Tag: humor

RIP, Mr. Frank Nemeth, 1936-2026; Mr. Thomas Farkas, 1937-2020, and any sense I ever had that I’m not an enormous idiot

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

This will be my third piece about a former teacher who has passed away, and to be completely honest, had you mentioned Mr. Nemeth to me before a couple of hours ago, I would have thought that he had already left us some time ago. He was my math teacher in seventh or eighth grade– I think in eighth, so this would be 1989-1990, but I cannot remember my other middle school math teacher to save my life, so it’s possible I had him in seventh. He spent, according to his obituary, 45 years teaching, all of it at the same school, and once again I find myself flummoxed at the idea that I’m as far into my career as I am and may not yet have reached the halfway point of his. He passed away at 90, so he would have only been in his mid-fifties when I had him.

I am trying really hard right now to not think too hard about the fact that he wasn’t that much older than I am now when I was in his class, and I’m definitely not trying to reconcile that knowledge with the idea I had that he was much older.

I really liked Mr. Nemeth– everybody did, as far as I remember– and while my memories from middle school are sketchy at best, I feel like he was one of the better math teachers I had. He was definitely someone who enjoyed working with kids as well, which is not exactly the same thing as being a good teacher– you can, believe it or not, be a tremendous educator and not “like kids” that much.

Now, I need you to be aware that I wrote those three paragraphs along with several others, and then made the post live. After that I went and looked at my yearbook from 8th grade, and then my head exploded. I have left the paragraphs above unedited– you will note that I said that I don’t remember if I had him in seventh or eighth grade? As it turns out, I had him in seventh grade, and this story that I wrote about him for an RIP post, the story that I’m going to reproduce below, was not about him. Because I went and looked at my yearbook and, yes, I did have Mr. Nemeth, and I liked Mr. Nemeth, but my eighth grade teacher was named Mr. Farkas, and he passed away in 2020(*). So I wrote this whole story intending it to be a charming anecdote about a beloved former teacher who had passed away and I was writing about the wrong guy.

(Fun fact about middle school: A good chunk of adults have very few working memories of the years between 12-14 as compared to any other era of their lives, and it’s because your brains are so thoroughly marinated in puberty chemicals that forming long-term memories is actually inhibited. I could not have told you Mr. Farkas’ name until seeing his picture, at which point everything just completely shook loose in my head. To be clear, I did like Mr. Nemeth, now that I’m remembering him properly, and I’m going to tell the story about Mr. Farkas anyway, with the right name on it, because now that I’ve written all of this out it’s too good to delete.)

So, returning to the original post: I have a quick story I want to tell about Mr. Farkas, and for the second time, the story I’m going to tell is a cherished memory on my end and absolutely something that he would never be able to get away with were he to do it today. There was a particular Friday in Math class where a few of my friends decided to start telling everyone that I was having a party that night. I don’t remember what triggered this; it was likely nothing at all, as I was not at the time known for throwing parties, and I definitely wasn’t known for throwing parties that were attended by girls, and my friends were making no exceptions as to who they were inviting over to my house. No one took the joke especially seriously, and at any rate the guys weren’t sharing my address or phone number, so it’s not as if anyone could have found me anyway.

As it turned out, that night I decided to have a few people over anyway to play video games, including the friends that were telling everyone I was having a party. There were maybe four or five of us, I think. My mom and dad were watching TV in the living room and we were playing games in the family room when there was a knock at the door. We were all briefly confused, as everyone we were expecting was already there, and I didn’t live in the kind of neighborhood where neighbors dropped by very often.

I answered the door. It was Mr. Farkas.

He had a cotton candy machine with him.

I remember that he explained how he had come to be in possession of a cotton candy machine, but I regret to inform you that I don’t remember the reason. I don’t know if he specifically put the cotton candy machine into his car to bring it to my house and see if we wanted cotton candy, or if he was bringing it back from somewhere(**) and he had just decided to check and see if party rockin’ was taking place at the Siler household that night.

One way or another, though, my math teacher was at my door, asking if the four or five of us wanted him to spin up any cotton candy for us, along with my brother and my parents.

That is not an invitation that one turns down, believe me. So Mr. Farkas made all of us cotton candy and hung out for a little while and then vanished into the night, taking his cotton candy machine with him. And Monday at school, the same friends who had invited everyone to my house tried to tell everyone that there had been a party, and Mr. Farkas had shown up and made us cotton candy, and … okay, this bit could be partially invented, but I’m almost certain no one believed us, and I half-believe that Mr. Farkas denied the whole story as well.

I have to have gotten my habit of gaslighting my students to death from somewhere, after all.

Rest in peace, both of you, Mr. Nemeth and Mr. Farkas. I hope my students have as warm memories, accurate or otherwise, of me as I do of the two of you thirty-six years down the road, even if I don’t intend to show up at their houses to create any of those memories.

(*) The punchline to all of this is that Mr. Farkas’ obituary actually calls him The Cotton Candy Man, implying that this was not the first time he’d pulled this move and explaining why he had the machine.

(** I didn’t live far from school, so this isn’t entirely unimaginable, if there had been a sporting event that night or something that he was making candy for. I have a vague recollection that it was his machine, but again, this was a long damn time ago.)

Done-ish

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.

I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.

(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)

Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.

In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker: Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?

Crisis averted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Yesterday’s issue is resolved, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to commit any crimes, justified or otherwise.

This will be another short post, but let me tell you a fun story about teaching 8th graders: one of my boys fell asleep in class yesterday, farted loudly enough that it woke him up, and then, not realizing that the uproarious laughter taking place in the room was at him, joined right in on laughing so that it didn’t look like he didn’t know what was going on.

“Did you just fart yourself awake?” is not a sentence I ever expected to say to anyone at work.

My mom says I’m funny

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.

Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.

(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)

Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.

On narrative consistency

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, look, McDonalds. This is bullshit.

Nobody believed your asses two years ago when you said that the McRib was on its “farewell tour” or whatever the hell you called it. Absolutely no one. We all knew that the McRib is always a seasonal or at least short-term item (length of term: however long it takes for pork prices to rise again) and it’s going to go away and come back. Everyone knew this. You fooled no one.

But yeah. You had to make a big Goddamn deal about how no, really, this is the last time. No more McRib, forever, and all that shit.

And now it’s 2024, and the fucking world is ending, and you bring this bullshit back … and you dare to just not acknowledge that you insisted it was never coming back? No mention of it at all? What, are you just hoping we don’t remember?

Call the motherfucker Son of McRib and put it on a round bun for a while or some shit, I don’t care. Slap a little mustard on it (no, really, think about it) and pretend it’s not the same sandwich. I don’t care. But, shit, can we pay a little attention to worldbuilding around here? All I’m asking for is some Goddamned consistency. This ain’t comic books. You can’t reboot the menu. Or at least you can’t reboot the menu and pretend you didn’t do it.

Do not assume that just because I just ate two of these sonsofbitches because I am sad that I didn’t notice what you did here, Goddammit. I see the Hamburglar in my neighborhood anytime soon I’m slapping him.

That’s a new one

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I have this kid in my last class. He’s a decent kid; he’s not, like, one of my favorites or anything like that but he’s not a behavior problem and most of the time he’s a reasonably solid student. He’s absent a lot, though, and he asks to go see the nurse more often than most of my students do. Probably a couple of times a week. This is generally not something I say no to unless I can tell that a (generic) student is just trying to get out of class, and a lot of times with this particular kid I can tell just from looking at him that something’s bugging him and so I’ll let him go.

Today, though, he was off his game more than usual– fidgety, out of his seat a lot, more or less unmedicated ADHD behavior, although I can’t say for certain whether he’s actually on meds or not. He’s already asked to go to the bathroom right after getting to class and then asked to leave again to get a drink maybe ten minutes later, so the nurse request is the third time in a 55-minute period that he’s tried to leave the room, and I know good and Goddamn well the kid hasn’t gotten a single stitch of work done while he’s been in the classroom.

“Why do you want to go to the nurse?” I ask. He gives me a Look. I have been teaching for two decades; nearly one and a half times as long as this young man has been alive. I know this look. This look means I was not expecting to be questioned on this, and I am about to begin frantically making shit up.

“Well,” he says, and then he pauses. I wait.

“I was at the board during advisory, and someone threw an eraser at the board, and when it hit the board there, was, like, a cloud of chalk dust? And I breathed in the chalk dust, and now my stomach hurts.”

I took a moment to myself.

During my moment, I reflected upon a couple of things, to wit: 1) that advisory was a full two hours before this young man entered my classroom; 2) that everyone in the building was doing the same activity during advisory today, and that, while not impossible, it was unlikely that he had any reason to be near the board; 3) that his lungs are not actually connected to his stomach; and perhaps most importantly 4) that there is literally not a single chalkboard anywhere in the building.

I like our nurse; I have liked nearly every nurse I’ve ever worked with, but she is one of my top two or three favorites, I think. Fuck it, I decide, and send him to the nurse, and then I immediately go to my computer and compose a quick email, which I know she will see because her email is open 100% of the time, telling her to make absolutely certain to find out why he is in her office, because I cannot wait to see her reaction to this one.

Rather unsurprisingly, he was back in less than five minutes. I’m pretty certain he did not manage to get any additional math done with the remaining time he had in my room.

In which I get an award

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

I mentioned to my first hour that I had a band and choir concert to go to tonight at my son’s school, and a moment later joked that I kind of had to go because I am still married to the boy’s mother and we still all live in the same house and it would be rather difficult to pretend that I had something else that I needed to be doing other than going to the concert.

This provoked a literal chorus– multiple kids– telling me that their dads were still married to their moms and never showed up for any of their concerts anyway, and why was I such a good dad (calling it “doing the absolute minimum” probably didn’t help) and could I be their dad instead of the actual dads that they have now.

Uh. Oops?

At any rate, middle school band anchor concert, and it’s 9:00, and we just got home, and I’ve been there for (no exaggeration) hours, so I’m gonna cut this short and go to bed now.

Another true story of 8th graders

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

Upon entering my classroom this morning upon my arrival at work, feeling vaguely impish, I wrote the following on my whiteboard. I deliberately wrote the words relatively small and up at the top of the board, not front-and-center like I might with something important I wanted the kids to read:

THREE day WEEK end
(clap, clap, clapclapclap)

My sixth hour is the tampon crew. Typically between fifth and sixth hour I will go use the teacher bathroom, which is in the office area across the hall from my room. The kids know this, and they’re well-behaved enough that if I leave them alone for a couple of minutes while I go get rid of my lunch, nothing bad is going to happen, and if I’m not in the classroom the very second the bell rings no one is going to panic.

That little phrase was on the board all day, and none of the students commented on it.

I came out of the bathroom and saw/heard one of my kids in my room say “Okay, he’s coming!”

And then the chanting started.

And they were being so loud and I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t exactly encouraging them to stop, and it took the principal poking her head into the room before everything calmed down. She wasn’t pissed or anything but she was definitely wondering what the hell was going on.

I find myself glad that my classroom isn’t on the second floor. One can only imagine what the teacher underneath me might have thought.