Tag: exhaustion

I would like to announce…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

…thus far today I have committed no murder.

Must be February

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching12 Comments

paperworkOh, Christ, I’m tired.

The following happened today:

  • School counselor dropped off a new student, halfway through class, while I was teaching, on absolutely no notice.  The new student is blind.  What is this I don’t even.  How the hell am I supposed to accommodate a blind student on no fucking notice?  What?  Are you kidding me?
  • NO, really, are you kidding me?  You didn’t really just drop off a student with a major disability into my classroom with no notice, right?  Because, maybe you don’t know this, but I don’t have a large-format photocopier in my classroom.  Which means that the kid can’t do a single thing I’m doing today, not to mention that I mostly teach from the board and he can’t see the board ever, and no there aren’t any notes I can give him because you didn’t tell me he was going to be in my class.  
  • Fuck.
  • At least three different union issues dropped into my lap today, after an extraordinarily quiet school year.  Three in one day.
  • A parent who has– and I just checked– literally never emailed me about her son apparently spent half an hour in the office during seventh hour griping about how she’s been “trying and trying and trying” to get ahold of me for help with her son’s math grades. This is manifestly untrue.  If her kid would turn in his fucking work he’d be fine.  She knows this.  That’s the answer to “how do I get his grades up,” he needs to turn his goddamn work in.
  • Italics.
  • Just took a closer look at the kid’s grades from last quarter and holy shit I dare her to try and make this my fault.  Bitch I will destroy you.
  • Right after finally remembering to email someone to tell them that I can’t attend a meeting with them tomorrow afternoon because I already have another meeting scheduled outside of my building, I got an email from my first meeting canceling that meeting, so I got to email the first person back and cancel my cancellation.  I have literally thought to myself “dammit, remember to email so-and-so and let her know you can’t be at her meeting” a dozen times today and as soon as I do it my reason for not going falls apart.
  • I am still sick.  That’s not a “thing that happened,” but I don’t care.
  • Had to meet with the DC kids today to tell them that the price of their trip has gone up because sixteen of the forty-two kids who signed up for the trip didn’t actually bother to pay for the thing.  One of the sixteen is the child of the parent who was griping about me in the office; she has also complained to me that we didn’t do any fund-raisers to pay for the trip, ignoring the fact that a) her kid didn’t so much as mow a damn lawn over the summer to raise any money, that b) I applied for over forty thousand dollars in grants for the trip, which I didn’t get, and c) there is scholarship money available to her through the tour company which– wait for it– she did not apply for.  Also d) I’m not the motherfucker who signed my kid up for an eight hundred dollar field trip with no fucking clue how I was going to pay for it.  Pretty sure that was you.
  • I am expecting much drama tomorrow from the DC meeting.  I can even predict which parents it will come from.
  • Untold idiocy after school with a parent trying to get one of her kids brought to the office instead of riding the bus.  I can’t even describe it.  This should be a simple thing for everyone involved and instead it was a massive screamy idiotic clusterfuck.

Third quarter always sucks.  It is an iron-clad stone-cold unavoidable undeniable rule of the universe.  But holy shit is it coming on with a vengeance this year.

Fuck.

The highlight of the day…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

shut up…was hearing about a student who explained to her teacher that she needed to go see the nurse because “the color was coming off” of her skin.

That’s new.

Didn’t actually happen to me, though.  I’m exhausted beyond anything that’s reasonable right now; I got a decent amount of sleep last night and despite a couple of Tweets to the contrary I had a decent day at work, although my worst group was easily my Honors class, which 1) rarely happens and 2) tends to annoy me out of proportion to their behavior.

It’s 7:13.  If I’m in bed in 45 minutes I’m not going to be surprised about it.

In which this isn’t helping

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching17 Comments

2014-01-10 19.28.23I am, generally, someone who tries to be realistic about his students.  Teachers tend to run the gamut; some of them truly believe that all of their kids can change the world if they want to, and far too many succumb to cynicism and don’t give their kids credit for anything.  I try to split the difference as much as I can. The simple fact– and this would be true regardless of what kind of district I worked in, and I do not work in a high-income district– a certain percentage of my kids are going to exit the world more or less as poor and ignorant as they were when they came into it.  I’ve found out about three or four former students just in the last few weeks who have had babies recently; none of them have graduated high school yet, and at this point I pretty much doubt any of them ever will.  The thing that keeps me going, though, is that despite all their disadvantages in life and despite an American culture that pays lip service to education but does not actually give a damn about it or value people who have it, some of my kids are going to succeed despite all the shit life has stacked against them.  And here’s the thing:  I cannot look at a roomful of seventh and eighth graders and pick out which ones are going to make it and which ones aren’t.  It is entirely possible that a kid who I think is already fucked for life at 12 is going to find a way to escape the morass of shit he’s found himself in and lead a good life.  It’s also entirely possible that my honors kid who I think I’m gonna be asking for a job in twenty years is going to have something happen to her that sends her spiraling.

I know the truth about this country; I know that education can’t actually overcome poverty, most of the time, and I have no illusions that my contributions in seventh grade math– seventh grade, the grade where any human being, regardless of any other factor, is least likely to, able to, or interested in Taking Shit Seriously For Their Future– seventh grade is generally the worst year of your life— are going to make any real difference.  For some kids? Sure, absolutely.  For all of them?  Most of them, even?  Not really.  They’re gonna go do what they’re gonna go do, and maybe that’ll be Good Things and maybe that’ll be Bad Things, but the simple fact is their seventh-grade math teacher isn’t gonna make all that much difference to how things turn out.

But again:  I can’t tell the difference from here.  I can’t tell you which of these kids I’m actually gonna make a difference with.  I can’t tell you which of the kids are actually gonna remember me (positively, hopefully) and which won’t.  And given the number of kids who have told me I was their favorite teacher or mine was their favorite class who I would have thought hated me, sometimes I’m not even sure they have any idea.

(Kinda embarrassing late edit:  Because I can’t see the future, I have to treat all of them as if they’re going to make it.  Even if I think they’re not going to.  All of them, all the time, every day.  Which, weirdly, is less positive than it sounds, and frankly is frequently exhausting.  That was kinda the point of this whole first part and I never actually said it.)

I’ve not even started this piece and I’m sidetracked already.

I talked earlier this week about what we’re doing in class:  composite shapes, like the one in the diagram above– an actual problem in their math workbook.  Here’s the thing:  for good or for bad, my kids are not very good at geometry right now.  They can’t quite wrap their heads around how formulas work, they don’t want to bother to remember them, and even when they do they frequently leave bits out or randomly decide that even though they multiplied pi by the radius squared the last thirty times they calculated the area of a circle they’re gonna add it this time.  And, while I’m going back and forth on things, I myself bounce back and forth between “You fucking idiots have been doing this shit for three or four years now, when the fuck is it going to click?” and trying to be a bit more reasonable and recognizing that even with the smart ones learning is going to involve backsliding and making mistakes and goddammit circles were a pain in your ass when you were their age too so stop being an asshole.

Simple shapes are bad enough.  Maybe they shouldn’t be; maybe I should be a better teacher and they should get them by now; maybe they should be better students and maybe just once in a while spend ten seconds studying or actually pick up a book and do some damn homework once in a while.  They don’t; I know this.  Doesn’t change my job.  Ain’t nobody gonna blame the kids.  It’s me and I know it; governors can’t get elected calling kids stupid.  They’re gonna call me incompetent instead.

Simple shapes are bad enough; when you glomp three or four of them together and then don’t provide all of the measurements that they need, it gets much worse.  They don’t quite understand which operations to use at any given time, most of the time; they’re terrible at anything involving multiple steps, and they cannot, cannot reason their way out of a paper bag with a bright light at one end and a rabid dragon-wolverine at the other.  Composite shapes are a horrible sick combination of all of these things and plus it’s the first week back from Winter Break and plus we’ve been doing this for two days and they just. do. not. get it.

Will they get it?  Yeah, probably, eventually.  With me, maybe not?  But maybe in eighth grade, they’ll get it.  Somebody’s gotta teach this shit first, and I remember being pretty bad at long division once upon a time.  It clicked sooner or later.  This will too.

But back to that shape.  Here, look at it again:

2014-01-10 19.28.23I’m gonna admit something:  I looked at that figure for three or four minutes with one of my smarter kids today, and I’ve spent another five or six minutes looking at it now, before posting it in front of God and the internet, and I swear to you that I have no goddamned earthly idea right now how the hell I might find the area of that shape.  I say this fully aware that some smartass is going to set me straight within five minutes, either here or on Facebook (let’s be honest, it’s gonna be Facebook) and I will be properly chastened at that time.  But right now?  I don’t even know where to start.  It sorta looks like two trapezoids pushed together, which would be fine, except I don’t have the height on either of them; that angle up at the very top might be a right angle but I think it’s the only one.  There’s no good way to make triangles out of it; again, I don’t have any heights to go with the bases.  Parallelograms are right out because the angles don’t match.

Literally:  no clue.

And my seventh-graders are supposed to be able to figure this shit out.  My seventh-graders, who struggle with basic triangles, and require patient coaching to figure out the area of L shapes that are plainly and obviously (even to them!) two rectangles stuck to each other.

I don’t like having to say “I don’t know how to do that; skip it” in fucking math class.  Especially when I’m spending effort, as I have to every day, trying to convince them that yes, you can do this.  That yes, you do understand this.  That yes, this is possible to begin with.  It doesn’t fucking help when my completely grown three-college-degrees-two-master’s-degrees-twelve-years-of-teaching-experience-and-a-partridge-in-a-fucking-pear-tree ass proves unable to solve a problem that they are expected to do.

It was a frustrating day.  Go ahead, point out how I fucked this up; it’s probably something obvious.

In which I find a way to mention sriracha again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews, TeachingLeave a comment

20131108-174700.jpgI have, conservatively, and depending on how much I push down on the stack prior to measuring it, between four and six inches of poorly-organized and no doubt deeply depressing grading to wade through this weekend. I am not remotely in the mood for it right now; I think pulling together next week’s lesson plans (and, uh, this week’s lesson plans) is probably about as ambitious as I’m planning on getting tonight. I have a blog post to write, the last 40 pages of a relatively entertaining book to blaze through, and Baldur’s Gate. I think that’s probably enough to get me through a three-hour shift at OtherJob.

Three of my favorite kids (and the sister of one of the three, who I haven’t actually ever had in class due to her age but I’m fond of) all transferred out today. It’s got me in a deeply pessimistic mood about my job during a month that has already seen much, much more than its share of pessimism, and I caught myself looking at job listings at private schools again yesterday. There’s a tiny silver cloud in that one of the two Kids Who are Always Suspended was spreading the word that he was transferring schools on Monday as well, but he apparently has given two different schools out for where he’ll be landing so I’m not holding my damn breath. Naturally, even in that situation, he’s the one of the two who I actually kind of like despite his constant attempts to derail my classroom; the nicest thing I can say about the other one is that the world would be a better place had he been a blowjob.

So, yeah, that’s where my head’s at right now. Also, since I apparently review commercial food items now, I had what Subway is calling their “Sriracha Chicken Melt” for dinner tonight. While it was tasty (and spicy enough that, half an hour later, my nose is still sorta running) there are little advertising placards all over the store that describe the sriracha as “creamy.” Sriracha is a lot of things, but creamy is none of them. Something else sriracha isn’t: orange. So I don’t know what the hell I was eating on that sammitch, but it wasn’t sriracha.

Mmmm, sriracha.

IN WHICH NEVER MIND

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

Today was actually a pretty good day, all told. For some reason, my first and second hour class was in a behaving sort of mood today– or at least they entered a behaving sort of mood just as soon as the first kid to act up had his parents emailed on the spot– and the rest of my classes more or less followed suit. My main plan right now has to be to come up with a way to get through Monday without losing my soul to despair, which has been the pattern set by the last several Mondays.

OH MY GOD OTHERJOB SO BUSY WHY IS IT JULY GOTTA GO

Holy crap, is it the last warm Friday night of the year or something like that?  For the last several Fridays I’ve been able to write and/or read and/or grade more or less in peace at OtherJob because we haven’t had enough customers to keep me away from the laptop.  We got killed tonight starting two hours ago and just calmed down about twenty minutes ago.  And it was a crazy group of people, too– one group of Juggalos, one group of about fifteen Mennonites, and the local center for severely and profoundly disabled people had a crew out.  All at the same time, plus the usual assortment of families and couples on dates.

I cannot deal with Juggalos and Mennonites and Logan Center folks at the same time.  My brain can’t cope.  The Mennonites are all on Rumspringa and trying to buy weed from the Juggalos and the Logan Center kids keep asking who smells like pinecones.  Brain: broken.  At one point I was so frazzled I called a grown man “sweetheart;” I’d just been arguing with his daughter about which of us had had a longer day.  She was about seventh or eighth grade which tends to trigger my teacher vocabulary.   Luckily for me, he took it in stride– he turned to his daughter, said “He wins,” and then told me he was flattered but I wasn’t his type.

I may need to go home and get to bed soon.

Let me know what you think of the new site design, by the way.

In which leave me alone universe

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, CookingLeave a comment

All I actually want from life right now is to have nothing to do.   Unfortunately, these two piles of worksheets here don’t count as nothing and I probably shouldn’t cheat by not actually grading them or throwing them away or summat.  I just want them to be done and to not be my problem any longer so that I can have seven or eight hours of actual relaxation before going to bed tonight.

I may be growing weary of six-day weeks, guys.

That’s all for now. Somebody spent last night trolling through the archives (I SEE YOU) so I don’t even feel like I have to babysit my traffic today.  Screw you, pointless metric-obsession!  Hah!

Making reubens for dinner.  Read a book about a guy named Reuben last night and he made me hungry.  Plus, foodspin.

G’bye.

tl;don’t r

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized1 Comment

In accordance with prophecy, the post that instructed you to not read it if you respect me (which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wrote last night and delayed until noon today) has received a full day’s worth of traffic already.  I hate you all.

I spent all day today putting out fires, and right now I’m split between basically writing a short-ish “YAAR EXHAUSTION” type of post or going exhaustive and giving you a moment-by-moment breakdown of the horror that was my day.  I think I’m leaning toward exhaustive– after all, I’m at OtherJob, my lesson plans are already done, most of my grading is already done, and it’s been raining all day so there really isn’t much else to do.

It is entirely possible that this post will end abruptly with “fuck this, you get the idea” or something similar; please don’t hold it against me.  After all, you already got a post today, right?

BEFORE SCHOOL:  I wake up on time, but somehow going into the office to check and see if my paycheck came in and my union dues got paid takes half an hour.  I have no idea where the time went; I rush through my shower and manage to forget to eat breakfast before leaving the house.  I do manage to pack a lunch, which is an unimportant detail except insofar as it indicates that I was in the kitchen while I was forgetting to eat.  I manage to make it to work on time.

AT SCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS:  As I’ve mentioned previously I cover the gym in the morning.  There are a couple of other adults in there with me by the time the lion’s share of the kids are at school but it’s not uncommon for it to be me and two hundred kids.  Today, our assistant principal (new to the building this year) comes in and asks me in a rather pointed fashion what the building policy is on cell phones.  Note: she is fully aware of the answer to this question, which is that the kids basically aren’t supposed to have them, ever, and if they do they’re to remain in backpacks until such time as they are placed in lockers, and at all times they are to be off.

I explain to her that my policy on cell phones is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None; I ignore anything that is plainly related to listening to music, force phones to be put away when anything that could involve taking pictures is taking place, and tend to react reasonably, but harshly, to kids who are actually talking on them– which is rare.  The main reason is that every second kid in the gym has a cell phone with them and if I start taking cell phones away (which I am fully empowered to do by district policy) I will do nothing but take phones away and fight with kids every morning, all morning.  I fully understand why this is the policy in class but it is virtually unenforceable when the ratio of kids with cellphones to teachers doing something about them is literally a hundred to one.  I am not interested in that fight every day, and kids who are being reasonably discreet are going to be ignored.

She does not appear happy with this explanation until I look around and find five kids who are quietly listening to music and ask her which one she’d like me to take a phone away from first; that child will immediately find the other four and ask why I’m not taking their phones away instead of whoever I’m talking to.  They will then report to their parents that I’m picking on them.  No thank you.  This appears to clear the fog a bit and the conversation ends with no directive to change my policy.

The kids are on edge in a weird sort of way but there aren’t any fights or any real threats of one.  But there’s a weird vibe in the gym that I don’t like.

HOMEROOM:  The bright spot of my day, once the girls are done screaming about another spider in the hallway, which is quickly becoming the theme around here lately.  We do a Word of the Week; this week’s word was “ration.”  The kids are supposed to write a sentence for me; I select the best two or three and send them to the librarian, and he names a victor for each grade level.  One of my girls wins today.  If my name were Mr. Smith and her name were Charlie, this would be the sentence:  “Mr. Smith told me that he has a ration of Charlie that he is allowed every day, and I don’t get to talk to him again until tomorrow.”

I am beloved, obviously.

SUCCESS:  (It’s between homeroom and first hour, I didn’t name it, shut up.)  I’m ten minutes into my lesson when the teacher next door asks if she can borrow me for “a minute.”  There are two teachers in the room for Success so I have the other one take over and go into the hall.  There is an eighth grade girl who I only know by sight (new to the building this year) pacing and muttering angrily in the hallway with her fists clenched and tears in her eyes.  I get over my initial why the hell is this my problem bewilderment and ask her what’s wrong.

Here’s a thing:  Seventh and eighth grade girls are really fucking easy to manipulate.  I don’t know if you knew that but holy Christ is it true.  Some fifth grader– a fucking fifth grader— on the bus asked her if she thought she could beat up some other student, and now she’s angry because she has to fight this other student.  Who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the teacher next door) happens to be in my room at that very moment.  I spend a few minutes trying to calm her down and then call the other student into the hallway.  They are both saying stupid shit like “I don’t wanna fight her, but if she hits me I’m gonna kick her ass,” and pointing out that both of them are starting their sentences with saying that they do not want to fight is not doing the job it should of convincing them that, no, nobody’s actually going to fight here.

This conversation literally costs me the rest of the period.  By the end of it I’m reasonably convinced that I’m not going to have to break the two of them up at any point today and I’m ready to break the fifth grader’s head myself.  Then the teacher pulls another student out of her classroom who I have to convince that none of this shit was his business and he doesn’t need to threaten the first girl because nobody wants to fucking fight here so stop being a damn asshole.  I make a mental note to have a stern word with the fifth grader and bemoan the critical thinking skills of everyone under 30.  I do virtually no teaching in my first class of the day.

FIRST AND SECOND HOUR I have to spend keeping an eye on one of my autistic kids because he’s making his para insane and in general the kids are being weirdly dependent and pretending to not be as bright as they are.  This is an affliction that is not at all specific to them but they’re bad about it; I need to break them of this habit.  I have deliberately put a review packet together for my kids today because I have a crapton of desk work that must get done by the end of the day and my prep period was full before I even walked into the building.

(Note: this is something that most people don’t realize about teaching.  I have virtually no time to do anything during my day that isn’t teaching.  Any paperwork of any kind, including all of my grading, gets done on my own time.  It had piled up too much by this point.  It was time to have a work day.)

At any rate, this plan didn’t work out, because the kids had way too many questions.  I got a bit done but not as much as I wanted.

THIRD AND FOURTH HOUR was when all hell broke loose.  Third and fourth hour contain The Twins, who are several posts unto themselves and who I will talk about in more detail when I have the mental energy.  And if I’m being honest this is already a fourteen hundred word post and I haven’t even gotten to the stressful part.

So, yeah: I’m gonna abbreviate.  A lot.  The twins are, very soon, gonna get the shit kicked out of them, and it’s going to be their own damn fault– and that is not something I am prone to say about my students, particularly students who have obvious developmental issues (I suspect fetal alcohol syndrome; this is unconfirmed.)  But they piss off everyone they come into contact with, more or less deliberately, and then they tattle on the kids they’ve pissed off.

For example: if walking past the desk of the biggest gangbanger in the building, a kid who was in jail before he got expelled from his previous school and sent to us, maybe you don’t knock his shit on the floor on purpose.  Because he might literally kill you.

It’s happened twice.

The kids nearly caused two different fights today, and that’s not counting the number of students they got pissed off at them.  I ended up sending them out of my room with my coteacher for their own safety and not only arranged for them to not be in the halls during passing period for the rest of the day but literally created a security detail to get them to their buses at the end of the day so that they didn’t have to be in the gym with the rest of the kids.

I fully expect to find another article in the paper in a few months about how I didn’t do anything about the way they were mercilessly bullied, by the way.  I’m at 1700 words; this post would be twice as long if I actually talked about all the nonsense they created today.

And that was before my fifth and sixth hour got into my room.

God, I’m tired.