A game I enjoy playing every year: on one of the three days before longer breaks (Spring, Thanksgiving, Winter) I hand the kids a word search called Famous Mathematicians. It’s their names. I usually do a few of them and split the classes up or sort of randomly spread them around, and this year I decided to pack everyone’s names into one 35×35 grid. There are 119 student names on that grid, and yes, some of them are backwards.
Ordinarily I don’t use anyone’s real names on the blog, but I don’t intend to provide you with a key, which means some of these names are absolutely not going to be uncovered, and I figure finding out that out of my 119 8th graders, one of them is William and another is Sarah is probably not actually any real breach of confidentiality, especially when they’re all embedded in an image and not actually in searchable text. (The “Sara” in the bottom row is an accident! I do not have a Sara.)
At any rate, I can’t come up with any way this could bite me in the ass, so if you’re really bored over the long weekend I hope you have coming, feel free to print this out and see if you can find 119 human-sounding names in there. If I come up with a way this could cause me trouble, I’ll throw the post behind a password, but I don’t think it’s too likely.
(My bank password’s in there too, just for the hell of it.)
I just went and looked, and it has been five years since I did not post about being horrendously sick sometime during the last week of August or the first week of September. Tomorrow is the last school day of August. I am, at the moment, healthy. Will I make it to work in the morning? We shall see.
Honestly, this year continues to be the best start to a school year I can remember; I’ve now made it through two and a half weeks of school without even threatening an office referral, although we did have a little drama blow-up between some of my girls today that threatened the peace and harmony of my little universe for a while. Everyone decided to be reasonable, though, so we’re all good over here in Silertown.
Anyway, I’m going to spend the rest of the night with my face buried in Katabasis, so y’all be good.
We spent a pleasant afternoon at the Niles Renaissance Faire today, or at least a pleasant hour and a half or so, and while I didn’t find a cool hat or a cool cane, both of which I’ve been on the lookout for, I did come home with a neat set of dice and a Kukri. I can now add to the pile of medieval weaponry that is currently sitting in the corner of my office, not on display or anything, just sort of sitting there, because I have no self-control at all and access to adult money.
So my club of weird, wonderful little queer kids decided they wanted to do a scavenger hunt. We put the list of items together today. They have a week:
A pop-it
Any object with a rainbow theme
A piece of handmade jewelry
An actual real world paper map not printed by a printer
A map of a fantasy world
Something with fire (nothing illegal please)
An unbroken egg
One Croc
One chancla (bonus points if it’s the same color as the Croc)
A hat with a bird on it
An action figure
A unicorn (three-dimensional, not a picture)
A school hallway pass, signed by a teacher, with “APPLESAUCE” written as the student’s name. I must be able to read the teacher’s name and you can not explain why you need this.
A [name of our school] article of clothing. Your ID does not count.
The wrapper for a Jolly Rancher
An unsharpened pencil of at least two colors.
A receipt from CVS, Walgreen’s or 7-11.
A recipe for baklava.
A toilet paper tube. No toilet paper may be attached.
An unused but unwrapped Band-Aid.
A button with two holes in it.
A bobby pin
A safety pin
A clothespin
A piece of paper with a clear fingerprint on it.
A Nevada quarter
A piece of paper foreign currency
The name of one of Mr. Siler’s favorite books. This will be ten books and to keep things fair Mr. Siler will share a list of the books with another teacher.
A phone video of you dancing and singing the alphabet.
A milk sticker. The milk does not have to be dairy based.
A paper wall calendar from 2023.
A container for a large fries from McDonald’s.
A piece of turquoise.
A pink Lego. You may not steal Mr. Siler’s Legos.
A yellow Zip Tie.
A tie clip.
A cassette tape.
A DVD.
A piece of hair from a teacher. The hair must be in an envelope and the teacher must sign it. You cannot explain why you need the hair. You may lie.
A piece of soap in any color other than white.
A picture of two stuffed animals in a place stuffed animals are typically not found. They must look like they are upset with each other.
A Halloween wig. It cannot be a wig a normal person would wear on a normal day.
A picture of your parents/guardians/responsible adults when they were young.
A positive affirmation from [either of the social workers]. This can be written on paper or emailed.
A toy car.
A picture of yourself in preschool (3-5 years old)
A horoscope clipped from a newspaper or printed from the internet
A Marvel comic book.
The Secret Item from [the principal]. I have not decided what this is yet so give me some time.
A video of any teacher rapping. You cannot tell them why you need the video.
BONUS: Any item so strange that no one else recognizes it.
I will report back on how this goes. They were super excited about putting the list together; we’ll see how many of them actually bring a bagful of stuff next week.
We’re going to present these in reverse order, because one of them is a better picture than the other:
I finished the Lego Himeji Castle set this evening, which turned out to be a really fun build even if it continues the fine Lego tradition of putting a bunch of cool details in that are immediately completely covered up by other bricks, never to be seen again. I suppose I would rather have the cool details than not have them, but I wanna see them, dammit.
Also, I need a bigger house, because I have four unbuilt Lego sets sitting in boxes a few feet away from me right now and I have no idea where the hell I’m going to put any of them once they’re done. Anyone want to give me their house?
My wife got me (well, both of us, but I was the one who wanted them) registered for three pottery classes at a local makerspace for Christmas, and we had our second class today, charmingly titled “Build a Mug.” The first class was kintsugi pottery and I did not post my product from that one because, frankly, I screwed up on the very first step and didn’t notice it until it was much too late, and since the modern version of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with epoxy, the initial mistake meant that every subsequent piece I tried to put back together only ended up slightly more askew, and the final product just looks crap.
This mug? It’s not glazed yet, but I think I might actually use this mug once I have it finished in a couple of weeks. It needs to dry for about ten days and then we can go in and glaze it for final firing, so it’ll be a bit before I can post a picture of the final product, but my understanding is that glazing will smooth over a lot of the little imperfections. This obviously won’t look professional but I don’t think it looks completely crap, and the class was a lot of fun.
We’re actually doing a throwing class on Valentine’s Day, and I am fully ready to make pottery my entire Goddamned personality for a while if that’s as much fun as I think it might be.
This little bastard isn’t much to Puzzle People, I imagine, and it’s not a ton of pieces or anything, but it occupied a couple of hours of my afternoon and then immediately got photographed, torn apart, and given to my wife. If you look carefully there are a bunch of nautical-themed pieces in there which was a cool little touch. Also, a lot of those pieces don’t really lock together all that well so I kept accidentally shoving them out of place and having to put everything back together.
Other than that? It’s Wednesday. Comic shop. Tomorrow, I get to go to the dump. I’m super excited.
Spent the last couple of days putting this little thing together:
I took the picture from a couple of different angles and then realized if I was going to give you a picture of the TantiveIV, it really ought to let you see the engines, which are the most iconic part of the ship. And once again, while putting a Lego set together, I found myself musing on why the designers make the decisions they do on certain things, and just how dedicated these crazy bastards are to including Easter eggs. To wit, an earlier, in-progress photo of the front of the ship:
What you don’t see there is a third two-stud stack behind the white and blue one. That one has a white base and a brown top, to go with the one that is gold-on-gold and the one that is blue-on-white. Note where this is in the picture above; it’s completely invisible and covered up by the pieces that attach to those clamps on the side.
Why are those there?
Well, it’s C-3PO, R2-D2 and Princess Leia, of course. Each rendered as two single studs in the right color. And it’s just there to put a little smile on your face as you’re putting the set together, and as a little secret that you know about once the build is finished. The Tantive IV, of course, is the ship that Leia is trying to escape Darth Vader in during the opening moments of A New Hope, and so of course she has to pass the Death Star plans on to the droids.
In other news, as of last night I thought I’d fixed my computer again, only to spend forty fucking minutes trying to get the damn thing to launch Chrome this afternoon so that I could work on writing practice finals for my classes this week. The following all happened:
Apple Music crashed, repeatedly;
Chrome crashed, repeatedly;
One hard restart;
After the restart, my desktop images on my extra monitors were on the wrong monitors (?!?)
My touchpad lost connectivity three times, and had to be turned off and turned back on again;
Audio was coming through the wrong monitor at one point;
Every so often I could move the mouse around but couldn’t click and the haptics on my touchpad were disabled, and every so often I could click on things but not move the mouse;
Attempting to open the systems settings crashed every other open app, then the system settings opened as if nothing had gone wrong;
Probably a few other things.
At this point, I have officially caved and ordered a new screaming fucking beast of a computer that is so much more computer than I need that it’s actually kind of sad. Like, I’ll need to develop a new hobby or go back to gaming on YouTube or something to justify this purchase. Naturally, after dinner, the computer had mysteriously reverted to working just fine, and I’ve been sitting here for just over an hour, writing the two initial practice exams and this blog post with no issues of any kind. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’ve had enough of dealing with it.
It’s left me a bit worried about tomorrow, honestly— not only did my kids handle both of their two assignments today with aplomb (I think literally every single student turned their assignment in today, which is unheard of) and not only did my meeting with the grandmother of Not In My Class Anymore Kid go quite well, but Not In My Class Anymore Kid really isn’t in my class anymore. I was half-expecting admin to try and reverse the decision but they didn’t. There weren’t even any real discipline issues today! On top of all that, I’ve seen my pay stub for tomorrow, and it’s unexpectedly about twice what it normally is, because not only have they finally started paying me for being the 8th grade team lead again, but I got back pay for it, and half of my money for the TLT team came through unexpectedly.
Am I looking for something to blow some money on? Yes. Yes I am. I paid off a couple of things already and about half of it is going into savings but that still leaves a nice little chunk of change that I can use as mad money.
I’m going to end up blowing it all on roleplaying materials that I’ll never read, won’t I?
Anyway, I’m going to go curl up with a book and hope that I won’t pay for all these good vibes tomorrow.
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