Good news/bad news

On December 11, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:

I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and

I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.

That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m gonna go die.

Summertime, I guess

On May 30, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

In which tomorrow is a new day

On December 10, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.

I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.

Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”

And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.

I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.

On degeneracy

On September 19, 2024September 19, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.

Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.

(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)

Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.

Bah.

Taking the night off

On April 22, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I have managed to set it up so that I have no lesson planning to do this week, and no photocopying to do in the morning, which means I came home and died on the couch, and now I want to go die on the couch some more. Go hug somebody.

Still alive

On September 15, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

All merry hell is continuing to break loose; I was the only 8th grade teacher to show up today, and we may have lost two more teachers.

Whee!

Nope, not tonight

On May 4, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

There is a post coming about this week, one that isn’t a movie review, a picture of a bookshelf, or a single sentence, but I just don’t have the emotional energy for it right now. I have to write lesson plans for tomorrow and I think I’d rather throw myself off a bridge; dealing with that and a blog post is simply too goddamn much. I’ll come out of the hole in the ground I’ve dug myself sooner or later but it’s not gonna be tonight.