Kinda lost my mind at the office closet just now, and pulled out a trash bag worth of just the most random shit imaginable that at some point I (possibly my wife, but let’s be real) decided needed to be saved. The above is the “after” picture, and as you can see, it’s still chaos.
Spoiler alert: none of this needed to be saved. Perhaps the lowest item on that scale was the pile of greeting cards I found, all for various events– birthdays, anniversaries, thinking of you, etcetera– all of which were blank. So at some point we … acquired some surplus cards? For some reason? And then just stuck them in the closet, forever? Construction paper so old that it has faded in a lightless closet. Three books of “tracing paper” that has price tags on it that have got to be forty years old. I suspect we moved these books of tracing paper from our previous house.
I’ve been looking for a project; I’m going to liquidate this fucking closet over the next couple of days.
Anybody want a ukulele? Or, seriously, twenty longboxes of comic books? Please, someone, take my comic books.
I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.
It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”
Uh-oh.
I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.
This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.
But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.
So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.
Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.
Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.
Was this image specifically engineered to make me insane? Is this what we’re fucking doing now?
SIN NUMBER ONE: This is a seriously fucking milquetoast quote and it doesn’t need to be framed as a quote in the first place. It’s not bad as a sentiment! Throw it on the rainbow background and call it good!
SIN NUMBER TWO: If you’re going to phrase something as a fucking quote than take the ten seconds it takes to Google it and figure out who the shit said the damn thing in the first place. Don’t ever fucking put “unknown” as the source for a quote. It makes you look like an asshole. And if you’re going to insist on putting “unknown” as the source for your fucking quote…
This is not my district, but it’s nearby, and I’m looking at this and reading it and genuinely doubting my own sanity, because I cannot for the life of me imagine why the fuck anyone would ever think any of this is a good idea.
Yesterday was the first day that Indiana had over 5000 new coronavirus cases. There were 5038. Today– and “today,” to make sure everyone understands, is a word that means “one day after yesterday,”– there were over 6500. School districts across northern Indiana and southern Michigan are going back to full-time virtual or dialing back on the plans they had in place, and this is what Mishawaka thinks is a good idea once 2nd semester starts? Not only are they dumping all of their grade-cohort kids into the building at the same time, thus doubling the number of students in every single class they’re in, thus fucking up any actual chance at social distancing in hallways, classrooms, or at lunch, but by shifting to grade-only cohorts they’re guaranteeing that lots and lots of families with more than one child are sending those kids to school on different days.
Like fucking hell the Board of Health okayed that. I don’t believe that for a second. And they actually talk about how they already don’t have the staff to keep the buildings open! Do you think this shit is going to get better come January? You want people to be more vigilant, but you’re making the situation in your buildings worse on purpose???
And they don’t get into this in the letter, but if you were to click through and look at some of their individual school plans, you’d find out that they’re tying whether you can be 100% virtual to grades and attendance. In other words, they think that if your grades are poor they can require you to come to school part time.
Utter fucking madness. It’s either them or me. Someone is completely crazy. I just wish I could be certain who it was, because more and more I find myself living in a world where I have to conclude that huge numbers of the people around me are out of their Goddamned minds, and eventually it’s going to get to the point where it has to be me and not them.
Pretty sure I’ve used that as a title for a blog post in the past, but whatever.
It was a really long fucking week, and not an especially good one, either professionally or mentally. My principal (who I really like, for the record) sent out a couple of emails at the end of the day regarding some walkthroughs that are going to be conducted next week and some expectations for how instruction should be going, and I read them and reflected on how I had to keep a seventh grader after class earlier today to make sure that he understood that if you have six pencils and you want seven you need one more.
That is not a joke, and the kid wasn’t fucking with me. At one point I literally put six Post-Its on the table in front of him and counted them and asked him how many more he needed to get seven. He said one instantly.
“Okay, what if they were pencils? If you have six pencils and you want seven, how many more do you need?”
(Pause)
“Forty-two?”
This has not been a week where I’ve been able to feel confident about my skills as an educator, let me put it that way. I have three days to get my head back on straight; I’m not sure that’s going to be enough time, and after several months of thinking yeah, it would be okay if I ended up doing this same job again next year, I’m very much in the mode of thinking that a night job at 7-11 might be a better use of my skills right now.
I’m not talking to anyone under twenty who I wasn’t personally responsible for the birth of for at least 48 hours. Hopefully that will improve things.
Damn near every single human being I work with has lost at least a few days out of the last few weeks to some disease or another. So far I’m the only one who has remained immune. So naturally it just turns out that it looks like I’m just last.
Which is in keeping with my sales, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, I’m going to bed insanely early tonight and mainlining a ton of Vitamin C in hopes of knocking this shit out before it has a chance to set in. I’m juuuust at the beginning of a cold right now so I’m crossing my fingers that such a thing is actually possible.
What’re the best cold-prevention tips you have? The more outlandish the better. If your grandmother used to make you drink some crazy shit that smelled like it was made of durian and bat piss I totally want to hear about it.
For those of you who have followed previous blogs of mine during presidential campaigns: I will not only not be liveblogging tonight’s disaster, I will be as far away from it as I can.
My apologies to the three of you who were hoping I had a stroke halfway through.
Damn near every single human being I work with has lost at least a few days out of the last few weeks to some disease or another. So far I’m the only one who has remained immune. So naturally it just turns out that it looks like I’m just last.
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