The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I ended instruction early with my sixth period class, with the words “To hell with this, you’re on your own,” went to my desk and put in for a personal day tomorrow on the spot. When you put in for a personal day you’re supposed to include a note to your administrator explaining what’s going on. Here’s mine:
My initial draft, “fuck this and fuck them,” was lightly edited by AI.
Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.
I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.
Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”
And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.
I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.
You tell me what the worst part of my day was:
Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?
Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?
Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?
Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.
It’s confirmed. Devon Green, a 23-year-old former student of mine, passed away in his sleep two days ago. That’s all anyone knows at the moment. His family is struggling to pay for the funeral; there’s a GoFundMe. If anybody happens to have a few spare nickels with nothing to use them on, donations would be greatly appreciated.
I’m pretty certain that any attempt at bloggery tonight would end up with the FBI knocking on my door, and I’m oh so very much not in the mood for that, so I’m just going to spend the rest of my evening trying to figure out how to convince my entire family to get the fuck out of this nightmare shithole of a country instead. Have a better evening than I’m planning on having.
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