I’m putting the Taj Mahal set together, finally, and I decided to do the first two bags tonight. I was kind of surprised at how colorful some of the bricks were since the Taj Mahal is almost entirely white, but Lego loves to use random colors for bricks that are going to get hidden anyway. I’ve wondered before what made them decide that some specific part ought to be some specific color and I’ve usually assumed it was because a certain color of plastic is cheaper or something like that.
It took me a few minutes to realize why they’d chosen these colors for the inside structure of this build. Are you smarter than me? Do you see it?
I actually thought the wheel in the middle was black and it appears to be blue, so I’m a little surprised the black pieces aren’t a dark blue, but yeah: for no better reason other than to do it, they’re echoing the colors of the Indian flag here, just to make the build a little bit more fun while you’re putting the base together. It’s a minor thing, I know, but every time I put a set together I find another reason to think their engineers really ought to be working on, like, global warming or something. These people are geniuses.
Last teaching day of the year today, and after three straight periods of teaching the whole day plus two days with optional after-school study sessions, I’m beat to hell. The final is tomorrow, and it took forty minutes to photocopy everything after the study session so I didn’t leave work after five. That time included one (1) copier jam that ate fifteen minutes, because, Christ, when modern photocopiers jam, they jam everywhere.
The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.
I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.
(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)
Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.
In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker:Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?
It’s too bad I can’t post pictures of students, because we had the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club today and took a group picture at the end. Somehow the same amount of pizza that they devoured like fucking fire ants the last time we had a pizza party left me with two entire pizzas this time, which might be the first time a group of seventh and eighth graders have left pizza uneaten in the entire history of humanity. Then again, that meant I got to send entire pizzas home with a couple of kids, which was more fun than it should have been.
We start reviewing for finals tomorrow, and I somehow managed to write all of one of my study guides and half of another at work today, meaning that this is going to be a significantly easier weekend than I was anticipating. Classes are going to be light in the morning tomorrow because of a field trip so I’m hoping I can get both of them finished off before the weekend even starts, which will mean the end of any lesson planning for 2024-25.
And we’re going to the Niles Renfaire on Saturday, so if it goes poorly I can at least buy a murder weapon for next week? Surely someone will be selling something bladed there, right?
Meanwhile, it was nearly 90 God damn degrees today somehow, and I’m gonna wear shorts tomorrow, because I’m not putting myself through another day like today was and it’s only supposed to be a couple degrees cooler.
(Twenty minute distraction)
… yeah, I don’t remember what else I was going to talk about, so I’ll see you tomorrow. 🙂
One thing I can be reliably counted on for is that I will massively overthink my awards at the end of the year. Each teacher in my building gives at least two; one for best student (this one is easy, because it’s objective; I look at my Algebra class, average their grades out over the entire year, and the highest kid gets it) and one for “most inspiring” student.
Y’all, “most inspiring student” is hard. There was one year where it was a gimme; the kid had walked into the building with literally no English at all midway through the first semester and proceeded to work his merry ass off for the rest of his time in the building, pulling a perfect GPA in Math and a respectable average in the rest of his classes along the way. This year I’m in the kinda weird position where I could justify a number of kids for being inspirational in theory but not necessarily inspiring to me specifically. My kid with the neurodegenerative disease who is in a wheelchair and has held down an A average, just for example. But honestly? He doesn’t work with me specifically all that much; he has a 1:1 aide and there’s also a special ed coteacher in the room with him, and he’s way more likely to talk to the two of them than he is to me. I have a couple of decent examples of the same general type of kid as last year’s winner, only none of them are as good of a student as he was and all of them had more English when I met them, plus I don’t want this to become The Smart ESL Kid award. There are a lot of kids who are amazing in a lot of ways but the word inspiring just doesn’t float through my head when I think of them. What I want is to be able to give like twelve “you are awesome” awards. Maybe a button that says I Am One Of Mr. Siler’s Favorites, Suck It Losers.
Right now I’m leaning toward a kid who is in my advisory but doesn’t actually have me for Math, which feels like a bit of a cheat; this kid is also in my weird little gay nerds club and I love them dearly so they will probably end up being the choice. But I dunno. The awards were due at the end of the day on Friday and I completely whiffed on them, but I figure I still have until the end of the day tomorrow to think about it.
Watch, both of my nominees will end up getting suspended tomorrow, for the first time ever in both cases. That’s how these things usually work.
I should probably start compiling my end-of-year posts, and the books wrap-up will be sometime in the next couple of days, but mentally I’m not there yet. 2024 was mostly fucking awful and in accordance with prophecy and past experience, 2025 will be much, much worse. Wrapping up this year means I have to admit next year is about to start and I’m not ready for that yet. So let’s call this another night off and try to write something with some substance tomorrow.
I bought eighty-six albums in 2024, a number that frankly I find surprising– I wouldn’t have guessed it was that many, and it’s probably upped a bit by the number of singles I purchased this year (See: Lamar, K.) but that’s still a hell of a lot of music. This, like last year, isn’t a Best Of list and the only order it’s going to be in is rough chronological, but here are some albums that I thought were notable from this year. And, yes, “this year” means “I heard it first this year,” not “It came out this year,” although most of these are 2024 releases.
T-Pain’slive album On Top of the Covers: Live from the Sun Rose has no right to be as good as it is. I didn’t realize I was a fan of T-Pain until hearing his cover of War Pigs, which made me spend money, and this album, recorded in front of a tiny crowd and featuring lots of T-Pain just sort of chatting and screwing around with the audience, is spectacular.
Be honest: did you know the Black Crowes were still recording? Did you know that Happiness Bastards was fucking awesome? I bought this one in a state of vague shock– their last release was in 2013, and I’d not heard anything about it prior to seeing it in Itunes’ pre-order list, but any child of the nineties has no right to pass this up. It’s great.
Speaking of bands from the nineties…
I talked about Pearl Jam’slatest release, Dark Matter, quite a lot when it came out, mostly because I didn’t listen to anything else for a month. It’s their best album since Vitalogy. That is the highest of high praise. You’ll notice a lot of live albums in the list later; it’s because I needed live versions of all of the songs on this album. Album of the year, no real competition.
If you had told me at any point prior to its release that one of my favorite hiphop albums of the year would be by LL Cool J I would have laughed at you, but The Force is the best thing he’s released in a long, long time. I used to be a big fan of his and then kinda fell away as he left the harder-edged persona of his earlier albums away (and focused on acting instead of rapping) but this reminds me of everything that he was capable of as a younger rapper, and his duet with Eminem on Murdergram Deux is one of the best songs he’s ever done, complete with the best single verse I’ve ever heard from him.
I found Kharii through TikTok, of all places, where she’s fond of freestyling straight into the camera, and her chill, slightly hippie rap vibe ended up right up my alley. Microdoses of Me is a full-length album and you’ll notice a couple of EPs in the list later as well.
This was Kendrick Lamar’s year in a lot of ways, and his unannounced drop of GNX toward the end of the year was one of the best surprises (possibly the only good surprise) of 2024. Kendrick has always been an artist who I respect more than I like, and his last full-length album kind of left me cold, but GNX is great even if it doesn’t piss on Drake enough. Mustaaaaaaaaaaaard!
Another “wait, they’re still recording?” release, and also another “not really a huge fan, just picked it up for the hell of it” release, The Cure’s new Songs of a Lost World is the most hypnotic, endlessly listenable thing I’ve heard this year. If I was trying to write a book I’d have this on constant repeat, because it just sort of worms its way into your brain and makes you focus. One thing: don’t listen to Endsong, the final track, while driving. It’ll put you in a trance and that’s a bad idea at 70 miles an hour.
They released a double album a couple of weeks ago, pairing this with a live version. Don’t bother; the live version sounds damn near exactly like the studio recording and it was really disappointing.
Okay, one more:
I don’t have the slightest recollection of what caused me to pick up Doechii’s latest album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, because previously I had only heard of her from a couple of clips on TikTok– not even any actual videos, because as far as I know she’s not on the platform, there have just been a couple of her audio clips that have gone viral. Well … thanks, whoever you are? She kind of reminds me of Kharii in that her rapping is really laid back and chill, but more slickly produced and a little bit more mainstream. They even both do the double-i thing. Either way the albums pair together really well.
Here’s the whole list. Let me know if there’s anything else you want me to talk about:
I am bound and determined to get some agendaless lazing-about time in tonight, and for the first time all week I don’t have anything to do for school and therefore don’t need to struggle with my Goddamn desktop— I’m typing this on my iPad, which would have been a monstrous pain in the ass to write tests on but works perfectly fine for bloggery. I published a post at some point about the several stages of being “back” at the beginning of the school year, and I think I’ve probably reached the first stage of being “done,” or maybe the second, the first being finishing all lesson planning for the year and the second being accomplishing all teaching. As they have finals tomorrow and then three days to finish off any missing work they care to do, while I’ll almost certainly show someone how to do something on an individual basis at some point between now and next Friday, I’m done with whole-group instruction for the year.
Done with Grading will be the next step, which I’ll hit next Wednesday, and then The Children are Gone. I might need to go in the Monday after school lets out— or at least sometime that week— to finish off closing out my room, since I’m changing classrooms in the fall so the job is a touch more involved than usual. But that’s it, and I think I can probably call myself done-done once the kids are gone.
I have no further lesson planning to do for the 2023-24 school year. I know exactly what my students will be doing each class period for the rest of the school year.
Now, granted, “what they will be doing” on some of those days is nothing.
And I have some practice finals I need to write this weekend. Like, I know what days they’re doing them, but they don’t actually exist yet.
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