I got a new student today, or rather I got her yesterday but I met her today, since I managed to drag my ass back to work this morning. Her name was unique but not in a way that seemed hard to pronounce; demographic data said she was white, but “white” can still cover a whole hell of a lot of ethnicities, right? I was prepared for her to be Eastern European or any of a variety of different things, but I still felt like I wasn’t going to immediately pronounce her name wrong unless there was something genuinely weird about it.
You may or may not be aware that “Micheal” is starting to be a way that people who are dumb and bad have chosen to spell their sons’ names. If you’ve been teaching in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably encountered at least one Micheal in there somewhere, and if you’re like me, you’ve immediately resolved to never contact those parents, ever, under any circumstances.
Gentle reader, the actual pronunciation of this child’s name is so, so much worse than simply reversing the admittedly-not-entirely-intuitive vowel placement in “Michael.” It’s worse than the forty thousand different spellings of “Jasmine” I’ve encountered over the years. Now, I really can’t tell you her actual name, because it’s unique enough that if she ever Googles herself she’ll find this post. But imagine a child being named, oh, I dunno, “Sahar,” and you think oh, that’s a neat name, I’ve never met a Sahar before, and you figure it’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “Sahara,” right? Might be wrong, but surely it’s not that far off. Like maybe you think it’s Suh-harrrr and it’s Sa-hair. Wrong, but not offensively so.
And then she tells you her name is pronounced “Sarah,” and you have to immediately freeze your face and not let the words No, it fucking isn’t, you poor thing out of your mouth.
… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?
No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.
Dammit.
On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.
It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.
I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.
I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!
Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.
Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.
We did not get a snow day, although most of the surrounding districts did. That said, it’s polar vortex time, and right now if the forecast doesn’t change I’m not expecting to return to work until Thursday, since we’re currently expecting wind chills of 20 below or colder for Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As children are idiots and show up to school without coats and wrapped in thin blankets (and this is, to be clear, often a choice, unrelated to poverty) we cannot have them outside walking to school or waiting on the bus when the windchill is 20 below. So.
And now, I am dying, and I shall sleep. We absolutely aren’t going anywhere tomorrow on account of the weather, and my plan is to spend the whole day doing as little as possible.
The following is a true fact: I am an Old. I have written before about how I’m at an age where I straddle the line a bit between Gen X and Millennials; my preferred nomenclature is the Oregon Trail Generation, but that’s not exactly what the cool kids call it. All that said, one thing I definitely am is Old. Yes, the oldest Millennials are old now. They have mortgages– some of them, anyway– and cars and kids and are starting to worry about paying for their college, and whether debt is going to be declared inheritable before they die.
Anyway. My wife and I were out doing some running around today, in two cars because one of the jobs involved bringing the last carload of stuff that we’re keeping back from my father-in-law’s apartment, and I told her that I was going to stop at a local gaming shop that is up by his place. The place is far enough away that if I drive past it I’m probably going to stop, just because I’m not up there very often. Anyway, I puttered around for a bit and decided to buy something and got behind a couple of high school-aged kids who were also checking out. Both of them, as it turns out, were buying card booster packs of some sort; Magic, I think, but I’m not sure and at any rate it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the booster packs were expensive, and I heard the cashier quote a hundred and seventeen dollars to one of the kids, who pulled a handful of twenties out of his pocket, counted them carefully, and handed them over, receiving his change in the expected fashion.
And then the whole world went sideways, as the kid looked at his friend and said “I love these things. The money doesn’t come out of my account, so it’s like I’m not really spending anything.”
There was a moment of frozen silence. The cashier, a man of about my age, made eye contact with me, as both of us realized at the same time that this young man had just used the construction these things to refer to twenty dollar bills as if they were some sort of exotic and rare form of shell- or bead-based barter,and I don’t think either of us really knew what to do for a second. The kid’s friend saw the look we shot each other and also saw that I was either having a stroke or trying not to laugh, and rolled his eyes at his friend without saying a word and ushered him out.
I walked to the counter and placed my purchase in front of the cashier.
This post is mostly existential horror of some kind or another so here is a kitten.
I have a student in the hospital; it turns out that Covid-19 and sickle cell anemia are not, in fact, two great tastes that go great together. Those first seven words of the post are, at the moment, the sum total of my knowledge and I don’t know what kind of shape she’s in, beyond “bad enough that she’s in the hospital.”
I have never really believed that prayer or well-wishes or positive thoughts or anything like that actually held any power to change and/or fix anything, particularly in the lives of third parties, but if anybody has any spoons left to toss in the direction of a fourteen-year-old they’ve never met, I’m willing to be proven wrong.
You might remember Hosea, who I talked about a week or so ago. That post is rather down on Hosea as a human being, and while I didn’t write anything in there that I disagree with, one of the interesting things about the kid is that he’s also got a generous streak that, on the occasions when he allows it to surface, is a mile wide. The problem is that it doesn’t come out very often.
He stopped me at lunch today to ask me if I knew about the Gofundme he’d started. Oh God, I thought, because generally when someone starts a Gofundme it’s not because something wonderful has happened, and I have no idea why this kid might think that he needs money badly enough that he’s crowdfunding for it on the Internet. So I ask him what it’s for, and he tells me it’s “to improve the world,” and doesn’t really elaborate. It’s on Facebook, he says. I tell him I don’t have a Facebook account, but if he wants he can email me the URL and I’ll take a look at it.
And he does. And I do.
And this Gofundme starts off with this YouTube video, which I was able to watch until the point where the teacher tells her class “I’m going to step out for a minute” and just bounces, and then there’s his little spiel for his funding, which is literally that he wants to “make the world better.”
He wants ten thousand dollars.
There’s not, like, a plan or anything. Just, like, hey, “if you want to make the world a better place donate now!!” and yes, that’s a direct quote.
I, uh, don’t know what to do with this. He wants me to donate, of course, and I don’t want to be perceived as being against improving the world– I am, in fact, staunchly pro-improvement in all its facets– but, like, I’m not just going to hand this kid some money, am I? I mean, I could make a token contribution, I suppose, like, $5 or something like that; I don’t know if Gofundme works like Kickstarter does, where if you don’t hit your funding target you don’t get any of the money. And it’s not like the kid has any chance of hitting $10,000 short of some sort of bolt-from-the-blue viral explosion scenario. Plus, like, I don’t think 8th graders can even use Gofundme. That’s gotta be some sort of TOS violation, right?
Do I do anything else about it, though? Should I tell his mom or something? I mean, it’s not like it’s wrong for him to be trying to raise money to make the world a better place, and while it’s not necessarily any of my Goddamned business one way or the other, I feel like if my kid was trying to raise ten thousand bucks on the Internet even as a foolish and naïve expression of hope for the future, if some other adult I knew found out about it and didn’t let me know about it I might be a trifle peeved. I feel like if my kid is trying to get that kind of money from strangers, maybe as a parent that should be something I know about. But what if she knows? How the hell does that conversation go?
(For the record, this is also a bit of a Problem Parent, which complicates things. I don’t want the kid in trouble. I can imagine a world where this causes that.)
The best solution is probably to sit down with him for a few minutes and give him a better idea of what this site is actually for, and the idea that when you raise money you generally do it for something specific, possibly followed up with a promise to donate if he decides to do a fundraiser for the humane society or whatever rather than this nebulous “make the world better” thing.
(Thinking about this a bit more, how the hell do they give you the money if a Gofundme is successfully funded? This kid’s fourteen; surely he can’t have hooked up a bank account to the site or something. That’s the other “maybe notify Mom” detail; let’s say that hypothetically Hosea snookers four or five adults into donating money, and now he’s got $75 or whatever that Mom didn’t give him and when she asks he says the money is from his teachers? Christ.)
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