I gotta get my shit together

On June 8, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

As you might expect, I follow a lot of teachers on my social media accounts, especially on TikTok. And one thing I see a lot of this time of year is teachers who are being really defensive and insisting that we Don’t Really Get Summers Off, because of … I dunno, planning and continuing education and a bunch of other stuff.

I have been teaching for over twenty years, and large portions of my job are muscle memory by now. I very much have my summers off and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you think that’s unfair you are absolutely welcome to become a teacher, and if you’re not running to do that, well, you must not be that upset about my summers.

I’m a week into summer break now, and y’all, I am seriously in need of a routine or a project or some shit like that. I cannot just stare at my phone and take naps all summer long, and I am dying over here.

This has got to be Find a Project week. I’m going to a Counting Crows concert next Saturday, so that can be my reward for having a productive week, right?

Sure.

Blech

On August 26, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

Is boredom a symptom of depression? I mean, it can be, right? I don’t think I’m clinically depressed because I’m too functional for too much of the time, but these brief twelve-hour funks where I don’t want to do anything could stop anytime and I’d be fine with it.

In which I hope for less bullshit

On September 2, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I spent the day administering standardized tests, of all fucking things, which are somewhat more difficult to do remotely than in person. Furthermore, spending seven hours in front of my computer– I literally did not leave my desk all day, and my wife was nice enough to bring me lunch– watching numbers slowly tick up from 1 to 53 has got to rank as one of my most boring days as an educator ever.

And I get to do it a minimum of twice more, since they’re not all done yet. This is basically the plan for the rest of the week.

Nonetheless, I’m going to loudly insist that I’m not complaining, because the alternative remains worse.

Speaking of that: neighboring districts have announced their plan to move to hybrid learning in a couple of weeks, which will be fun until they back off of it right before it happens. The state’s numbers have done nothing but worsen in the month of August, and so have the county’s, particularly once Notre Dame came back– so do you know what the state board of health did? They took a set of metrics that had everything in the red and added a new color band so that what was once red and definitely recommending distance learning was now orange and distance learning was just “strongly recommended,” or some shit like that.

Just say you’re bored and you don’t care if people die. Just fuckin’ do it, we all know it’s what you mean.

It’s more honest and I’m really tired of bullshit.

We closed everything down in March, when there were virtually no cases in the state. We closed them again in August, when things were much much much worse than they were in March because Americans are dog-stupid and selfish as fuck and no one could be counted on to act right. Now in September damn near everything is worse than it was in August and with Labor Day next weekend, guess what’s about to happen? Motherfuckers are gonna have parties and then two weeks after that they’re gonna get sick.

Oh, and Notre Dame, fresh off of two weeks of quarantine, is about to allow crowds at the football games they’re still insisting they’re going to have. So, a super-spreader event in my town roughly every two weeks for the next few months? Awesome. Just what we want.

It’ll work out fine, I’m sure. After all, we’re bored.

Oh right this needs a title

On March 30, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

So far, Spring Break has consisted of a lot of Transformers cartoons interspersed with occasional attempts to teach the boy to read and preparing a neverending succession of grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s actually getting pretty decent with a list of basic sight words; we’ll see if I can get him up to Dostoyevsky in the week and a half remaining before school starts again. Probably not, but goals are a good thing.

Outside of that and stressing the fuck out about the job market, though, there’s not been much else. I’m growing rather unpleasantly tired of my own bullshit, and am in that stage of bored where I can think of a dozen things I ought to be doing (not least among which would be getting something done on the A to Z challenge, which starts Friday) but being so unmotivated that I’m simply noting that they’re still out there and moving on with continuing to do not a whole lot. Last year my A to Z posts were completely done by now. I have them all scheduled but not a single one written yet.

I am sure that this is at least as exciting to read about as it is to live through.

I have just noticed that the keyboard in that picture is facing the wrong way, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

…yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Gonna take the boy to the comic shop and maybe try to get a short story finished this afternoon. We’ll see.

Seven weeks later…

On September 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Work2 Comments

…okay, it’s official. I missed teaching today. But just a little bit. I continue to miss absolutely none of the bullshit that comes with teaching, but my job has been wearying me lately, and… yeah. I miss it a little.

Here’s why: I knew from the beginning that my job was gonna be kind of cyclical, right? And the first, oh, six weeks of having the job were insane. Constant, constant shit to do with no breaks, and walking into work with five things to do and walking out after nine hours still needing to do four of those things because of the 37 other things that came up during the day.

I would estimate that in the last three days I have earned approximately fifteen dollars of my salary. I completed two major things on Monday. Maybe three. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday have featured sitting at my desk with my laptop and working on my book. And I’m not even being subtle about it; my bosses are fully aware of what I’m doing and why, and they also know that if I’m needed to actually do something that I’ll drop my own nonsense and go back to actually doing what I’m being paid for. And next week is going to ramp back up again because something fairly major is due on Friday that, for various uninteresting reasons, I can’t really start working on until Monday. But this week? I have wasted a lot of taxpayer money on salary. There’s just no way around it.

(This is the part where I point out that if I were not as efficient as fuck with my time when I do have stuff to do, I would probably have been able to fill up this week. But I’ve been getting shit done in an hour that my boss thought I was going to need a day for. I am in this boat partially because of sheer awesomeness.)

Anyway. One thing teaching never, ever is? Boring. And this job, this week, has been insanely boring.

And one other thing.

I do not like being in the office. I think I could name maybe 25-30 kids in the building right now if I had to, not counting the few who I know from my previous school. Easily 90% of those kids are shitheads. The reason I know their names is that they’re always in trouble and they’re always in the office carrying on, or their worthless trash parents are in the office carrying on (the boss had to call the police on a parent this morning) and I do not like them at all. I know there are good kids in this building, right? No doubt at all. But I don’t know any of them yet. I may have met a few of them today, which was sorta nice, but I have got to start just wandering into classrooms and pitching in on days like today where I don’t have a ton of stuff to do. Because this is not working for me right now, and it needs to be fixed.

In which I’m back, I guess

On May 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

I didn’t post yesterday; a combination of being legitimately too busy, having very little to say, and a mild ennui/stress/depression thing that had me not in the mood to interact with the universe. Plus the boy’s been poorly for the last day or so and yesterday was rather more filled with tears than I wanted it to be. (Mom: don’t panic.)

Today, on the other hand, is going much better. New Atmosphere CD, for starters, which is awesome. I’ve managed to make it two days at work without raising my voice; also super awesome. And this book thing is thisclose to being done; I’ve got a couple of annoying formatting things in the ebook that I really want to fix– one blank page that I can’t get to go away and some weirdness with my author picture in the back, plus I need to figure out where the copyright notice goes, if I’m gonna bother to put one in. Niggly stuff, mostly; I’ve got ebooks from professional publishing houses with a bunch of blank pages, so I might be stressing about one a trifle too much.

I think I’ll show my son Frozen this afternoon. He’s never seen it before. Neither has my wife. We’ll see if it can dethrone Lilo and Stitch–which, don’t get me wrong, I love– as greatest movie ever or not.

Or maybe I’ll just go outside. It’s fuckin’ beautiful out there.

How are you, Internet?

In which I suck

On July 16, 2013July 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

No, seriously. I am absolutely terrible at being alive. And I’m ready for summer to be over. This notion that two months more-or-less-off in the summer is a “perk” for teachers makes me insane, people. If I don’t have a schedule to follow of some sort I degenerate into a fat, unwashed mess of unmotivated sludge so fast that it’s astonishing. Right now? I got home from work thirteen hours ago and I’m already so bored I want to die. Most of that time was spent asleep.

There has been more than one point in my life where I was working three jobs, and for my working life I’m pretty sure there has been more time where I’ve had multiple jobs than when I haven’t. So summertime, where I not only have only one job but that job isn’t even full-time, is torture. I have been awake for four hours and these few, crappy little sentences are all that I’ve done. Wait, no– I dragged myself into the kitchen twice, once to eat two granola bars and let the dogs out, and a second time to eat a microwave pizza and let the dogs out again. I’ve technically eaten two meals and I haven’t showered yet.

I have about a month left until I can start spending ten hours a day in my classroom and griping about that. I seriously don’t know if I can keep my shit together until then. Also it is a hundred thousand degrees outside and fuck that. It was so humid yesterday afternoon that I could drink the air. It’s not that bad just yet but it’s supposed to be again later.

Arrrrrrrrgh.

Twice this week I’ve run into people in public who I used to be really close to but haven’t seen in fifteen to twenty years. In both cases it’s led to half an hour or so of relatively pleasant conversation (“relatively” because one of them started off with me saying “what the hell are you doing here?” before I realized how rude that sounded and the other because it started with an accusation of Unfriending on Facebook, which, while it was almost certainly true, I didn’t remember doing it and therefore couldn’t defend myself adequately; plus, as everyone who is in regular touch with me knows, I’m not normal about Facebook; in both cases the conversation started with me way off-balance) but I’m seriously wondering when the hell the almost-inevitable third shoe is going to drop. I spent some time last night going over everyone I’ve ever known in my head and trying to figure out who has the most reason to be pissed off at me and now I’m thinking about doing some cyberstalking to figure out if those people live anywhere near me. Of course, that won’t be terribly helpful– one of the two lives in bloody Norway and still managed to run into me in a bookstore in Indiana, which is a pretty fuckin’ impressive feat.

I should take a shower, shouldn’t I?