The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Got home at 4:30, wrote a practice test, went to a thing for my kid’s school until 8, now I’m home, with one more test to write before I can sleep, and today was a heavy teaching day. Tomorrow will be too, and so will Wednesday. On the plus side, after Wednesday, I’m effectively done with teaching for the year, although there will be a few more days of school left.
So yeah. This is what y’all get tonight. Hugs!
Did I mention I was a union rep again? Well, I am, and I had a meeting after school, so I didn’t get home until after 6, and then I had to eat something because diabeetus, and then we had to go pick my car up and hey did you know that the Kia Soul apparently has some sort of funky battery that doesn’t jump the same as other batteries and also costs a hell of a lot more, and if you’re thinking “Hey, Luther, that sounds fishy, you should look into that!” then you’re absolutely right I’m going to do that, and then I had to grade some tests and write some assignments and some emails, and now it’s 9 goddamn 13 and I’m going to bed so I can do it all tomorrow and Christ am I tired.
Lots to do today: some recording, some putting-together of furniture, moving around other furniture, some minor bits of shopping, every item of clothing I own has been washed in the last couple of days and needs to be put away, four days of lesson planning (lucky for me, I got caught up on my grading before leaving work on Friday,) a loose plan for the weeks between now and ILEARN because I feel like as soon as I actually internalize when ILEARN is it’s going to start causing panic attacks and I need my numbers to look good so I probably ought to start getting ready, and whatever the hell else it occurs to me to do to procrastinate about starting all of that. Also eating, showering, and the various other tasks necessary to keep my shambling mass vertical and non-odoriferous.
Also I think I’ve decided it might be time to redo the look of the site. I like this one a lot but I’ve been using it for a couple of years at least and it’s time to freshen things up a bit.
What are you doing with your Presidents’ Day? (Probably nothing, I realize this. It’s a dumb holiday.)
I’m teaching myself Arabic, finally fulfilling a promise I made to myself when I dropped out of the class a couple of weeks into my freshman year of college. I’ve been using Duolingo fairly religiously and I just bought a “basics” type of textbook, and looking at the image above I can almost parse some letters? Regular Arabic writing is complicated enough for the unskilled Westerner; Arabic calligraphy is a level of insane that I am not yet remotely prepared to deal with. I am aware that English calligraphy is probably harder to decipher than regular English print, but Arabic doesn’t have print, and each letter has three forms depending on where it is in the word, plus the several letters that English has no equivalent for in the first place, so I feel fairly confident in asserting that there is a real difficulty difference here.
I mean, it’s not Russian cursive, which is apparently not a hoax, somehow:
I mean … come the fuck on. I believe Arabic calligraphy is words. I don’t know that I can really convince myself that that shit is legible script to anyone, Russian-speaking or not.
Anyway. Point is, between lesson planning, blogging, eating dinner, learning an extraordinarily difficult foreign language for no Goddamn reason, trying to record a little bit of YouTube video, and, oh, right, interacting with my family, my evenings have been feeling unreasonably stuffed lately, which I think has been a major contributing factor to 1) how brief my posts have been and 2) how late my posts have been, as it’s currently 8:30 PM and I’ve just stopped writing to stare at my phone for ten minutes. I’m not complaining, as I’m still more or less enjoying all these activities and it’s not like Winter Break isn’t right around the corner, but … man.
There’s a lot going on.
I didn’t do anything substantive yesterday, which was 100% a deliberate choice, but that meant that I left everything I had to do today for today, and then got three inches of snow dumped on my driveway that demanded dealing with on top of it, meaning that today I have run errands, graded, tried out our new snowblower (A+ would blow again,) planned for next week, made some tentative plans as to how I’m going to teach Fatima to read, edited some videos, written this blog post, and done some reading. I’ve also … uh … supervised as my wife and son crawled into the crawlspace underneath the house, because we have a couple of leaks that are going to have to be dealt with, which I’m super excited about.
We watched Eternals yesterday. That’s the review. That one sentence. I’m not saying don’t watch it, but don’t go out of your way to expend any effort on watching it either.
I still have a ton of stuff to do tonight, or maybe I don’t and it’s just that the few things I have left to do feel like a lot, I’m not sure. Either way it’s probably time to cross “dinner” off of the list (right after “write blog post”) because it’s possible that I’m overestimating what else I have to do today because I’m hungry. Did I ever eat lunch? I think I skipped lunch. That probably wasn’t smart.
Anyway, see you tomorrow. There may be kvetching about technology purchases! Or maybe not. We’ll see.
Holy hell, but this was a long week. I don’t want to get too into the weeds on the details, mostly because they’re boring, but today was one of those days where literally every thing I did for the entire day absolutely needed to get done — like, there was nothing I could put off until later — and was under time pressure, where I had just barely enough time to get each individual task done but only if I 1) executed perfectly and 2) wasn’t interrupted by any other tasks or minor biological necessities like, for example, my morning coffee shit, which got put off by an hour, which meant that by the time it finally happened it was gonna happen whether I wanted it to or not.
… I appear to be teaching again, by the by.
This is a terrible decision, of course. It’s a terrible decision. It’s difficult to overstate how terrible it is. But as of right now one of our 7th grade math teachers has kinda gone away– don’t ask, I actually don’t know a lot of details and I wouldn’t share them if I did– and I’ve picked up the 7th grade honors Algebra class. Chances are when 4th quarter starts in a week I may inherit another section or two, but I put my foot down about it happening right away because I have another five days at least to finish the task I started today, and it’s kinda essential.
I know, I’m vaguebooking. It’s unavoidable, I apologize.
So, yeah. For some indeterminate amount of time– I am assuming for the rest of the year only because that way if it ends before that I can be pleasantly surprised– I am teaching at least one period and possibly as many as three periods a day of math, and stuffing the rest of my full-time job into the seven to five periods that remain.
I’m sure it’ll be fine. I don’t have a bad track record of trying to do more than one job at a time in an educational setting or anything like that.
Oh, and the overtime is $37/period. Times three, daily, times five, per week. Times, I dunno, 9-10 more weeks of school?
So, uh … I’ll find a way to make it work.
I accidentally said “Have a nice weekend!” to at least two or three different people today at various points, confusing the hell out of at least one student, and when I skipped out of the office (more or less literally) saying “See you Monday!” to everyone, I did it knowing full well that because I am going to be out of the building for three days I will probably end up with six days’ worth of catching up to do once I come back. So the last laugh is sure as hell gonna be on me.
It’s been a hellishly busy couple of days, but busy is all it has been, and busy I don’t really mind. I’m good at busy. Of course, I’m gonna stay that way for good chunks of the next several days, and they seriously think I’m gonna be in Indianapolis at 8:00 in the morning tomorrow, too, which would be a hilarious joke if motherfuckers weren’t serious. So things might be a little light around here for the back half of the week, but I’ll make up for it with cosplay pictures after the con.
My copies of CLICK are supposed to show up tomorrow, which is good, because tomorrow is pretty definitively before the con, but it’s also bad because I’ll already be gone before they get here and I won’t get to hold or touch the precious before I see them when my wife brings them to me Friday night. I’ll need to decide how much I’m selling them for, too, once I actually see them.
…damn, I need a new price board.
More to do! Hooray!
I’ll post a hotel view picture tomorrow. Behave, y’all.
I walked into the building this morning, dropped my bag off in my office, ate whatever sausage thing I had brought for breakfast, picked up my coffee, and headed down to the gym/cafeteria area to monitor the kids before the first bell rang. In the gym, I saw our security guard, a guy I know from one of my previous buildings. We chatted for a moment.
“I’m about to say something I’ve never said in a school before,” I said to him. “As of right now, I don’t really have anything to do today.”
He knows me, so he laughed.
“Someone will come in and drop something in my lap in the next five minutes,” I predicted. “This isn’t gonna last long.”
It took, in fact, less than one minute before the principal summoned me to the office, and then we were off to the races for the rest of the day. Yesterday was calm and sedate. Today was not. It was productive, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit I did not stop moving once all day long.
(Checks, discovers he walked four miles at work today)
(Is surprised it’s that low)
So it’s the end of the day and we’re shoving the very last of the stragglers out the door and to their buses. I am closing the doors behind them so that they can’t decide they have something Very Important That They Need Right Now and dash back into the building. Someone tugs on my sleeve. I turn and see someone who is much too young to be at my building looking up at me. She is, maybe, in third grade, and I’m guessing probably second.
“Do you have a student named Aaron at your school?” she says.
oh god what did I do to deserve this
“We probably have a lot of Aarons at this school, sweetie,” I say. “What is his last name?”
“She’s a girl,” she says. I wait. She does not elaborate.
“Do you know Erin’s last name?”
She thinks carefully and says a last name. I repeat it. She thinks about it some more and says that that’s not the right name.
“What’s your name?”
She answers me. I ask if Erin has the same last name as her and she says no, but she can’t remember Erin’s last name.
“Who brought you here, sweetie?”
“My te-te.”
“Okay. Can she come into the building and then we can go to the office and look for Erin?”
“She can’t come in.” Note that this response comes immediately. She doesn’t have to think about it at all. It’s at this point where I realize I don’t have a radio and can’t buzz the office about this conversation.
“Why can’t she come in?”
“She’s not wearing any pants.”
I blink, slowly, a couple of times. I notice that there’s a teacher standing behind me, just inside the building, and that that teacher is listening to the entire conversation I’m having and is laughing her ass off at me.
“Did you just say that she wasn’t wearing any pants?”
“Yeah, she just drove me here but she can’t come in ‘cuz she’s not wearing pants.”
I am not going to ask you can’t make me ask nope no way I am not asking
“Okay. Let’s try one more time, real hard, to remember Erin’s last name. I can have the office call for her to come out this door. She’s supposed to be out by now anyway, so she’ll probably come out soon anyway.”
She thinks and gives me a name.
“Are you sure?”
She nods vigorously.
“Okay. I’m gonna go to the office and tell them to call for Erin to come out, okay? Where’s your te-te’s car?”
She points. I don’t see a car. Auntie apparently didn’t figure out not to pull up by where the buses were. At that moment I hear an all-call behind me for the name that this little girl has given me, so apparently Auntie got tired of waiting and just called the school. I point out that they just called for Erin and the little girl runs away.
All right then.
Glad I could help.
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