Wheel of Time fans can’t be real

On May 26, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right?

I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else, and you should all be very proud of me for how little whining I have done about it here. Even if you feel like I’ve complained about these books a lot, you have no idea how much I have held back. Book Eight begins what even fans of the series call “The Slog.” Or maybe it’s Book Seven! They can’t agree.

I owe the publishers of the book I’m reading now a review, and I’m really wondering if I’m not being fair to the new book by putting it after a WoT book. Because oh man did I go straight to I Bet It Would Be Fun to Annotate This and Rip It to Shreds mode.

Anyway. For the record, I genuinely don’t care if you’ve enjoyed these books or not, and there are multiple people I really respect (such as, for example, my actual wife) who are fans of them, I just … I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will at this point. I’m still finishing the God damned things one way or another, though.

Had a weird moment during my prep/lunch period at work today, where a whole bunch of shit all piled up on me at once and I damn near had a meltdown over a bizarre assortment of objectively minor inconveniences. I’m still not used to the new glasses. I made bad lunch decisions, and on top of that I was given a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, or maybe it was just super low on syrup. I’ve bitten my lower lip in the exact same spot roughly seventy times in the last few days. My classroom hasn’t been vacuumed in several days, and the cruft that is still on the floor is resistant to my broom. And the anxiety over this summer school thing continues to ramp up; I looked a little bit more closely at what little information I have and I’m now definitively convinced they’ve handed me two grades at the same time.(*) And probably a few other things that I’m not remembering at the moment. And … man. I managed to work my way out of it before the kids showed up, which was good, especially since I had to double up my advisory again. Nobody wants Mr. Siler to lose his mind and go home early during the last week of school, especially since I just remembered another one of those little inconveniences and it was being handed yet another piece of essential paperwork that I needed to do about taking the last day of school off– which, remember, I told my boss about in January.

One good thing is I do think I’ve actually convinced myself that next year’s eighth graders should be fine. There’s still a billion ways that could go wrong, and my partner teacher continues to stubbornly refuse to admit that she’s jumping to the high school next year.

I would appreciate knowing something about anything involving the next few months within the next couple of days, thanks.

(*) Does this mean that both groups are tiny, and I’ll have a tiny group? Or are both groups normal sized, and I’ll have a huge group? What even is a huge group in this context, since they’ve told us nothing about the kids we have coming? Am I doing math and reading for both groups– so four preps in three hours? Is anyone ever going to respond to any of my emails?

I don’t even know what I want any more

On February 12, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I feel like I haven’t done anything at work all week except for talk about whether there was going to be school tomorrow or not. It’s supposed to snow all night and into tomorrow morning, with upper-end predictions being six inches of snow and a tenth of an inch of ice mixed into that, and that’s pretty ugly. The district has changed their mind– and sent out emails about said mind-changing– about what another closure would look like approximately nineteen thousand times this week. On Tuesday I was confidently told by a Downtown Person that we weren’t going to do e-learning at all if we had to cancel, and would just add a day to the end of the school year. By the end of that day we’d received five different emails about our procedure for synchronous e-learning, which are the Covid-style days where we’re in Google Meets all day. By today it was back to “traditional e-learning,” which caused widespread confusion because no one really knows what the word traditional means when it’s used in that sentence. Then they clarified that, without also clarifying that we aren’t allowed four asynchronous days during the school year and this would be the fourth, which was what set off all the speculation about what we were doing in the first place. Maybe we’ll lose the professional development day in March and just have school that day? Nobody fucking knows.

Incidentally, I recognize that this would require quite a roll of the dice, but if I go through the snow totals for each day for today through next Monday, I get the sum of eighteen inches of snow over the long weekend (Presidents’ Day is Monday, remember) which might cause fuckery with school being open on Tuesday.

I’m predicting a two-hour delay. I have moved into the I Have Shit to Do God Damn It point of the year, which means I don’t really want any more delays or closures, except I kind of do, because who wants to go to work if they don’t have to? Nobody. On top of that, it’s a Thursday before a four-day weekend when everyone has spent the entire week openly speculating that there will be no school on Thursday. What this means is that a lot of our kids will conclude that if there is school, it’s unfair, and they won’t show up anyway.

One way or another I am absolutely not making any Goddamn lesson plans for tomorrow until I know what’s going on. There’s no point.

Blech.

Choose my adventure!

On September 25, 2015September 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Right now I’m rolling out of bed and checking my bank account to see how much I got paid today. It is a virtual impossibility that my check is correct.

You get to vote on how it will be wrong!

Too high! They’re still paying me last year’s salary.
Too low! They deducted the overage from last paycheck, but they appear to have done it wrong.
Too high, but differently! They gave me the correct salary and forgot to correct it for the overpayment I got last paycheck.
Some other mistake. Specify in comments!

Competence is awesome.