On the unimaginable

On September 29, 2024September 29, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.

He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.

Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that he was still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.

The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.

Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:

I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)

Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.

68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.

I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.

(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)

I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.

On the decline of the species

On February 24, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

No, not humanity, although I’m sure I’ll write a post with that title about us eventually. I consider myself at least a nominally environmentally-inclined guy, although I generally let my wife (who actually possesses an advanced degree in environmental science) take the lead on the various green initiatives we participate in around the house. I like animals. I even like bugs. I understand that we need them around and that they need to be protected and that the average living thing is in fact a living thing and generally ought to be allowed to live independent of any human wishes or desires on the matter.

Unless we want to eat them, of course.

That said, the internet has 24 hours to come up with a reason why stink bugs need to exist or I’m going to go full-blown Mad Scientist on their asses and eradicate the entire species. I generally hear that the reason we can’t get rid of all the mosquitoes is because bats like to eat ’em and bats are awesome. Well, OK, that doesn’t apply to stink bugs, who don’t really fly and can’t be caught on the wing. Plus they live in buildings. So no bats. They’re probably too big for your average spider. They aren’t pollinators. As far as I can tell they exist for no other reason than to suddenly be in my house or place of business walking on something that they ought not to be walking on– like, say, the rim of a cup I like to drink from, or my fucking toothbrush. And then I can’t even satisfyingly smush them because they are stink bugs. They are the worst and I hate them and they all need to die.

24 hours and then I figure out how to destroy them all. If there are no comments I will assume the entire world agrees and will help with the project.

Thank you for your time.

On hills, and the dying thereupon

On May 11, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

I watched The Force Awakens with my son for the first time a few weeks ago. Since then we’ve watched it once or twice more and a curious pattern has arisen: every time, and I mean every God Damned time, Kylo Ren appears on screen, the boy asks who he is.

“Kylo Ren,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, then he waits until his next scene and asks again. If he wasn’t four I’d be certain he was trolling me. This has, lately, extended to toys as well; we were in Target the other day and he picked up a Ren figure and asked me who it was.

I generally walk into school with him at Hogwarts and escort him to his classroom; it’s not entirely necessary but he enjoys it and there’s no good reason not to do it. After he drops off his stuff at his cubby there’s a plastic box he’s supposed to put his lunch and snack into and take with him to the classroom. The kids have all decorated theirs with stickers, and I think the teachers use cubby-stickers for minor rewards. He always shows me when he has a new sticker. And the other day there was a Kylo Ren sticker on his mailbox.

“Look!” he says. “It’s Skylo Ren!”

“Kylo Ren,” I say.

“No,” he says. “That’s Skylo Ren.”

I swear, you could hear my teeth grinding from the moon for a brief moment.

“It’s Kylo,” I said. “It’s been Kylo every single time you’ve asked for weeks. Which one of us can read, again?”

“Mrs. McGonagall says it’s Skylo,” he says, as if that settles the issue. I think Mrs. McGonagall is the gym teacher, maybe?

“Mrs. McGonagall is wrong,” I say. “His name is Kylo Ren. K-Y-L-O.”

“Skylo,” he says. He’s getting loud and insistent. I drop it, until the next time I am with him in a store and see a Kylo Ren toy, at which point I force him to spell the name to me and, after doing so, he asks who the toy is.

I give up.

They have been studying birds in class, for what seems like weeks, and the boy has acquired a legitimately impressive store of facts about ornithology. We are putting him to bed, and I walk into his bedroom as my wife is giving him a hug and he, in his way, is explaining to her that cowbirds put their eggs in the nests of other birds because they are lazy.

My wife is a biologist. I actually see her eyes twitch.

“Who told you that?” she says.

“Mrs. Dumbledore,” he says. Mrs. Dumbledore is actually his teacher.

“That’s not quite true,” she says. “It’s actually an evolutionary strategy–”

He interrupts. “Lazy!”

There is another twitch.

I watch my wife be dragged unwillingly down a road where she actually uses the phrase brood parasitism in a conversation with a four-year-old. There is a large smile on my face, and eventually the boy wins again. Okay. Fine. Skylo Ren. Lazy cowbirds.

We give up.

On my activities so far today

On March 31, 2016March 31, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

I got up a bit earlier than usual because I needed to have a blood draw this morning and since it had to be fasting I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. I have the veins of a heroin addict; generally whenever I need to have blood drawn for any reason it will take multiple nurses and multiple sticks with the needle in various places before it works, regardless of the experience or talent level of the nurses involved. When I was hospitalized the second time in October I actually lost track of how many people it took before someone successfully got an IV in me; my record at the local phlebotomy joint is six sticks and three nurses.

In between sticks two and three this morning, I passed out. Second time that has happened, and I don’t recommend it. The nurses get real bossy when it happens, for starters, hollering about sitting up and keeping your eyes open and uncrossing your feet and breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth and all sorts of it would be inconvenient if you died here sorts of things. Just let me sleep! I wanna sleeeeep. But I did not die, and the third stick– in the back of my hand, where I’m going to start insisting they start— finally actually successfully drew blood.

True fact: I am legally unable to donate blood, due to a false positive hepatitis B test in college. I do not and have never had hepatitis, but apparently once you have even a false positive they blacklist you. Which is fine, because given my issues with getting blood out of my veins donating blood is not a method of charity I’m going to be partial to anyway, but it’s nice to have an actual excuse other than “I have no veins, and my arms are made of jelly.”

At any rate, I’m hoping the rest of the day improves.

On adaptation

On February 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized, Writing7 Comments

The human body fascinates me. It’s cold as hell outside again, right? Eleven degrees, wind chill of -4. -4 is, by any remotely reasonable estimation, cold. Append an “as fuck” as needed. I just got home from work and cleared yesterday and the day before’s snow off of the driveway and finished re-digging my mailbox back out from the glacier the snowplow deposited in front of it.

I did not bother zipping my coat until I was almost done. Why? I wasn’t cold. We are at the point where if it were to leap up to 30 degrees tomorrow I would be entirely unsurprised were I to see someone wearing shorts outside. And don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I’m claiming superpowers here– it’s happening to everybody. Tomorrow morning’s supposed to be crazy cold again, although the predicted temperature has been creeping skyward all morning. A week ago– and I mean that literally, last week– the news that temps would be below zero between six and seven would have everyone scrambling to predict that we’d be out. You can see me doing it if you look at last Thursday’s post. Tomorrow morning? Everyone’s looking at the exact same temperatures and going “ah, fuck it.” There is, at this moment, not so much as a single two-hour delay for tomorrow announced. Last Thursday there were a dozen districts that had already announced delays by now. I think we figure anyone who hasn’t died from the cold already can probably handle waiting for the buses for a few minutes. Now all we need are buses that can actually get our kids to school on time; that’s been a huge mess lately.

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Complete change of subject: anyone know how to find out if an image is public domain or not? I know that a lot of stuff NASA puts out is basically free to use for anyone for any reason (IANAL) but what if you can’t confirm where an image comes from? For example, this rather striking image looks like a lot of planetary nebulae, but I can’t find this specific image anywhere helpful and I wouldn’t be completely surprised to discover it was a Photoshop job. I’ve done a reverse Google Image Search on it to no real avail, although I probably need to suck it up and just check every use of the image until I find somebody linking it as their work on DeviantArt or something. But if I don’t find that… I still can’t assume, right? Argh.

Anyway, here’s the picture I’m referring to: