The pink panties story

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

I have been reminded that I owe you a story, and now that I’ve totally fucked up the SEO for my site for the rest of time I may as well tell it. I have two Honors Algebra classes, one first thing in the morning and one in the afternoon. This is a high school class that they’re getting actual high school credits for. My morning class is quite possibly the most chill group of kids I have ever encountered. I’ve never seen anything like them. No drama. They come in, they do their work, they ask questions if they have them, and when they’re done they just sit and relax and chat. They’re one of those classes where if I needed to I could just leave and everybody would still be in their seats doing whatever they were doing when I left when I came back. I love them.

I’m at my desk doing something or another and the kids are working at their seats. The word panties floats into my ears, and I hear what sounds like vaguely horrified noises and some relatively uncharacteristic teenage giggling. I look up.

Now, I am perhaps twenty feet away, but it is still fairly clear that there is a pair of pink panties on the floor next to one of my boys.

“Please do not tell me there is underwear on the floor in my classroom right now,” I say.

“There’s underwear on the floor, Mr. Siler,” they say.

I stand up to go look closer. There is indeed a pair of lace pink panties on the fucking floor in my fucking middle school math classroom. There should not be panties on the floor. I take a moment to regret every decision that I have ever made in my life that led me to the point where I had to ask a room of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children “Does anyone want to claim the mystery underwear before I throw it away?”

(Fun fact about me: I detest the word “panties” for no reason I have ever been able to enunciate, and I have already used it far too many times in this post. I do not say it out loud unless I absolutely have to, and that is not a condition that occurs often.)

I look around at my girls. Roughly half of the kids in the room, maybe a little bit more. I note two things: first, they are all wearing pants, and second, none of them appears to suddenly be having the worst day of her entire life. Most of them appear entertained; a couple look scandalized, but not in an oh my god those are mine sort of way.

No one wants to claim the underwear. Someone suggests that the boy it is sitting next to is responsible for them. This would not be enormously surprising, to be honest. I give him my firmest Teacher Look, and he fails to wither under my glare. I think there’s no earthly way he could keep a straight face right now and go to get a pencil, which I use to pick up the underwear.

At which point something equally horrible becomes clear: there is not just a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom. There is a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom and it has been worn. Several days in a row, from the look of it. Soiled would perhaps give the wrong impression, but … crusty? We can go with crusty. There are no obvious signs of blood on them; with girls this age the immediate suspicion would be some sort of menstrual disaster but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I look around again. Each of my girls makes eye contact. There’s no way they would be willing to make eye contact with a male teacher holding their underwear by a pencil in the middle of math class. There’s just no way, right? That’s a literal nightmare.

I throw the underwear in the trash and forbid any of my students to ever speak of this again, a promise that all of them make and I’m absolutely certain that not one of them intends to keep. Two minutes later, my boss wanders by, because of course she does, and I tell her the story, mostly to gauge her reaction. She is horrified but thinks it’s hilarious, and having been a middle school principal for more than ten minutes, volunteers to take my trash bag out of my room so that the boys in the next class don’t go digging to find anything, no doubt to start throwing them around the room.

As of this moment, several days later, I still have no suspects.

It was a weird day.

My favorite teacher present ever

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I meant to mention this yesterday, but I forgot to bring this home and it fell out of my head, so enjoy this early-morning post. One of my kids came up to me with her parents after the 8th grade recognition yesterday and said she had a present for me. Then she handed me this roll of toilet paper.

“It’s for putting up with my crap all year,” she said. I made her sign it.

Ah, teaching.

Once you see it

Luther M. Siler

My absolute favorite thing about my cousin’s house is that they have figured out where they want all of their pictures but have not figured out what pictures they actually want to display yet, so things like this are all over the place.

A short Skyrim story

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I have spent a good portion of the last two days playing Skyrim. Why? I’m on Spring Break, and I do what I want. Something something self care something, damn it.

Anyway, my character is an archer and a thief, because no matter what build you try to have in Skyrim you always end up as an archer and a thief, and apparently at some point I stole something from a certain minor character’s home. I was just attacked in broad daylight in a whole other town by a handful of thugs, all of whom were quickly dispatched via arrows to the face. Because that is how I roll.

Upon searching said thugs, I found a letter from this dude telling them that he wanted them to beat me bloody, but if I died in the process, meh.

Now, actually killing NPCs in this game is possible but can frequently be more trouble than it’s worth, as murder is one of those crimes where the guards just sort of magically know you’ve done it even if you were the only other person in the room where it happened. But sometimes you need to make exceptions, right? And this dude had sent three thugs after me, so something something self defense something, right?

Well, when I stopped by his house again, he wasn’t home, and I wasn’t about to traipse all over the damn town looking for him. Now, if you’re not familiar with this game, be aware that you can pick up damn near any object you can see. Baskets. Food. Plates. Books. Silverware. That pair of boots on the floor in the corner. If you can see it, more likely than not you can pick it up and make off with it. It actually takes a while when you start playing to curb that automatic video game urge to loot everything, because you really don’t need all those wooden plates and flagons. They just take up room in your inventory and make it harder to carry stuff you want.

But you don’t have to carry stuff far to do something fun with it.

So I took every single object in this man’s house, went outside, and dumped it all on the ground in front of his place. I thought about just selling it but there was a lot of stuff and it would have required at least two trips to my fence– you can only sell stolen goods in certain places– and frankly I thought just throwing all his dishes and baskets and eating utensils and all of his food out in the snow outside his place was funny enough.

He has a farm outside of town, too. He comes after me again, I’ll clear that out next.

Your move, Belyn Hlaalu.

In which you don’t need to know this about me (again)

Luther M. Siler8 Comments

screw-calm-i-need-coffee-1I stopped at McDonald’s for coffee on the way home from work today, if that tells you anything about my day.

You may recall this post about my issues with the bathrooms at my current place of business.  If not, I recommend reading it; it’s funny, in a terrible godawful why did you tell us that sort of way.  If not, allow me to quote myself, if I may:

There are two adult bathrooms at my new place of business.  One of them is a one-seater and is effectively a private men’s room for the office.  That bathroom has two problems:  1) it is directly outside the principal’s office and 2) I am one of only three men who might ever use it, and one of the other two is frequently not in the office, so not only is there a theoretical chance that my boss might hear me in there but if I power bomb the place everyone is going to know it was me.  This cannot stand.

It is my prep period.  I am in my office frantically trying to get some of my own job done before I have to go do someone else’s for a while.  I have, as it happens, already had a cup of coffee this morning.  Now, for most people, coffee is a diuretic.  For me, it has rather more… substantial effects, if you know what I mean and I hope you do.

…

Coffee makes me shit, is what I’m trying to say here.

So, yeah.  As it works out, both of the other men in the office are not currently in the office, meaning that I can basically do whatever I want in My Other Office with no worries.  I become aware of Impending Pressure and head off to do my business.

Meanwhile: the assistant principal is next door.  We have recently had a very serious bullying issue on one of our buses that she’s been straightening out, and she’s been using varying levels of severity depending on the level of insistence of the various children involved that they had nothing to do with it.  As it turns out, there is video.  Fairly a lot of video.  So each and every one of these lil’ motherfuckers is busted; it’s just a matter of how long they’re gonna lie before a hammer gets dropped on their heads.  The kid currently in her office is being very insistent that he’s done nothing and said nothing and at the moment the AP is simply sitting there calmly categorizing his lies for use later.

This will, as it turns out, not go well for him.

So, back to me: I’m doing my business.  I’m doing quite a lot of my business, as it turns out, and it occurs to me partway through that I ought to be really glad that there’s no chance anybody else is gonna be trying to get in here anytime soon.

I finish.  I wash my hands.

Thank God I washed my hands.

Because when I open the door, my assistant principal is standing immediately outside the bathroom, with the student, who has clearly spent my entire time in there bawling his eyes out.  I do not know how long they have been waiting.

“Go on in there and clean yourself up,” she says to him.

I have two choices at this point.  This bathroom ain’t fit for human habitation, and there is  no escaping the fact that I am the one who has ruined it.  I can either admit it and suggest that the boy use the ladies’ bathroom (which, much like ours, is a locking one-seater) or I can just shrug and let this boy enter into the bowels (see what I did there?) of Hell, where the sulfur in the air will surely blind him before he’s able to wash the tears from his face.

Instead of doing either of those things, I just died of shame on the spot.  This will be my final post; it is being typed by my spirit, which will remain bound to that bathroom for all eternity once I hit “Publish” on this post.

You gotta do what you gotta do sometimes, y’know?