The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Not really, actually— l have spent most of tonight in a towering rage that I have not been able to shake. Everything is pissing me off and I can’t do the sensible thing and just stay off of the one social media account I have left because it’s the main contributor to the free-floating anger.
I wonder what being an emotionally intelligent adult might be like? I should try it.
I spent a good part of the day today— five hours, maybe– getting prepared for next week and the two-eleven-hour-days-plus-an-elearning-day stint following, and while I’ve been mostly immune to Sundaying since starting this new job I have been a mess all day today. There’s just too goddamned much going on over the next couple of weeks, most of it related to not math, and I want to do Math, and not Not Math. But I’ve got twelve thousand other things to worry about this week, and I care about exactly zero of them– I don’t give a shit if the kids have a little Slides presentation to show their parents at parent/teacher conferences, because the only kids who will actually do those are the ones whose parents I don’t need to see, and I don’t give a shit about the door decorating contest that they gave us a week to do and then promptly filled every advisory period in between the day they told us about the contest and the day they were judging it, and I don’t give a shit about the schedule for Advisory they dropped on us today(*), and I don’t give a shit about the fucking lesson that I’m supposed to teach, which was clearly written by a non-educator(**), so that the kids are “prepared” for the field trip they’re taking on Tuesday that I also don’t care about.
Christ and fuck.
I need to clear this mood before first contact with the kids tomorrow or it’s going to be a rougher seven days than I already think it’s going to be. I don’t need any of this shit. Just get the fuck out of my way and let me fucking teach.
(*) “But Luther, isn’t it Sunday?” you ask. Yes. They dropped a new Advisory schedule on us on a Sunday that is supposed to be implemented Monday, and to hell with the seventeen other things we are supposed to do this week, all of which are supposed to be done in Advisory. Fuck Advisory. Fuck the entire concept. Get rid of it and give me more class time. I hate it.
(**) How do I know, you may ask? It’s a lesson plan for eighth graders that changes tasks seven times over the course of the lesson, with each section ranging from three to eight minutes in length.(***) Fuck you. You teach it.
(***) A sample task: “Put the students in pairs and have them write the letters A-Z on a piece of paper. Have them read whateverthefuck and list things by their first letter that are manufactured in this county.” Total time for this activity: five to eight minutes, which is insufficient time just to get them in groups and have them all write out the list of letters. Suck a cock.
Okay, let’s put this right out there for everybody: I’m about to gripe about getting handed a whole pile of money, and we’re all just going to have to figure out how to live with that, okay? This is probably a pretty good stroke of fortune, but I’m still less than completely happy about it. Just prepare yourself, I guess.
Last week we had to fire a permanent substitute for several of our Social Studies classes. We never found a full-time teacher for that class, but this guy was showing up to work every day so he may as well have been the “real” teacher. I am not privy to the reasons for the firing, although I have reason to believe that they were of the “you aren’t very good at this” variety and possibly also the “you are not getting along with the other adults, who are better at their jobs than you” variety, but not anything more nefarious than that. At any rate, since I’m certified to teach middle school social studies, I spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to volunteer to pick up one of this guy’s sections and ended up deciding against it. The group he had during my prep period seemed like a pretty decent group of kids, but it would mean a whole lot of extra prep time for just one extra section of kids, and, well, it would eat my one prep period. That would mean teaching from 8:15 to 3:20 every day with nothing but a half hour break for lunch. I didn’t exactly turn it down, because it wasn’t offered to me, but I did decide I wasn’t going to put my name forward for it.
So naturally today one of our math teachers resigned, and while I could still turn down an overload, it feels a lot sketchier to refuse to teach an extra section of the course I’m already teaching, and I’ve covered her class before and it’s a reasonably easy group of kids. But it means, again, no preps ever, and less time for a bathroom break– and you’d best believe my bowels have gotten used to being evacuated promptly at 10:08 every morning when I send second hour away– and I can’t run out for lunch any longer.
My biggest complaint, though, is the notion that I have to bring my lunch every day for the rest of the year. The thought is crushing. I mean, I can order Jimmy John’s once in a while, and I can probably afford to Doordash every now and again, but that shit adds up quick and I don’t want to spend money on food all the Goddamn time, especially since if the delivery person is even a little late I’m racing through my lunch even faster than usual, which is deeply fucking annoying.
On the other hand, depending on exactly how they run the numbers I’m going to make somewhere between eight and eleven thousand dollars extra for covering the class. I get my hourly rate, so basically 3/4 of an extra 1/6 of my salary over the course of the year, although that sixth may be a little smaller than that because I’m not sure if Advisory counts as instructional time or they just divide my day into six classes or what.
One way or another, it’s a whole Goddamn lot of money. I have this plan going right now where other than the house I’m going to be completely out of debt by the end of this school year. Completely out. An extra nine grand– the most likely figure is roughly $8900 if you want specificity– over the course of the rest of the school year would move that timetable up pretty considerably. How much can I really gripe about doing a little bit more of something I was already doing when it has that level of compensation attached to it? But the fucking lunch thing has me all twisted up about it for some reason.
My brain makes no damn sense at all sometimes.
This post has the feel, to me, of something that has the potential to go viral in all the wrong ways, so let me be a hundred percent clear before I get started: Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water isn’t a bad book. It is not a book I especially enjoyed, and now that I’ve finished it I don’t find it especially likely that I’ll ever pick it up again, but that’s on me: literary fiction is not my thing, and this was a rare example of a book that just sort of grabbed me out of nowhere and made me buy it, knowing full well at the time that I was likely to have … well, precisely this reaction to it. It’s 715 pages long and it took me nine days to read, which is a fucking eternity for me, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all on the site were it not for the fact that I happened to take a good look at the blurbs on the back cover and, my God, they are completely out of control. I know what blurbs are supposed to do; they are to sell the book, and whatever editor is in charge of such things is likely to choose the most heavily enthusiastic bits out of the entire blurb to highlight. I get all that. But this level of praise is bordering on unhinged, and I think you need to see it.
That’s … really high praise! Really, really high! I don’t think I’ve ever been “overtaken with joy” even once in my entire life, and I’ve never “caught my breath” while reading a book, or at least if I have I don’t remember it. I am genuinely unsure what the hell the third sentence means; it has the feel of something that was translated from some other language, but the author of the blurb is a fellow Hoosier, born in Kokomo and currently teaching at the University of Oklahoma, of all the Godforsaken places on the planet. One assumes, then, that this was not translated, and thus it’s just incomprehensible. Or at least uncomprehended. One of my problems with literary fiction is the lingering feeling, while I’m reading it, that I’m just not smart enough to understand why it’s good. Like, I read genre fiction, and the people who read literary fiction openly look down on us, and we just accept it and move on with our lives; our shit isn’t as Good or as Important as theirs is … for some fucking reason that I’m also too dumb to have ever figured out. To start an entirely unrelated argument here, if I can get over this bullshit with Christians and morality you’d think I’d be able to get over it with literary fiction and intelligence, but apparently not yet. The gaslighting continues unabated.
(Again, not complaining about the book. It’s not a bad book. It’s just very much a Not for Me book. I three-starred it, and I could be convinced to raise that to four, especially since I really felt the book stuck the ending. But I was never going to love this.)
But, okay. She was overtaken with joy from the first page of the book. Again, maybe I just don’t get it! Let’s look at that first page. Surely fair use allows me to pull out 1/715 of the entire book, right? That’s .13%. I’m good:
Be honest: are you overtaken with joy right now?
To me, the most significant thing about this first page is that I genuinely have nothing to say about it. I’ve certainly read first pages and first paragraphs and first sentences that grabbed me by the shorthairs and didn’t let go, and I’ve read first pages that let me know in no uncertain terms that I was in for some godawful bullshit and I should either put the book down or buckle the fuck in. But … this is just a page of writing, to me. It’s certainly not bad writing and I have no complaints; the imagery is nice, but let’s be real, you could lose the paragraph about the bird and no damage would be done. Or would it? Maybe the bird is symbolic or some shit; I have no idea. But one way or another, I don’t feel anything in particular from having read this. I wouldn’t put the book down, but if you handed me just the first page and asked me if I was excited to read the rest, I’d shrug.
You tell me; I’ll believe you: what’s your reaction to this first page? What am I missing here?
The rest of the quotes on the back are not much better, by the way. Let me know if you want to see more.
If there are people– any people– working in schools during the summer, the Goddamned air conditioning in those buildings needs to be on, and it is bloody fucking insane that I’ve had to deal with this bullshit twice this week. It’s going to happen again tomorrow, but I’m going to show up prepared to be a sweaty fuck all afternoon, which I did not do today, because I had already forgotten the lessons Monday should have taught me. And the AC was off, and it was humid as fuck, and I was not dressed to be moving furniture in a windowless classroom with no moving air.
Tomorrow’s gonna suck too, but at least I’ll be prepared for it.
I just got an email from a company that makes “prone pillows,” supposedly designed specifically for use while lying down. They are meant to be ergonomic and I am not convinced the engineers behind the pillow have ever heard of fat people.
They are offering a “collaboration opportunity” involving me writing about their pillow and giving me a discount code that I can pass on to my readers, who they assure me are the perfect demographic for their product. Given that I have no demographic data for my readers of any kind, I find this assertion fascinating.
What say thee, readers? Should I see if I can get a free pillow out of these folks, and then review it for you?
It’s confirmed. Devon Green, a 23-year-old former student of mine, passed away in his sleep two days ago. That’s all anyone knows at the moment. His family is struggling to pay for the funeral; there’s a GoFundMe. If anybody happens to have a few spare nickels with nothing to use them on, donations would be greatly appreciated.
You may– I suspect it’s unlikely, but you may– recall this August 2021 post about Makyi Toliver, a former student of mine and one I was quite fond of, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for felony murder. I don’t know if you know what felony murder is, but it’s a wildly unjust fucking crime. Makyi and a sixteen-year-old friend attempted to steal a gun from a third person, a bungled theft that led to the gun’s owner killing his friend and shooting Makyi at least eight times. This, somehow, led to Makyi being convicted of murder. 45 years. At 20.
I’ve corresponded with Makyi a couple of times– not enough, to tell the truth– since he’s been locked up. Yesterday morning I checked my messages and noticed that his account was marked as inactive. I didn’t initially think much of it; maybe he’d been transferred or the prison was changing providers or something.
At 8:00 yesterday evening I got a text message from another teacher who had also had him in her classes. Makyi was dead. As far as we know right now, he died from suicide. Why “as far as we know”? The jail and the coroner are refusing to give his mother any information, which means we’re relying on– wait for it– rumors and secondhand information from other former students at Parchman.
Makyi was a good kid. He was a good kid and he had an immense amount of potential and he didn’t fucking deserve any of this.
I hate it here, and I’m not okay.