Nothing major going on today, but a few little bits and bobs to tell you about:
I just had a conversation with my wife about my vision. Short version: anything within about four or five feet is awesome. Beyond that things get blurry. Now, that’s a huge improvement to my previous “anything within eighteen inches is awesome” visual acuity, and I assume it’ll get better, but I’m doing this ridiculous thing where I can’t remember what, say, looking at the titles of all my books from my recliner used to look like, and it’s not like I can put my glasses back on to compare, now, is it? Tonight is the last night with the damn eye shields and man, am I excited about that.
Ghost of Tsushima is the new hotness around here; I played the first couple-three hours today, and before anything else it is abundantly clear that this is easily the most breathtakingly beautiful game I’ve ever played. That record was previously held by Horizon: Zero Dawn, I think, and Tsushima just blows that to hell. My jaw is hanging open half the time I’m playing it. My video games started with Pong, y’all. This is just unreal.
Second new record for Covid cases nationwide in two days today. In about ten minutes there’s a hastily-called Zoom meeting with two of the members of the school board; I’ll be attending. I emailed the superintendent and the entire board earlier this week about my concerns and didn’t use the word “motherfucker” once, so we’ll see how I do in a live meeting.
I rewired the lamp out by our driveway yesterday, something I’ve had on the “get to this eventually” list for years, so naturally we’re now thinking we should go get an entirely new lamp that uses solar energy. Either way, tomorrow I’m painting the post, I think.
I’ve not been reading a lot lately because it makes my eyes tired, but C.T. Rwizi’s Scarlet Odyssey is absolutely Goddamned amazing, one of the best books of the year, to the point where the sequel isn’t out until halfway through next year and I’ve still got 200 pages left in the book and I might pre-order it anyway. I’m hoping to finish it in the next day or two but I really haven’t been able to read as much as I usually do since the surgery, so we’ll see.
I was talking with one of my oldest friends the other day, and as one might expect the conversation turned to what my district was planning to do when school opens back up in … uh, less than a month.
“Nobody knows!” I said. “There’s no plan.”
Which, okay, is a slight exaggeration; it is fairer to say that the plan that they do have is grossly inadequate in every measurable way. But it’s a plan! It’s a plan that’s going to fail miserably, but it’s a plan!
She lives in another state, and like most of my long-term friends she is a college professor. (I am very much the uneducated rube among my closest friends, believe it or not.) So she is already trying to figure out how to manage her own classes in the best way she can, and she commented that she just didn’t know what the hell she was going to do if all three of her kids were home with her all the time. While she’s lucky in that she can work from home, that doesn’t mean that she can work from home and take on schooling responsibilities for three kids, who are all at inconveniently different grades and levels of responsibility.
I figure she’s not the only one.
I am here to help.
THE LUTHER SILER GUIDE TO EDUCATING YOUR OWN CHILDREN DURING A PANDEMIC, WHEN YOU ARE NOT A TEACHER, DO NOT WANT TO BE A TEACHER, AND FRANKLY WOULD BE PERFECTLY HAPPY TO LOCK YOUR OWN CHILDREN IN A BOX FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY IF IT MEANT THEY WOULD LEAVE YOU ALONE FOR A FEW MINUTES
It’s a working title.
Here is how to homeschool your kids until such time as it is safe to send them back to school:
Make sure they read every day. At least a couple of hours. I don’t care what they read. Game guides. Comic books. Nonfiction. Chapter books. Newspapers. Age-appropriateness is probably a good thing; if you have a library nearby, and it’s still open, take ’em a couple of times a month and get a big pile of books. When you have time, ask them about what they read.
Maybe– maybe— go on the internet, I recommend math-aids.com— find some math work from under the grade they are in right now, because you are making sure they’re keeping up basic skills, not reinventing the wheel– and make them do a couple of pages of math a day. Focus on basic operations, fractions, decimals, percentages, things like that. Story problems are good. Yes, I know you hated story problems as a kid. Make ’em do some math once in a while that doesn’t immediately tell them every step to do, is what I’m saying.
That’s it.
That’s the whole curriculum.
Worried about science or social studies? Okay, make some of those books they’re reading be about topics in those departments that they find interesting, and again, asking them about what they read is good. If you’re concerned about them getting some exercise, figure out the safest way to force them to run around once in a while and call that gym class. If they already play an instrument, have them keep practicing that with whatever they have on hand. If they don’t, this is not the time to learn. Call that music class. If they’re artistically inclined, get some books on art and buy some paper to draw on. There’s art class.
My point is, you do not need an expensive fucking curriculum and you also do not need to feel bad about being an inadequate educator when your actual job is keeping the lights on and food on the table (I have enough trouble just remembering to feed my own child, who would only eat once a week if we never made him) and a roof over their heads.
Keep them reading, make them do some math once in a while, and pull in stuff from other subjects that they find interesting. Do not fight with them on anything but the reading. And, again, if it has printed words on it it is reading. Your main focus is to keep their brains from either solidifying into cement inside their skulls or liquefying and dribbling out of their ears. We’re looking for a nice tofu-like brain consistency here, and yes, I just Googled “consistency of the human brain,” and it’s the best thing I’ve done all day.
It’s possible that there are laws wherever you live that regulate homeschooling, but I genuinely doubt anybody’s paying attention to them right now and I’m absolutely certain that if you have to tell the state what curriculum you’re using or some shit like that they aren’t going to come to your house and double-check. If your kid is enrolled in school and is e-learning, and you find the volume of work you’re supposed to keep track of for your kids to be impossible, email their teachers and tell them the deal. Chances are, it’ll be fine. The parents who are worried about it are not the ones we’re worried about.
Breathe.
It will be fine. Your kid will miss some learning and some later teachers will have to clean that up. That’s okay. It will be fine.
It will not keep them out of college. It will not keep them from being able to hold a job later on in life. They’re all gonna miss a good chunk of this year. Once they’re back in school, we’ll take care of it.
Just keep them safe, keep them healthy, keep them fed, and keep their brains at a nice, moist, tofu-like consistency. Everything else is fixable.
I had a hard time getting to sleep last night– those damn eye shields really are a pain in the ass– but beyond that I was busy writing this post in my head, starting with the kids waiting outdoors for the bus and going through to the end of the day. And, yeah, it was going to be long as hell. Like, Star Wars movie review levels of long.
And then I thought about it this morning, and it occurred to me that this doesn’t really need to be complicated.
We cannot reopen schools yet.
We cannot reopen schools because there is no way to make 34 people crowded into the same room safe, masks or otherwise. It is not possible given perfect compliance from everyone involved, and we will not get anything even vaguely close perfect compliance from everyone involved. And that, really, is the end of it. I can talk all I want about hand sanitizer and bathrooms and hallways and passing periods and discipline and lunch and breakfast and, dear God, band and choir,(*) but it all keeps boiling down to the fact that in my classroom I will have 32 kids and another adult beyond myself and that is not safe. Period.
I would be more willing to give this a shot if my district was setting things up in such a way that I saw half of my students each day. But even then, that model only holds up until someone gets sick, which is inevitable. Once we start talking about contact tracing and quarantine all hell breaks loose, and the one place where I am willing to literally point and laugh at my district leaders is when they claim that there will be enough subs to cover sick and/or quarantined adults.
This is an utter fantasy. No, there will not. There aren’t enough pencils and paper, for God’s sake, there will not be enough hand sanitizer and there will not be enough masks and there sure as hell will not be enough subs. There haven’t been enough subs for years. It’s not going to get better when the subs have to shove their faces into a petri dish to go make their little $100 a day, and once a single sub gets sick we have now potentially infected multiple buildings in the course of just a few days.
We can’t do this. We might try and do it anyway, because if you ever thought that maybe Americans weren’t utter idiots the last six months have rather definitively proved you wrong, but we can not do this.
I also keep seeing people throwing up their hands and pretending to panic about What Parents Will Have to Do if their kids remain home. I have said this before, and I will reiterate: first of all, your kids have been home since March, so let’s not pretend that this is a new problem. Your kids are home right now, because it is summertime, and there is no magic switch that flips in August and makes whatever child care scenario you have going right now somehow magically impossible. Keep doing whatever you’re doing right now. It might suck! I agree! I have a kid too, and I’ve been at home with him since March as well!
I agree. I just don’t care. Because your child care problems are not a reason for me to endanger my health and my family’s health. Your child care problems are not a reason to make what is already uncontrolled spread of a highly contagious and incredibly dangerous disease massively worse. Because that’s what will happen.
There are going to be teacher strikes in a few weeks if this isn’t settled better, folks. We aren’t going back. Nobody’s going back. Best get used to it right now.
And yes, this was absolutely the short version.
(*) I have many friends who are band and choir teachers. I am very sorry, but your classes are just going to have to go away this year. Your classes generate so many droplets that band instruments have special valves that are used to drain the spit out of them. It’s just not possible to do this safely right now, even in comparison with other classes. I love y’all, but … no.
I had what I had been told was an appointment for “measurements” for my LASIK surgery this afternoon, and it turned out to be a full-blown eye appointment in addition to the supplementary measurements, so this is what I looked like when I left the place– fully masked up, glasses fogged to hell, and my special wraparound plastic shades that made it possible to make it back home again. It’s about five hours later now and I’ve only just gotten to the point where I can see well enough to be able to read what I type; that said, I’m not as likely to notice typos as usual so don’t hold them against me, please.
The informed consent paperwork for this surgery is a trip, y’all. I’m only slightly exaggerating when I tell you that it declares that 1) the surgery will not work, 2) that it will also stop being effective in a couple of weeks, 3) that I will lose my vision altogether, and that also 4) I may lose both eyes and 5) it is entirely possible that the laser gun doing my actual surgery will explode during the procedure, immediately after it loses power due to a localized outage and a meteor strikes the building. It is the most comprehensive informed consent form I have ever signed, and I’m a little surprised that I’m still doing this after having every single thing that could possibly go wrong explained so clearly to me. I think I can still sue if the surgeon literally gouges my eyes out with a spoon, but I think forks are in the fine print somewhere.
That said, I got a nice drawstring bag and a t-shirt out of the deal, and the t-shirt is not only made from nice thick fabric but it looks like it’s going to fit comfortably, which is rarely the case from free t-shirts. I am trying to decide if actually wearing it to my surgery is the equivalent of showing up to a concert in a shirt from the band you’re seeing. I think probably it is.
In other news, let’s talk masks. I wasn’t aware that I was looking at a potentially two-hour visit when I walked in; I was expecting maybe half an hour of pushing my face into various devices and then to be done. The good news is I managed to make it through the entire two hours without a panic attack becoming a serious concern– which I would not have wagered was a thing I could do going into the appointment. Now, my glasses are a big part of what triggers the problem, and I didn’t have them on for most of the appointment, so that’s probably part of it.
That mask up there is my “best” mask. I got it for $12 at a medical supply place, and I’m considering heading back for a couple more so I can rotate through them. It’s treated with something antibacterial, supposedly; it looks okay, and it fits better than several others I’ve tried. But it folds in the middle and gets in my mouth when I talk– you can see the crease in the picture– and my beard constantly pushes the bottom of it up, so I’m always tugging it back down. As you can see, it folds up as well.
I’m considering doing some surgery on the thing with a paperclip or piece of wire to see if I can give that center vertical seam some more rigidity and structure so that it pushes out from my mouth more reliably, but it’s probably worth asking: does anyone have any particular kind of mask they want to recommend? I don’t want one of the kinds with a vent on them because they don’t work as well, and something washable is great, too. An N95 would do the job just fine but we are apparently still having a PPE shortage so I don’t want to use those, plus they’re not reusable. Something vaguely in the department of that one in terms of looks would be a good thing, too. I’ll need to wear it at work, so solid black is probably my best choice.
(It is also possible that I may need to give up on the idea of not having a close-cropped beard while we are on Mask Planet. I am not happy about that idea, but it may become necessary.)
My stress level has been through the roof lately, to the point where putting more than two or three words together even on here requires a lot more psyching myself up than it ever used to. And when I say “ever,” I mean dating back to my first blog, so we’re going back like fifteen or sixteen years here.
The one thing that has been keeping me sane the last few days has, no shit, been woodworking videos. They are astonishingly calming. I can’t get enough of them, and I’m going to have to be careful to not accidentally buy a lathe before school starts:
Here’s the … fun? Yeah, let’s go with fun– thing about planning completely optional eye surgery during a global pandemic: I have so much other shit on my mind right now that any sort of holy shit something terrible could go wrong and I could go blind I’m going to go blind anxiety just doesn’t even have time to penetrate. Because, well, if, I dunno, the machine explodes or some shit during the surgery, and I’m permanently blinded, well, then I guess I don’t have to worry about shit like returning to work any longer, now, do I? And considering that in… shit, seventeen years of teaching– is that right?– I have never once managed to make it through the first month of school without getting sick for a couple of days, it is fair to say that I am considerably more frightened of COVID-19 right now than I am of any shit going wrong during my five-minute eye surgery. That’s gonna be fine.
I just need to not die after the surgery.
There’s a School Board meeting on July 13th– the same day as the surgery, as it turns out– and rumor has it that more information about this reopening plan is going to be revealed and/or voted on there. I think there’s also some sort of virtual townhall planned in the next couple of days. But right now, nobody knows anything except for the part where what they have planned right now is not going to work. I will have every 8th grader in my building in my math classes next semester. Every single one. Here’s what Indiana’s current infection stats look like:
Note that unlike a lot of states, Indiana doesn’t report all at once, so our number creeps up over the course of the day, and the day’s not done yet. While we’re not Florida or Texas by any stretch of the imagination, our numbers are definitely creeping back up again, and I don’t see that changing by next month.
It’ll take all of a week, tops, before there’s an 8th grader who tests positive in my building. And that will have been a kid in my classroom, by definition. When you toss second-order exposures on there (I don’t know if that’s a technical term; what I’m getting at is Jimmy’s little brother testing positive, but not Jimmy yet) it may not even take a week. We had a positive in March right around when school let out and this had barely started yet.
I keep wanting to write a more academic, reasoned defense of why schools can’t reopen yet, and the fact is I can’t get past the part where I don’t feel like I should be endangering my family so that other people can go to work. If I was actually doing it for education, that would be one thing, but if anything has been made fucking undeniable about American culture in the last three months it’s that schools are looked at as daytime child care and not much fucking else. Go ahead, try and find someone making a genuine case for reopening schools for any reason beyond “parents can’t handle their kids being at home.” You will, to put it mildly, be challenged in this effort. There’s occasional lip service paid to educational inequity and how not everyone has internet access, but that’s generally paragraph nine of the twenty-paragraph article and the rest is all about balancing either an Essential Job with staying home or existential angst from having to be on Zoom while you answer the occasional math question. And I get it! I do! I had to do the same thing with my own kid from March through June, and I only have one of them!
I just don’t think your child care issues are a reason to risk my family’s health, to say nothing of my own, and if that makes me selfish, well, I’ll find a way to live with it. Because the more we find out about this motherfucker the worse it looks, and even with a good chance of everyone coming out alive on the other end I’m not interested in a fucking chronic illness for the rest of my life either. Sorrynotsorry.
Damn near all of us need to be staying home, and while we’re staying home the fucking government needs to get off their asses and start sending peoplemoney to pay their bills while they’re home, and if your answer to that is but Republicans then fine, let’s bring the fucking guillotine back and see how fast they change their fucking minds. I’m not in the mood to be civilized about this shit any longer. Enough of this shit. We’ll be over three million fucking infections by tomorrow. Enough.
My dad and I were driving me to college, and for some reason we’d rented an SUV– specifically, a royal blue Ford Escape– in order to get me there. I was driving, and for some reason I was having an immense amount of trouble keeping control of the car– any touch of the accelerator was pushing us back into the seats, tapping the brakes was tossing us into our seatbelts, and I kept trying to make minor corrections to how we were driving and ending up in the wrong lane or nearly off the highway.
At some point, one of those accidental lane changes ended up with us on an offramp and on a new, unknown highway, now definitively going in the wrong direction.
So: I was going back to school, not at all in control of the vehicle I was driving, and going the wrong direction.
I– well, all of us, really– got a letter from my superintendent this morning outlining the district’s plan to reopen this fall, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that their plan is basically “we reopen, and nothing changes, so try not to die.” Apparently he mentioned some vague sort of “we’ll try and create a virtual school, and you’ll have options for e-learning if you want them” thing at an event this morning, but there are no details, there is as of yet no staff for such a thing, and the letter makes no mention of it.
Everyone will be required to “have” a mask.
Have.
Not “wear.”
I was expecting a lot of different things, but “we’re going to do nothing” was not one of them, and I am frustrated and, frankly, frightened beyond my ability to describe it right now. Like, “take one of your emergency brain pills” frustrated.
So the best thing to do, obviously, is lash out at some bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m mad about, and luckily I just decided I was done with this deeply stupid book here. Here’s my entire review: don’t read this fucking book, and don’t trust anyone who tells you this is a good book, and I am seriously looking askance at the two Actual Authors who recommended this to the skies and back, because you’re both out of your damn minds.
Need some background for that review? Okay. First, look at the title. The title of this book is Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel, Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere. That title is wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious, and if you can’t literally get the front cover to your book done without being wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious then your opinions on writing are probably not to be taken terribly seriously. Second, this author 1) has no relevant experience or expertise in psychology and 2) has never written or published a fucking novel.
Which … really, at that point we’re done. Your book is garbage. I don’t have to read your book to know it’s garbage. Unfortunately, I did, which was clearly my mistake, as I’ll never get that time back, and I should have been using it to look for a job.
Also, there’s no “brain science” in the book. None what-so-fucking-ever. There’s the occasional sentence where she says things like “brain science tells us …” but there are never any citations or, like, quotes from actual people who work in the field, or anything like that, and she also appears to think that “brain science” is a thing, which it’s not. There’s no one in the world where if you ask them their job they will tell you “I am a brain scientist.” The word is psychologist. I would also accept psychiatrist or neurologist or probably a couple of others. Hell, even an anthropologist would probably be useful for some of the claims that she makes, but there’s none of that either. It’s all fuckin’ hooey, and worse, it’s hooey that really only applies to literary fiction and doesn’t work well with genre at all. Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you to George R.R. Martin, who could probably tell you a few things about how his books violate every single one of the rules in this book– if you can coax him off of his gigantic money bed in his gold house to come talk to you in the first place.
The whole book is bullshit; know-nothing, arrogant, prescriptive bullshit, and it’s an easy candidate for the worst book I’ve had to read so far this year.
