THREE day WEEK end (clap, clap, clapclapclap)

On February 14, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Pretty sure I’ve used that as a title for a blog post in the past, but whatever.

It was a really long fucking week, and not an especially good one, either professionally or mentally. My principal (who I really like, for the record) sent out a couple of emails at the end of the day regarding some walkthroughs that are going to be conducted next week and some expectations for how instruction should be going, and I read them and reflected on how I had to keep a seventh grader after class earlier today to make sure that he understood that if you have six pencils and you want seven you need one more.

That is not a joke, and the kid wasn’t fucking with me. At one point I literally put six Post-Its on the table in front of him and counted them and asked him how many more he needed to get seven. He said one instantly.

“Okay, what if they were pencils? If you have six pencils and you want seven, how many more do you need?”

(Pause)

“Forty-two?”

This has not been a week where I’ve been able to feel confident about my skills as an educator, let me put it that way. I have three days to get my head back on straight; I’m not sure that’s going to be enough time, and after several months of thinking yeah, it would be okay if I ended up doing this same job again next year, I’m very much in the mode of thinking that a night job at 7-11 might be a better use of my skills right now.

I’m not talking to anyone under twenty who I wasn’t personally responsible for the birth of for at least 48 hours. Hopefully that will improve things.

This is how much I don’t want to be grading

On January 26, 2020March 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

There is a new, canonical Benevolence Archives microfiction up at Patreon right now. I don’t update my Patreon nearly as often as I ought to but I’m also prone to not charging people during the months where I don’t update much, and there’s definitely enough content up over there now to justify your $1 or $2 every couple of months. So if the idea of more BA excites you at all, maybe check it out.

In other news, I am watching basketball again. IU is up four on Maryland at the moment with two minutes left; we’ll see if me posting that fact here ends up losing the game for them.(*)

(Yes, I have managed to more or less eradicate paying attention to sports from my life. No, I will never manage to eradicate being deeply superstitious about IU basketball. Never, as long as I live; it’s ground in there too deeply.)

That said, I’ve now blogged, written actual fiction, done a bit of light cleaning around the house, showered and gotten dressed today, so I’m much closer to an adult than I usually am on a typical Sunday and there is at least a chance that some of the ridiculous pile of grading I need to take care of is going to have some headway made on it after dinner.

Just a chance, mind you, not a guarantee. Just because I’m close to being an adult today doesn’t mean I’m a responsible one. 🙂

(*) Did Maryland end the game with a 7-0 run and win by a point, despite the fact that I waited to post this until after the game ended? Yes, they did. Am I nonetheless responsible for the loss, even though I could very well have deleted the evidence and not said anything about it to anyone? Yes. Yes, I am.

An unfortunate announcement

On March 10, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Okay.

I discussed this a bit the other day, but it’s official now: Sunlight is on hold, and when it comes back it may not be Sunlight anymore. I remain deeply unhappy with the manuscript as it currently exists, and it badly needs a massive restructuring. Basically a page one rewrite. There are bits of it I can salvage, but even those are going to need restructuring and moving around.

So I’m putting it aside for a while. The new goal– and I think this is possible, but y’all know how I am about hitting my own deadlines– is to have the next Benevolence Archives book available by IndyPopCon in June. That’s going to be crazy tight, I’m not gonna lie. But I’m already 1/3 of the way to my target wordcount for it, so it’s not impossible. I still want the Skylights sequel out in 2016, but it’s going to have to be later in the year. I need to put it away for a while to get a clearer perspective on where I want the story to go.

The good news is that I’m really happy with the stories I’ve written so far for Tales from the Benevolence Archives. This is good stuff. You’ll like it. I promise. 🙂

#Weekendcoffeeshare: Fear and Self-Loathing edition

On September 12, 2015September 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories20 Comments

I’ll be honest: if we were having coffee, the very first thing I’d do is point out that it’s the inaugural #SilerSaturday and hey my book is free at Amazon have you downloaded Benevolence Archives yet you really should no risk it’s freeeeeeee.

After that I would look sheepish and apologize and try not to bring it up again but I’d probably mention it at least once more because the book’s good dammit and if you love me you will download a thing for free.

But anyway.

After that? Parental and husbandly anxiety, mostly. My son, who is four, is enrolled at an insanely expensive private school that my wife and I can only barely afford, and that was before I took a twelve thousand dollar pay cut since my last job isn’t my job anymore. And he got suspended at the end of… well, not last week, the week before that, because he’s still pooping himself, for reasons that I’m not getting into right now (because coffee) but just trust me they make sense.

And my wife has been home with him for the entire time, because I’ve missed too many days of school already, and she’s letting me get away with the sort-of-excuse that it sort-of is. My kids have a math test this upcoming week and they’ve had a week less instruction than the other fifth-graders because I’ve either been sick or pulled out of my room to do something else so many times already. The boy is still inexplicably diarrhetic and he’s been back in pull-ups for the last couple of days after months in underwear, and we’re quickly getting to the point where we’re worrying that they’re just going to suggest un-enrolling him and trying again next year.

Now, my kid’s birthday is in August. He’s the youngest kid in his class. It would have been entirely reasonable to leave him in day care for another year (where they change diapers) and wait a year to enroll him in school. Plenty of people have made the decision that they’d rather have their kid be the oldest in his grade instead of the youngest, and some of them will defend it fiercely. We didn’t make that call, but there is a non-zero chance that we may be about to have it made for us.

And… hell, I’m taking it personally, I’ll be honest. This is a perfectly normal damn thing and I’m acting like he’s doing something to me, which he’s not, but… dammit. Insanely expensive private school, did I mention that? Insanely expensive exclusive private school. Like, I don’t feel like I belong there. Masters of the Universe type private school. And there’s a chance that my kid is gonna get kicked out because of poop.

It’s got me twisted. Really twisted, in a way I don’t like.

Eventually we might get around to the fact that I saw someone from high school this week who I haven’t seen in maybe fifteen years, and that’s still got me weirded out too, which happens every time I see someone from high school. I’ve not made a secret of the fact that I’m not super happy about living in the same state I grew up in, much less the same town. The conversation was perfectly happy and innocuous and pleasant, mind you, and even ended refreshingly, without the typical “We should hang out sometime!” lie that frequently accompanies these sorts of things. But… yeah. I’ve got a lot of reasons for my head to be muddled right now. I need to get it cleared out.

Download a free book. It’ll help. 🙂

In which I am disappoint

On June 4, 2015June 4, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading7 Comments

Had an annoying experience last night where I had to stop reading a book by an author who I really like because I realized that the book just really wasn’t ever going to start working for me. I’ve read a handful of other books by this guy and enjoyed them tremendously; this particular book was his first voyage into YA, but he kept the darker, grittier, more violent themes from his adult-oriented work precisely intact. I discovered very quickly that I’m not interested in YA where absolutely everything about the world sucks and everyone and everything is terrible.

(I’m not going to name the book. I’m not actually sure why; I just don’t want to. Be aware that it’s not terribly difficult to figure out what I’ve been reading if you visit certain readin’ themed websites, though.)

At any rate, I didn’t like the main character very much, the plot, which centered on bullying, was alternately enraging and weirdly triggering, and and in general everything was just kind of overwritten. It wasn’t enough for the bad guy to be a vicious bully, he had to be a literal skinhead neo-Nazi. We can’t just have a character beaten up, somebody’s gotta put out cigarette butts all over them or try to make them eat dogshit. And then the only-barely-veiled rape threats started, and peace out, thanks, I’ll be back for your next book for grown-ups but I gotta bounce on this one.

I changed the Goodreads rating three times before deciding that even though I hadn’t finished it I was content with a one-star. Ordinarily I won’t review a book I didn’t finish but in this case, especially knowing more bad shit was coming from the synopsis, I don’t feel as bad about it.

As bad. Still a bad taste in my mouth, though. This “not liking work from authors I enjoy” thing can stop now.

Ugh, pt. 2

On September 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know it while it was happening, but it’s now confirmed: last year did not go well. I have official state growth numbers on all my kids, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it: they suck. Indiana breaks kids into three growth categories, conveniently labeled Low Growth, Medium Growth, and High Growth. In the two previous years that the growth model has existed, I’ve had over half of my kids in High Growth and between ten and twenty percent (well, okay, 10% one year and 20% the next) as Low Growth kids. The rest, obviously, were in the middle. These numbers either had me with the best numbers in my building one year or tied for second or third, depending on how you measured, the second year.

Last year I only managed to get a quarter of my kids into the High Growth category, with fully forty-five fucking percent of them low growth. Even if I throw out a few of the kids who I don’t think it’s fair to count against me (in particular, the blind kid who transferred into my class in the third quarter and the handful of kids who spent large chunks of the year in jail or suspended) I’m still probably at a third low growth, which is way too fucking many. I had a brief theory that I was in trouble because I’d jumped up a grade and I was effectively competing against myself; I haven’t formally run the numbers but looking closely convinced me that that was not the case. Some of my highest-growth kids are kids I had two years in a row; some of my lowest-growth kids were kids I only had the one year.

I don’t have data on other teachers to compare myself to because I’m no longer in the same building; for whatever it’s worth, I can also see their language arts scores and by and large my students had better growth in math than LA. However, someone else doing worse doesn’t really make me feel better for having sucked last year. Even my honors kids didn’t really do that great on growth; I feel slightly okay with that because since it was the Algebra class, I didn’t fully concentrate on the 8th grade standards, and I don’t know that I can expect high ISTEP growth when I wasn’t concentrating on ISTEP skills over the course of the year. But that doesn’t exactly make me look better either, although they did quite well on the ECAs at the end of the year, which is something.

The more I think about it, the less interested I am in potentially going back into the classroom after the expiration date on this job runs out. I’m still most of a school year away at minimum (and may be four years away if I get lucky with a couple of things this year) but I still need to start thinking seriously about what is going to come next. Because right now I don’t miss teaching. I just don’t. And I really need to figure out what The Next Thing might be.

I will be in Indianapolis tomorrow and Thursday, speaking of the new job, so it may be quiet around here. I’m hoping to have a Big Thing to announce this weekend, so with a bit of luck I’ll make up for it.

Sigh

On July 29, 2014July 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching9 Comments

This picture is starting to make the rounds on Facebook. The original picture is a full-body shot of the kid standing in front of his house; I’ve cropped out everything but the relevant information, for what will soon be obvious reasons:

We’ll see how viral it actually gets, and whether any of you see it shared to your walls, but… yeah. One of mine.

Sigh.

In which that just didn’t work at all

On June 20, 2013June 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking13 Comments

I can’t bake. I don’t know why.

I have demonstrated over the last six months or so that I can follow a recipe. I’m not good yet at going “off-book,” for lack of a better phrase– I’m not able to look at my pantry and come up with a meal as opposed to deciding “I want this,” finding a recipe for it, and then going out and buying everything I might need to make that recipe. But there haven’t been that many categories of food so far that I don’t seem to be able to handle *except* for baking. Any dish involving anything called “batter” is going to go wrong in my hands. It’s annoying and I hate it.

This one shoulda been simple. Peel and chop up some apples, toss them with sugar and cinnamon, melt butter in my two 5 1/2″ skillets (the idea is that there’s one apple pancake per skillet, right?) then sauté the apples in the butter. Meanwhile, mix up the batter, which is your basic butter/flour/egg/milk/salt mixture, pour it over the sautéed apples, then bake the whole mess for ten minutes in the oven.

The recipe was seriously like five sentences long. This shoulda been simple.

Issues were as follows:

Waaaay too much butter for what I was trying to do. This I blame on the recipe. It said to melt the butter then use “half” of the melted butter for the batter; no. There were pools of melted butter rising to the top of the batter when I poured it into the skillets. This may possibly be related to issue #2, but I don’t think issue #2 would have been as much of a problem if I’d just had less butter to begin with.
I don’t think I sautéed the apples for quite long enough. There was too much apple for the skillets (leaving me with several pieces of cut, peeled, sugar-and-cinnamoned raw apple, which isn’t exactly a problem) but even with a bunch of them held back there was too much apple in the skillets and I didn’t cook them down long enough. This one’s my fault; I was trying to get everything done before Bek left for work so I figured I’d be able to cut short the apple-cooking part. It ain’t like raw apples taste bad; they’re just crunchier than properly cooked ones would have been.
Forgot the salt. Dumbass rookie move; on the other hand, it was just supposed to be a pinch of salt per skillet’s worth of batter so I can’t imagine it made a huge difference other than to the taste.
After that, though? The oven turned into a smoky hell, because the skillets flat weren’t big enough to hold the batter. “You should have used bigger skillets,” you say? Pfah. The recipe and the cookware are both from the same brand, and the cookbook I used is by the same company that makes the skillets. The recipe was literally tuned specifically for this skillet. The one you’re looking at turned into some sort of Fourth of July magic snake-lookin’ bullshit and the other one just flat didn’t cook at all; the butter boiled over the edges and burned in the oven, which meant that when I opened it the fires of hell poured out and I had three fire alarms going in my house at 6:45 in the morning with a sleeping baby not too far away. WHICH IS ALL SORTS OF AWESOME AND FUN LET ME TELL YOU.

The one I pulled the apples out of and then threw away, deeming it unsalvageable. The pictured “pancake” was at least edible but tasted awful, possibly due to lack of salt but possibly also just due to the recipe generally being crap. I may try this once more and make two of them in a much bigger skillet, which ought to minimize spillage and also give me a bit more room to sauté the apples properly before pouring the batter in. This ought to be something that tastes good, dammit; it’s bloody apple pancakes and apple pancakes are supposed to be fuckin’ tasty.

Bah. Food is stupid.