The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I tell you what, when you’re someone who tends to write his way through his issues, and you’re realizing that you don’t want to write about the shit that’s currently occupying your mind … that’s a problem.
Might be time for a new Sekrit Blog. Who knows.
EDIT: You know what? Cat picture:
I alluded the other day to realizing that you’ve grown tired of a long-term hobby, and it’s floated through my head several times recently (and, I think, was also suggested by someone here, although I’m not about to go looking through comments) that if I described what I’ve been like lately to a third party and especially if I didn’t tell them I was talking about myself, they’d describe me as clinically depressed. My anhedonia is through the roof lately; I don’t enjoy much of anything that I used to enjoy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
I’ve effectively stopped watching all things that can be watched. I have a probably month-high stack of comic books sitting next to me that I bought and actively don’t want to read. I’m ready to clear all of my superhero memorabilia out of the house, and that’s a lot of stuff. Even video games have been sources of more stress than stress relief yesterday; I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate III pretty consistently for a few weeks and I had a moment the other day where I realized I was getting tired of it. I’m … maybe a third of the way in? And my backlog is like six or seven games deep right now. If I hadn’t already shut down the YouTube channel (which is another thing I used to enjoy that I’ve stopped doing) I’d have to at this point, just because I can’t fucking finish anything.
I’m still reading, but nothing’s set the world on fire recently. I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do if I lose interest in reading. It’s unimaginable. And, well, y’all can bear witness to the amount of time I’ve spent writing recently. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I’m unhappy; I just … feel like I don’t really enjoy anything lately. A bunch of perfectly cromulent geek hobbies have been tossed aside in favor of the fucking NYT crossword and Spelling Bee and I refuse to be that person.
I’ve been on brain meds long enough that I’m used to sort of monitoring my mental status from a distance. I’ll get in touch with my doctor if I start feeling like this is getting genuinely alarming, or if my wife comes to me after reading this and says she’s noticed something different. It may just be that I’m finally aging out of my juvenile bullshit; who knows. I just … really miss liking things, that’s all, and I don’t feel like that’s something I do any longer.
Blech.
I am more or less taking tonight off, but I thought I’d let everyone know that my student from yesterday was back in class today and all appears to be well.
Trigger warning: suicide.
Spoiler alert: everybody is OK.
Note that, at least if you’re reading this on desktop, there’s a “pages” link underneath the like button at the bottom of the post. Or you can just click here, I guess.
Welp.
Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.
I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.
Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.
Today went exactly as I thought it would, as opposed to how I feared it would. Everybody, from the building principal to the security guards to the kids, seemed really nice, and there don’t seem to be any shouty people in my hallway yet, and other than some casual profanity in the hallway I didn’t even see any misbehavior. Learning the LMS system the new district uses is going to crack my skull open, and right now I kind of hate it, and I talked all day so my throat feels like somebody ran an electric mixer in it for a couple of minutes, but other than that? No complaints.
I had a whole bit here about the Speaker of the House but having written half of it, I’ve decided it’s dumb and I need to learn more before I put anything dumb where people can read it. So … yeah. My advice to the Democrats is to listen to people who are smarter than me.
It’s absolutely wonderful, this feeling that your brain is betraying you. I know how tomorrow is going to go. It’s going to be fine. I might have a minor technical hiccup or two, possibly involving a photocopier or the ancient projector in my classroom or the fact that I haven’t touched a Windows device in, probably, literal decades. That’s the worst that’s going to happen. The kids are going to be fine. It’s going to be honeymoon time and beyond that I took some time today to go through my kids’ discipline records and something like 75% of them have no referrals at all, and my worst kids have maybe one a week, with a lot of those being something called “refusal to identify self,” which … well, I’m actually going to ask them tomorrow or Tuesday how it is that I have kids who have no referrals other than five or six refusals to identify themselves, because that doesn’t make any sense to me– if I’m mad at a kid for refusing to identify him- or herself, I feel like there’s probably something else going on that I could have put on that referral? Something that maybe trumps the refusal to identify?
I dunno. At the moment it’s a minor mystery.
And nonetheless, despite the fact that I have changed schools many times, despite the fact that I have had nineteen first days of school and this will be the twentieth and I can do these things in my sleep, I am crawling out of my skin with anxiety right now. Like, I’m getting physical manifestations of it. I’m sweatier than I ought to be and jumpy as fuck. I’d take a brain pill except that the newer emergency pills have a bad habit of turning me into a slug the day after I take them (they are listed for “up to four times a day” on the bottle, and I cannot imagine what the fuck would happen if I took four of them in a day) and I cannot be a slug tomorrow.
I’m also being deeply stupid about having to get to work earlier than normal. I generally got to my previous school at 8:30; I have to be at this one at 7:30. That’s an hour earlier, and I don’t have to drop my son off. So I get up an hour earlier. This isn’t complicated. I’ve already changed my alarm and everything. And yet, bullshit abounds regardless. It’s just before 8:00 right now and I’m genuinely concerned that I should be starting to get ready to bed.
Just shut up, brain, I’m tired of you. I know it’s been a stressful week and realistically it’s about to be another one, but Christ, enough. We know how to do this. It’s going to be fine.
My lovely little vacation is about to end— not the one that had me at my aunt’s house yesterday, where I somehow left during the summer and returned during the winter, because that happened— but my three weeks between jobs. Tomorrow afternoon we move my stuff into my classroom, and I officially start on Monday.
And if I’m being honest, I’ve not been this nervous about starting at a new school since I lived in Chicago. I don’t feel like I know nearly enough about the building to be starting on Monday, and while I don’t want to get into shit-talking before I even start, I feel unprepared in a way that is specifically alarming about the quality of leadership– admin and otherwise– in the building. To be specific, I’ve requested access to their teacher handbook at least half a dozen times and from multiple people, and not only have I not been given access to any such thing, no one has even acknowledged the request. In other words, I’ve asked three different people “Can you send me the teacher handbook?” and I haven’t gotten “not until you start here” or “we don’t have one” or “Yes, I’ll do that” from any of the three, it’s just been as if I haven’t asked the question at all. So right now I know not a single thing about how any procedures at all work in the building. I finally got access to attendance today, so I know my schedule, but I have never seen a bell schedule, so I don’t know when, say, fourth hour actually is. I don’t know if there’s any particular places I’m supposed to be in the morning or at dismissal.
It’s alarming. Like, this is information I need, and furthermore it’s information they want me to have. I’m supposed to see the principal tomorrow so I’ll be able to ask her in person, but I should’ve had this weeks ago.
The other thing? I’m letting my head get into this stupid place where maybe I’ve only allowed myself to think that I’m a good teacher for the last two decades because I’ve been teaching at mostly shitty schools for my entire career! Like, I don’t want to be the guy who spends the next three months saying “Oh, at my old district we said bleh, and now at this district you say blah,” but I have this weird and likely entirely inaccurate feeling that I have a whole lot of really bad habits— what are they? I dunno!– that I’m going to have to unlearn, and I’m worried that I’m going to have to start submitting 20 pages of lesson plans every week or some shit like that, which is … massively unlikely.
Oh, and I have to learn Canvas, which is vastly annoying, because right now I don’t know it at all.
It’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine. But I’m already stuck in a world where I left town for 24 hours and I feel like I was gone a month, and next week is going to be an enormously long week even in the best-case scenario. So maybe that nap I took this afternoon wasn’t a bad idea after all.