What a day

On August 3, 2018August 3, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

giphy I had to be up at what will soon be Regular Time but for today was Two Damn Hours Early this morning, in order to drive across town to drop my son off at day care before driving back across town to go to a conference. Which had precisely one (1) useful session out of the five that I attended before bailing early with the usual complement of complaints about how these horrible things always go. Today’s highlight was the first session of the day after the keynote, where the guy began apologizing for having had a “long week” immediately when the first people walked into the room and did not stop apologizing until five minutes after the session was supposed to have begun, at which point he provided us with perhaps fifteen minutes of material in what was supposed to be a 45-minute session and then declared that he was glad that he’d been able to “stretch that out so long.” The other fucker was an elbow-partner fucker, which is when the presenter for a session decides that the people attending his session to hear him provide his expertise on a topic would rather talk to the people next to them who they don’t know and were presumably also seeking, rather than possessing, said expertise.

Be aware that they could have pointed at me and said “You. Head this session.” at any exact moment and I would have been able to fill 45 minutes with no preparation at all. I’m a vet, motherfuckers, and really any teacher ought to be able to fill a time slot that short. This is Goddamned ridiculous and I was about to type something about how I can’t believe how terrible these always are and how they are always terrible in the exact same way except really by now I shouldn’t be surprised any longer.

The one session that was good was great, though, and provided me with all sorts of useful information for next year. I will be using stuff that this guy suggested we do. Lots of it.

Welcome back, I guess.

On a positive note, I had several instances of people saying really kind things to me over the course of the conference, including the principal of the school letting it drop that he had been about to call me for an interview when the principal who ended up actually hiring me actually forbade him to do so, because she wanted me– which I feel like I could justifiably be angry about but I’m going to choose to be entertained by instead. I randomly ran into the mother of a kid I had in both 6th and 8th grade, a kid who is entering college (yay!) next year, who was all kinds of excited to see me and told me that her entire family generally believes me to be the best teacher her kid ever had.

Which is fucking humbling.

I also ran into two former students today, one who was actually in my class that I ran into at the grocery (and recognized me first, and didn’t run away, and gave me a hug instead) and another who I didn’t actually have but who sat with me at lunch and when I asked him “how high school has been going” (he’s an incoming senior) proceeded to begin with first semester of his freshman year and tell me every class he’s taken and every grade he’s gotten.

On the plus side, he’s doing great, and this is a kid who just kind of makes everyone around him root for him to succeed, and on the negative side, I forgot that you never ask an autistic kid– or at least a kid with his particular stripe of autism– a wide-open question like that unless you’re prepared to get the entire answer.

So, yeah. Despite the first half of this piece, it was in general a pretty good day.

In which I need my knees broken

On February 12, 2017February 12, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

So I just found out this is going to be my schedule in the latter part of March:

Saturday, March 18: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 19: Work from 12-6
Monday, March 20: Board plane to Denver– which, to make sure we’re clear, is not where my wife or my son live. Upon leaving plane, attend sales meetings.
Tuesday, March 21-Thursday, March 23: Lots and lots of sales meetings. Probably involving some sort of roleplaying, with my days and evenings full of the sort of alpha males who might attend these sorts of things. I don’t drink and will have nothing in common with any of these people and will probably be having to share a hotel room with someone.
Friday, March 24: Attend morning sales meetings and then fly back home.
Saturday, March 25: Work from 9-8
Sunday, March 26: Work from 12-6. I have been informed that I will receive my “average daily pay” for the days I’m in Denver, and that if I manage to exceed my average sales for an entire week over the 25th and 26th I will receive a bonus of… wait for it… fifty dollars!
Monday, March 27: Work from 9-8
Tuesday, March 28: Work from 9-8
Wednesday, March 29: Work from 9-2:30.

And then come home and die.

I’m going to need someone to badly injure me on the 19th. Anybody wanna get in on that? Is there a line already?

Proof of life, pt. 2

On December 1, 2015December 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

So I spent all weekend being “on,” and as a result I have been home and very much “off” for the last couple of days. Luckily for me, That Post has been resurging again for the last couple of days and so it’s not like I’ve been starving for traffic.

I’ll try and write about something tomorrow. Until then, did you know you can get autographed books straight from me?

(I know, I know. But I need money.)

In which I don’t know where they find these people

On April 24, 2015April 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized12 Comments

I am either the most arrogant sonofabitch on the planet, an utter wizard at doing large-room presentations, or both, because it never goddamn fails that I always think I can do a better job than the people presenting at these conferences. It took precisely 45 minutes for me to walk out of my first breakout conference, and it was the first breakout conference of the convention, so I’m either at 1/1 or 0/1 so far depending on how you’re keeping track.

I wasn’t alone. These sessions are a scant hour and fifteen minutes long. If I paid five hundred dollars of gubmint money to be able to attend this thing– and I did– then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the presenters to prepare an hour and fifteen minutes of actual material before they come to present, and to actually have something to say about the topic on which they are supposedly presenting. If I attend a talk that references starting new magnet schools in the title of the talk, I assume based on that title that the people doing the talk have started a magnet school or perhaps started a series of magnet schools and that they feel like they have something useful to pass on to others about this process.

In other words, I want to go there to hear you talk about your subject, and not to have conversations with “elbow partners” about poorly-defined subjects that no one in the room really quite gets, and I sure as fuck don’t want you to spend seven minutes talking about how it’s important that we conclude our sixty-second elbow talks in sixty seconds because we have a schedule to keep to.

When you lead into your fourth “elbow talk” in 45 minutes, and you announce that this one will require all of us to change our seats based on a topic we supposedly chose a few minutes ago (no one chose a topic, because we didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about or why we were doing it) and then to “ideate” for four and a half minutes, and then you spend ten minutes talking about the difference between “ideating” and “brainstorming,” which boils down to “we want to use a fancier word for made-up differences between the terms,” you’re making it very fucking clear that you had no plan for this whatsoever and that you are deliberately and perniciously wasting my time, and I start doing the math and determining how much of a refund you personally owe all of the motherfuckers in the room who spent $500 for this conference before we paid for transportation, hotel rooms, or meals.

Hint: five figures. Which had muhfuckin’ better well be bigger than your speaking fee, you waste of flesh.

A positive: I spent my “elbow sessions” talking with an elderly white man from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. I initially began our conversation by carefully calibrating my expectations for Elderly White Man from Louisiana, only to accidentally trigger a truly delightful anti-Bobby Jindal rant a moment later. His name was Elvis, which only made him more fun to talk to. Unfortunately, he bailed at the same time I did, as we both realized at once that the presenters literally had nothing of value to say. I like you, Elvis. I hope the rest of your conference goes better.

In which I like it here

On April 23, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Work4 Comments

Brief post, because longdaytired, but two things happened today that you should know about. The main feature of today’s convention was visiting local magnet schools. This is what happened when we got there:

That’s every kid in the building at this international magnet school, lined up along the stairs on the way into the building, waving flags to welcome us to visit their school. A few minutes after I took this, they filed out about 20 of them to sing a song at us in five or six languages, and then their Special Olympics team came out to run the steps and head out to the Special Olympics. Which were today.

The schools I visited today were so wonderful that it actually ended up kinda depressing. Luckily this happened:

You don’t want to know how much I spent on dinner. But OMG. Worth every dime, especially since I’m being reimbursed for all the dimes.

There was also seared ahi tuna.

In general, I’m finding I really like Raleigh, in a very distinct Man, I could see myself living here sort of way. It strikes me as the type of city that Bloomington (as in Indiana, where I went to college) would be if Bloomington had two million people living in it. It’s beautiful, for starters; wooded everywhere– I’ve never lived anywhere with this many trees– and the downtown area is clean and neat and fun. I deliberately walked back from the convention center to see more of downtown, cutting through Fayetteville street and checking out the courthouse. It’s just a really neat town, and the bits of it I’ve seen outside the downtown area (granted, through the windows of either a bus or a taxi) have been really cool too. I’m sure part of it somewhere sucks but I haven’t seen it yet.

Tomorrow will either be tapas or oysters, and I’m gonna have barbecue for lunch. I’m excited. Oh, and the conference might be cool too. I hope.

In which I continue to eat well

On November 7, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

Made some better decisions today– I bought some stuff last night to have for breakfast this morning, so I wasn’t roped into paying extortionate prices for granola, and walked over to the convention center rather than taking the shuttle so that I could explore a little bit. I found a sushi place, far enough away from the bulk of the convention that there wasn’t going to be a line at lunchtime, so I ate well for lunch. Like fitty-dolla-to-hell-with-it-I’m-getting-reimbursed well. Om nom nom, goddammit.

I’m currently holed up at a bar in the atrium. The bar is actually closed, so it’s basically just a free seating area, and I’m going to work on the book while I wait for the next session to start. I’ll do one more today and then head back over to the hotel. Tonight, barbecue.

This is the waterfall twenty feet away from me:

It’s cooler in here today, too, which might be because it’s a bit cloudier outside or might just be because I’ve managed to avoid the ridiculous crush of people that yesterday was so plagued by. This place certainly does pretty.

Anyway, I’ve got an hour before I need to find my next session. I’ve gotten some fiction done today already, but I’d like a four-figure word count before I leave the conference. Wish me luck.

In which #Nashville redeems itself

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking5 Comments

It is known: if you cast a net and ask “Where shall I eat?” and then you see the same place mentioned by more than one person, and those people cannot reasonably be suspected to have colluded, you should probably try and eat at that place.

To wit: Nashville’s Loveless Cafe. Which is, as it turns out, really far away from my hotel, meaning that if I hadn’t rented a car there’d be no way for me to have gotten there, which justifies renting the car all by itself.

Worth.

It.

I am moving, children. I’m going to move into the parking lot of this restaurant and just live in a tent and eat there every day. The conference has been a bust so far, and I do not suspect that tomorrow will be better than today was. Dinner has redeemed the entire trip.

That is what they call the Southern Sampler Platter, which meant that I didn’t really have to choose what I wanted to eat; I could just say “Bring me everything!”

Ham. Fried chicken. Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Turnip greens in potlikker. Caramel sweet potatoes– oh, my Lord God, the sweet potatoes. Not pictured: some melt-in-your-mouth motherfucking biscuits. And sweet tea, of course.

Seriously, people, I could live off the sweet potatoes– and, oddly, the ham, which I was not expecting to be the star of the meal. “Ham’s ham” is something I might have said before eating that ham. Ham is no longer ham.

Tomorrow we are going for barbecue. I haven’t picked a place yet– I’m leaning toward Martins— but definitely barbecue.

(The conference has been crowded and hot and over way too big of an area and the conference center sorta sucks and the sessions I want to go to keep getting filled up before I get there or there are physical space issues that make me unwilling to stay. I’m not happy with the conference, at all. But oh man, did dinner make up for it. So happy.)

(Despite two straight “oddities” posts, I have no gripes about the hotel. It entertains me in places, but it’s fine.)

(Parentheses!)

Oh, almost forgot– our waiter’s name was Owen. Well, is Owen, as I’m pretty sure he’s still alive. Owen was an awesome guy, the type of server who makes a meal better. Hooray for Owen!

Beginning to suspect this won’t go well

On November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

I am in the type of place that thinks nothing of charging $13 for a couple of granola bars and a bottle of apple juice but can’t provide functional wireless access. This is not encouraging.

On the plus side, the atrium looks like this: