’t even know how to put 1/2 + 2/9 into a calculator, much less what it means or how to figure it out. Can we just do that instead and skip this entire fucking unit? Because it really and truly and genuinely does not matter if they don’t learn this in eighth grade.

That number again

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching3 Comments

The assessment I had to give this week over the Pythagorean Theorem was not written by me, nor was it written by anyone in my building, and furthermore it was split into four parts for reasons that make sense in a way but I will not be getting into here. My partner teacher and I looked at the fourth test and decided that it was much too difficult and so we decided not to count it as a test grade, but to give it anyway, since, y’know, the Lord High Muckety-Mucks want us to.

I decided to Do Science. Anyone who spends any time around teachers nowadays is fully aware of the common teacher complaint that we’ve never seen such a level of don’t-give-a-shit from our kids than we are lately, and that further the level of inability to notice things, in general, is a big problem.

You, being an adult, have likely already noticed that I wrote the fucking answers for the second assessment– yes, it was only four questions– on the board.

106 8th graders in my class completed that assignment today. 26.4% of them failed the Problem Solving portion of it, a number so close to 27% that I am considering writing John Rogers and asking him to make an addendum to his Crazification Factor. If I add in the number of students who clearly did not notice that the answers were on the board in plan and large letters– and I promise you that board is not in an obscure location in my classroom– but did not out-and-out fail, it rises to 45.3%, which is completely Goddamned insane.

One of these days, someone will figure out a way to separate kids who don’t understand something from those who simply don’t give a shit, and on that day, American education will change radically. Until then, however, I’m going to keep bitching about the notion that my job performance is evaluated by how other people act.

In which no one is watching

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Tonight is one of those nights where I can pretty much get away with saying anything I want, because the whole world is distracted, in this case by the Taylor Bowl. I am, in accordance with my ancient traditions, not watching, but if you are I hope you’re enjoying it. I don’t much care who wins, although a Chiefs win will make me a tiny bit happier if only because it will make certain very bad people angry, and I like it when those people don’t get what they want. If you want the 49ers to win because you are a 49ers fan, or because you hate the Chiefs for some pre-Taylor-Swift reason, I have no beef with you.

Frankly, the fact that I can name both the teams playing makes this the Super Bowl that I’ve paid the most attention to in a long, long time. The unfortunate part is that on this Day of No One Paying Attention, I don’t have anything tremendously compelling, much less controversial, that I want to talk about. 

Anyway, I’ve got a heavy teaching load tomorrow, as both my Algebra kids and my regular 8th graders are starting a new unit, so I expect to be half-dead when I get home from school tomorrow. The good news is that, compared to systems of equations, slope, and graphing linear equations, which is what we’ve been occupying most of our time with since November, Pythagoras and basic factoring are absolute cake, which means that my job ought to get a little less stressful and their grades ought to come up. I’ve got about an inch of papers to go through sitting next to me and I suspect I’m not going to touch it tonight. This wasn’t much of a weekend– it wasn’t bad, by any means, but I really didn’t do much with it– but if I make it through the next four days, I get a four-day weekend. I don’t want to miss any more days in February so hopefully everything will go nice and smoothly. We’ll see.

In which I take shit too personal

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

They fucking bombed their test today. We’ve been talking about this material since November and I gave them a practice test yesterday that was identical to the test they took today except that I swapped around some numbers, I showed them how to do every question on the practice test in class yesterday, I allowed them completely open notes, and over half of them still failed.

I am so pissed off right now it’s giving me an upset stomach, and I am no longer interested in attempting to educate people who do not want to be educated. Fuck ’em. If 75% of my students are failing at the end of the quarter I don’t give a shit any longer. They should be able to drop the fuck out if they want to. Let them become their fucking parents’ problems again. 

Fuck.

A reminder that I know nothing

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

New Hampshire’s happening tonight, and as of this moment there’s about 11% of the vote in on the Republican side and the shitgibbon is ahead, by a fairly paltry amount. I have no sense whatsoever of where in New Hampshire Nikki Haley might be expecting her votes to come from, so trying to drill down at all doesn’t make any sense, and it’s probably a good time to remind everyone that I don’t know anything at all about politics or how people think, because I still don’t understand how this illiterate, atheist con man got the Republican nomination the first time, much less what’s looking like the third. 

(EDIT: The AP called the race while I was writing this; at this point, I really feel like all we have left is to hope the fucker dies before the election. Preferably as soon as possible. Tonight would be cool. God’s in the bathroom again, apparently.)*

Meanwhile, Biden– who is not on the ballot– is pulling 74% of the vote against Phillips and Williamson. If this isn’t enough to convince a certain slice of what ought to be the Democratic electorate that there is not actually any desire on the part of actual voting Democrats for any other candidate, I don’t know what the hell could do it. I suspect these people, much like the shitgibbon’s cultists, are similarly impervious to reason, but we’ll see.

(SECOND EDIT: While I was writing the first edit, the AP called the race for Biden, too. Which is deeply fucking hilarious. Time for Phillips and Williamson to go.)

Meanwhile: snow day today, and freezing rain is being replaced by Hell Fog, and I’m fully anticipating a two-hour delay tomorrow, because quarter-mile visibilities and kids walking to school don’t mix. There won’t be a close, but my district has had Fog Days in the past, and two-hour delays don’t count against us the way actual closures do. This might bite me in the ass if I have to go in and plan a day on no notice, but … yeah, I’ll risk it. 

* I do actually think Biden can and will beat him again, but I’d prefer to not have to find out if I’m right about that. The fucker exists on cheeseburgers and his brain is made of pudding. Come on, God.

In accordance with prophecy, progress

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I’m caught up with my grading for the week; everything that has been completed and turned in is entered. And, as I suspected, grades are substantially improved– the fraction is kids still failing and the number afterward is the number with literal grades of zero, and (while the 11/27 and 13/28 are still a big problem) I no longer have any classes with half or more of the students failing, and all the classes together have fewer students with zeroes than sixth hour by itself before I brought my inner bastard out. This is not good enough yet, but it’s Progress. I’ll take it.

You tell me: anyone want to read a barn-burner of a shitty review of a game that came out in 2018? I’m tempted to not bother but sometimes rage-reviews can be fun.