Tag: idiocy

A BRAND-NEW complaint about young people!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

We are all familiar with the common Old gripe about how Kids These Days can’t read analog clocks. This is a true thing about young people, but I genuinely have a hard time caring about it too much. Reading analog clocks is a skill that is easy to pick up when it becomes necessary and it is kind of hard to imagine how one’s life might genuinely be impacted by an inability to read one. Also, if you really want to make these people sputter, ask them if they can use a slide rule or an abacus, because Kids These Days can’t read clocks for exactly the same reason that most old people can’t use slide rules or abaci any longer.

That said, I have a complaint about young people and telling time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone else griping about it anywhere, so I demand credit when this becomes the new big complaint about The Yoots. Who are an entirely distinct group of humans from The Roots, despite what my autocorrect might think.

Kids these days have an almost frightening inability to deal with chronal inconsistency.

Perhaps I should explain.

Anyone who grew up in a world with analog clocks and analog watches and VCRs and anything that had to have its time set manually got used to the idea that we were never 100% sure what time it was, and it didn’t really matter. You might have ten different clocks or watches in your house and even assuming your VCR or your microwave wasn’t flashing 12:00 all the time, those ten clocks were probably displaying at least three or four different times. Even worse, sometimes we set clocks a few minutes fast on purpose! I only recently broke myself of the habit of setting the clock in my car ahead a few minutes, because never once did it actually help me get somewhere on time, which was supposed to be the whole point of doing such a thing.

Maybe it was 10:02. Maybe it was 10:03 or 10:01, or maybe it was 10:05! It really didn’t matter. Unless you were trying to catch a TV show at a specific time, being off by a minute or two was just never a big deal. Remember how sometimes in movies or TV shows they’d have a moment where they made a big deal about synchronizing watches? When was the last time you saw someone do that?

My son will occasionally ask me what time it is. I will look at my watch and, in the manner of an Old, I will probably round a little bit rather than provide him the precise time. Woe betide me if he happens to glance at a clock and notice I was wrong. It’s the same thing if I’m telling him how long he has to do something. “You’ve got ten minutes.” If I approach him again at minute nine, we have a problem.

Now, you might think that’s just my kid? Nah. I put up a new digital clock in my classroom this year, which previously, in the manner of most school classrooms, only had an analog clock above the door, which, remember, a lot of them can’t read. If that clock is one minute off from the time their iPads tell them it is– which is the same time their watches tell them, which is the same time their phones tell them, and there’s not even an iPhone/Android divide here because they all pull the Actual Time from the same place– I start hearing about it. And they cannot comprehend why I am not constantly adjusting the clock in my classroom to precisely synchronize with the bell schedule or the Real Time on their devices. I, an Old, don’t give a shit about a clock being a minute off. My students, Youngs one and all, absolutely cannot handle the ambiguity. It’s not just one kid and it’s not just one class. It happens all the time. I’m at the point where I’m going to set the thing an hour off just to see if any of them die from it.

These kids have Known the Time for their entire lives. They have always had constant access to a device that hooks up to the One True Time, a molecular clock in, I dunno, I assume Switzerland or some shit like that, and every device they have agrees on what time it is, always. And they cannot find a way to live like we lived. And it’s hilarious.

Someone solved the math question I posted yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised with the percentage of my students who noticed on their own that I’d put the answers to today’s assignment on the board. I did end up working a couple of them out for students, just to prove that I was asking them something that they knew how to do, even if it was a pain in the ass. Here, with only a couple of shortcuts that I assume any adult mathematician can handle, is the full solution to the equation. Please forgive my crappy handwriting, especially the way all the Vs look like check marks and that really sloppy 5 in the first line:

Make it make sense

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was behind this … person … for a bit on the way home from work today, and the cognitive dissonance hurt so badly that I had to get a picture. You can, no doubt, see the “TEACH PEACE” sticker on the left there; that’s fine. The problem is the decal on the right, which, just in case you can’t quite parse it, is a Punisher skull, with an American flag overlaid on it, with the words “FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT” around it. This image in red vinyl, basically. As an open endorsement of American fascism it’s not quite as overt as, say, a thin blue line cross, but it’s pretty fucked up! In general, any time you see someone idolizing the Punisher, that’s a bad person, and they are to be avoided (I’ve said this before: any police organization in particular that uses that logo needs to be dissolved, immediately) but combining it with “teach peace” is just fucking unhinged. The fact that it’s on a pickup truck is even weirder; that may be the only pickup truck on the planet with a “teach peace” sticker on it.

I can see someone already fixing their fingers to suggest that a married couple owns this truck and one of them picked one sticker and one picked the other; these people should not be married and they should also own separate cars. It’s unfair that they managed to cause me pain when all I was trying to do was get my ass home from work. I mean, the one who is married to the Punisher asshole is probably in pain every day, but I want them both to suffer.

Anyway, it’s April so I hate my job; there is no place in the world that is worse than a middle school in the spring, except that there is, and it’s a middle school during standardized testing during the spring. Unfortunately I have to go to that place every day, and tomorrow I get to be there from 7:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night, and then I have to go back on Friday morning for some fucking reason, so don’t expect much out of me tomorrow and whatever you get on Friday is going to be through a veil of barely repressed rage. It’s gonna be awesome for everybody, is what I’m saying.

They broke me today

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

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.

Well that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Jesus Christ, look at all the white people.

This is, technically, the last day of my Spring Break, as I’m not supposed to go to work on Saturday or Sunday anyway. So of course I have shit I need to do in the next couple of days to get ready for next week. I said before the week started that I didn’t want to do anything over my break, and holy shit did I succeed at that, as I didn’t even really succeed in doing the bits of nothing I wanted to do.

Which, whatever. It is quite obviously the height of privilege to get a week off and complain about it, so I’m at least going to have the dignity to not do it much. I did finish Hild last night, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that I didn’t say already– you want to read it if you have enough ability to concentrate to be able to read it, and I don’t, and as a result I can say that I appreciated the book but I didn’t enjoy it. I will not be bothering with the sequel, I think. I have a handful of other books I want to finish in the next couple of days before we go back to work; we’ll see how that goes. And since my wife is going to be back tomorrow I should probably spend some time cleaning.

(This is not to say that we lived like animals while she was gone; we didn’t, but still. I don’t want her to come home from a two-day drive and look around and think she needs to clean something.)

I was going to do all that today, but today was the Day of Unintentional Naps. My caffeine immunity is starting to become an actual joke; most people after two large cups of coffee in the morning are wide awake if not actively jittery; I woke up at 8, drank two large cups of coffee, and went back to bed. Then, after getting out of bed, I took a shower and fell asleep on the couch. I dunno what the hell my deal is lately.

Tomorrow, I will try to have something interesting to talk about.

In which I’m getting dumber

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.

Listen Goddammit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

First of all, no, and second of all, bring your ass over here so I can swat you on the nose with this rolled-up newspaper, because NO.

Fuckin’ internet.

In which I have a disease

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

…both in the literal and metaphorical sense. The wonderful news is that my ear abruptly partially cleared on the way home from work today, as I was actually on my way to urgent care to have it looked at again. It’s not 100% yet; there’s still some tinnitus and a little bit of pressure, but it’s not remotely as bad as it was yesterday and the transition from one phase to the other took all of thirty seconds. Hopefully it’ll continue to improve over the next day or two; I have about five doses of my antibiotic left.

The metaphorical sense? Do I need to explain, since you presumably have eyes and can see the image at the top of this post? Because God damn if I didn’t involuntarily start to reach for my wallet the second this image appeared on my phone, only to realize that the presale doesn’t start until the end of March so I have plenty of time to talk myself into buying four books that I didn’t like by an author who I genuinely dislike just because holy shit they’re pretty.

(They actually come with two dust covers each, those above and another set that is a slightly upscaled version of the original covers. I already have all four of these damn things with the original covers, so it’ll be these.)

Don’t ask the price. The set will cost roughly $texas; Broken Binding editions are expensive. They appreciate like motherfuckers, so I could pretend that I was going to hold on to them for a year and then sell them, I suppose, but I’ve got to buy them first. Nonetheless! Daddy can do this, all day, every day, no problem. But when is it going to stop?

I know I’ve said this before– hell, I’m a million and a half words deep into this site, I’ve said everything before– but I really never thought I was going to be the person I’ve become, where the more discretionary income I have, the more shit I find to buy. This obsession with special editions of books even if I don’t like the books is just the latest Goddamn symptom.

I’m just declaring myself alive

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

…that’s how it works, right? I’m still sick, by any reasonable standard, although I think the fever has gone away– it helps if you don’t take your temperature!– and the Weird Ear Thing has gotten better enough that I didn’t actually go back into urgent care this morning. I’ve started my antibiotics, finally, although this is still probably a virus.

One way or another, Goddammit, I’m going to work tomorrow, and I’m gonna make some kids know some math whether they like it or not, because I’m tired of this, and if there’s one thing America has taught me over the last eight years it’s that the best way to fix being sick is to pretend you’re not sick any more and then bad things never, ever happen as a result. So Goddammit, that’s the plan.

(I may still go back to urgent care if this ear thing isn’t fully fixed tomorrow. I’m hoping that the antibiotics take it out as a side effect, since it really doesn’t seem to be wax-related. We’ll see.)

Anyway. That problem’s solved. How’re you?