I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”
Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:
This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.
It has been hot and gross for a couple of weeks now, and the humidity has been grotesque enough that I have genuinely had some trouble breathing while outside recently. Yesterday was supposed to be in the low eighties; it didn’t really appear to make any difference and everything was still horrid. Today the high was supposed to be 77 degrees; I took a risk and wore my usual jeans.
I have not lived in Indiana for my entire damn-near-half-century life, but I have lived in the Midwest for all of that time, and I know what the Goddamn sky looks like in November. It looks exactly like that, which is what I was greeted with when I left work this afternoon, and stayed like that the whole way home. Even weirder? Maybe I’ve had the world’s strangest stroke, but I swear to everything you might find holy that I could smell snow.
Was there snow? No, of course not; that would be damn near unprecedented in late August, and it wasn’t remotely cold enough besides. I cannot describe the level of sensory discontinuity(*) this led to. My body was telling me slightly cool for August and my nose and eyes were telling me Mid-November; snow coming.
Stupid state.
(*) This is not exactly the word I want, but my brain is stuck on dysmorphia and dystopia, both of which are even wronger than discontinuity. If I happen to remember the word I want or someone volunteers it, maybe I’ll edit.
I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.
This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.
Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:
Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.
Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.
State math testing tomorrow and Wednesday, and then I’m … well, it’s middle school, so never, ever stress-free, but at least a lot less stressed than I am right now. I sat down during our team meeting with the other 8th grade Math teacher and once we went through everything we knew we had to do already for the rest of the year I realized I only really have like eight more assignments to plan.
I told them today that I was going to keep things super simple in class for the next couple of days, and that tomorrow’s assignment in particular was going to be extremely short. Like, five problems short. I have entertained myself by making those five problems insanely complicated,(*) and I’m going to put the answers on the board and not mention it to anyone. We’ll see how many of them notice! I’m going to guess roughly a quarter do not.
(*) Insanely complicated and yet within the skill set of anyone who has been actually paying attention. So, f’rex:
I may throw some extra credit at anyone who actually solves them instead of just circling the right answers. We’ll see.
I think today was the closest I’ve ever come to telling everyone in the house to head for the basement without an actual tornado warning. The top video is out my front window; I saw the first tree across the road fall almost immediately when the wind started, and missed the second one. My wife saw the tree fall in our back yard (second picture) which is the second time that our neighbors behind us have had a tree fall into our yard, thus becoming, by Indiana law, our problem.
The final picture is from maybe 20 minutes later, rain still falling, as every Hoosier-ass dad in the neighborhood and their dogs went outside to wander around and look at the carnage. I may hop in the car soon and see how the rest of the area looks; supposedly there are a lot of power outages nearby but we’re fine.
The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.
So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.
The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.
Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.
There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.
It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.
For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.
You can probably expect me to keep rattling on about this until these damn things are all done; I managed 35 of them today, and I’m done with almost half of them. My stamina seems to be growing, so I’ll shoot for 40 tomorrow and see what happens to my handwriting at the end.
Anyway, I’ve been fiddling with the message I’m supposed to write on these things as I’ve been going through and I think I’ve settled on the Luther Approved Version. I think I posted this already, but here’s the official text that I’m basing my cards on:
Hi [voter’s first name]! Thank you for being a voter! Your friends and family may need your reminder to vote. Please ask them to vote in the Tues. Nov 5 election! – [your first name].
And here’s my version:
Hi [voter’s first name]!1 Thank you for being a voter!2 Your friends and family3 may need your encouragement4 to vote. Please ask5 everyone6 to do their part7 in the election on November8 5! -Luther
I kind of wish I had some other way to refer to everyone; every so often I get a name that is almost certainly not what the voter calls themselves, and when I get things sent to me that don’t have my preferred name on them it’s always an immediate turnoff. ↩︎
I don’t mind this formulation at all. I wrote a couple that said “thank you for voting,” but I like “voter” more because even if the person hasn’t voted yet, it’s a subtle push that a voter is what you are and therefore even if you haven’t voted yet you’re going to, because that’s what voters do, right? ↩︎
Again, not a change, but “friends and family” and not “family and friends” because folks are more likely to befriend people who align with them politically and we all know about that one asshole uncle you’ve got. Feel free to not talk to him! I’ve considered tossing “like-minded” in there a couple of times but this is already long enough. ↩︎
I don’t like “reminder,” because it feels hectoring and I’m pretty sure that people know there’s an election coming. If they genuinely don’t know yet I’m not sure getting them to vote helps me any. “Encouragement” feels a lot more active without being nagging and also has the word “courage” in it. That said, do you know how many letters the word “encouragement” has in it? A hundred and fifty-three.↩︎
Thought about moving “remind” here and didn’t. Ask. ↩︎
“Everyone” and not “them.” Ask everyone. Everyone? Everyone.↩︎
I feel like the original message overuses the word “vote.” I get why, of course, because repetition is king, but damn it I’m a writer and it’s overused. Plus “do their part” makes it sound like a responsibility and something people are supposed to do, which has the advantage of being completely true. Go do your damn job, reluctant Democratic voters! ↩︎
I dislike two abbreviations in a row and I don’t feel like the “Tuesday” really 100% needs to be there, especially since it’s on the front of the card. November 5 it is! ↩︎
Also, did you know how much a postcard stamp goes for nowadays? Fifty-six cents, which means two hundred of them runs a hundred and fifteen dollars after the handling fee. I had no choice other than “standard” delivery, which had bloody well better get the damned things to me by the 23rd or I’m gonna fight somebody. You’d think the post office, of all places, would tell you specifically how fast “standard delivery” gets me my damn stamps but they don’t.
I put addresses on the last two and a half pages of postcards today, and got 25 written with full messages– those are the ones that are in the rubber band. If I can keep up that pace I’ll have them all done by the 19th, well in advance of the mailing date on the 24th. And since tomorrow is Sunday and I don’t have any grading to do, I figure I can get at least two days’ worth done and get ahead.(*)
I dunno. I’ve gone door-to-door on Election Day, I’ve done voter registration, and now this, and of the three I think I like voter registration the most as a pro-democracy activity. The Election Day I spent canvassing for John Kerry did not result in a single extra voter being sent to the polls but did result in at least two people threatening my life and one threatening to sue me, and I just don’t have a ton of confidence in the messages they’re asking me to put on these cards.
Part of it, I suppose, is I fundamentally don’t understand the mind of the non-voter or the reluctant voter. I vote in every fucking election. I don’t have to be asked or talked into it. It’s part of my damn job. This particular year required probably the largest investment in time I’ve ever had to make in order to vote and I was probably in line for about an hour. I know that in some places the lines can be horrendously longer, and things can go wrong, and sure, there are good reasons why some people aren’t able to vote. Fine. But just … choosing not to? I don’t get it and I never will, and the notion that you might be a nominally Democratic enough voter to get on one of these mailing lists and still need a postcard reminder in order to vote just doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, I want to see the screening methods they used to generate these lists.
Blech. I’m gonna do it anyway, obviously, because I can either do something or I can go insane, and I don’t have the temperament for phone banking and I’m never doing door-to-door again, so voter postcards it is. I just wish I could convince myself that this was actually going to make some kind of difference.
(*) And it occurs to me that I have parent/teacher conferences on the 21st and 22nd after school, and I’m absolutely certain I’ll be in no shape to come home and write postcards, so I probably ought to get these done well in advance. Maybe I’ll do 30 a day instead of 25.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 