The older brother of a kid in my building was murdered by the police.
A former student was shot a couple of miles from school and may be paralyzed for life.
And just yesterday another former student was arrested for murder. Despite being a minor the police are releasing his name all over the fucking place.
Oh, and another younger brother of former students who would have been one of mine in a couple of years got airlifted to a hospital in Indianapolis today for unspecified reasons and is expected to be gone “indefinitely.”
I have a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks and she’s going to ask me about my mental health. I’m going to have to lie.
This is the 666th day of posting in a row, for those of you who are into nonsense.
Every time I pick up my phone or turn on my computer, the world has gotten measurably worse since the last time I looked. I wish that was an exaggeration. It’s not. Remember when we invaded a foreign country, killed a bunch of people, arrested and kidnapped their leader and brought him back to America for a trial? That was eight days ago. It’s out of the news.
Oh, and it may turn out that it was a coup engineered by Venezuela’s Vice-President, who manipulated the pedophile rapist felon currently running our country into doing what she wanted. He apparently posted today that he was the “acting president” of Venezuela; they can have him. Frankly at this point I’d welcome an invasion. Just make sure you do it when he’s in Florida; DC has Black people in it and they don’t deserve his bullshit. He’s already destroyed half of the White House so if England or Canada or Cuba knocks the rest of it down again I really don’t give a fuck at this point.
The idea that there is nothing that I can do is slowly driving me mad. I mean, I can pretend. I could go downtown and stand in the cold with a bunch of people and yell some slogans; no one is listening. There were protests downtown today and yesterday. They didn’t even make the local news. I could call my Senators and my House representative; they’re all Republicans and I assure you not one of them gives a fuck. All that would do is get me put on a list, and let’s be honest, I’m probably already on a couple of them anyway. I could take the week off and go to Minneapolis and do … something. No fucking idea what.
Weird, to think that living in a red state is actually protecting me to some extent right now. I’ve heard tell of the occasional ICE vehicle spotted around town but nothing has made the news, and I’ve heard nothing at my school about any immigration raids or anything similar. None of my students have abruptly stopped coming to school. Somebody posted on Reddit the other day in a local board asking what we thought we would do if ICE started going door-to-door in our neighborhood. I had to answer that I didn’t know, which absolutely terrifies me. I’m old and fantastically out of shape and I have a son and a wife to worry about. Even if I could convince myself that vigilantism of some sort was the answer I am literally not physically capable of it. Sure, if someone comes knocking on my door I can refuse to tell them anything about my neighbors. They’re actually doing that in MN right now. Literal highway checkpoints, too. I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.
The idea of going out in a blaze of glory gets a lot less glorious once you realize what it would most likely consist of is a couple of ineffectual wild swings and a heart attack. My wife and I have talked about getting a gun or two for the house; we mutually decided against the idea at the time (for the record, just as a reminder, I hate guns. This has not changed) and now I’m wondering if we should revisit it. But, seriously, for what? What ultimately made us decide against the thing in the first place is that there are four people in this house and all four of us are on psych meds and we both know that any gun in the house is much more of a danger to the four of us than it would ever be to any theoretical intruder. Is the idea that I might at least take one of the fuckers with me when they show up worth it? This isn’t the movies. There’s no Red Dawn scenario here. I’m as likely to successfully defend my family with one of the swords that are already in the house as I am with a fucking gun.
What else am I supposed to do if somebody shows up, call the police? The police haven’t chosen the people over ICE even a single time yet. They aren’t going to. They’re not here to protect us and they never have been.
I don’t have a pithy way to end this. It’s all more swearing and fantasies about violence from here on out.
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.
It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.
Today? Dead quiet.
We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.
I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.
This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.
After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.
You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?
And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.
“Dipshit groyper in it for the lulz” was not one of the identities I had considered for the shooter.
I need to figure out what it is about the first test of the year that causes all my kids to turn their brains off. Because I’m pretty sure I’m four, maybe five years deep where after the first test I wanted to quit my job and go pick onions for a living. My next classes are going to be yet another one of those situations where I have to struggle to keep the words fucking idiots from escaping my lips. Tell me, gentle reader, what do you think about this statement:
Any number to the power of 0 is 1.(*)
I feel like that’s pretty unambiguous!
Can you explain to me why, in a question about the power of zero, where the notes stated that any number to the power of zero is one, some students said that no, this number wouldn’t equal one, or worse, that some of the example numbers would only sometimes equal one? Gentle reader, can you give me a single example in mathematics of the word sometimes showing up when we’re talking about something equalling something else?
Christ, I’m tired.(**)
(*) For the purposes of this conversation, remember this is 8th grade math, and we’re going to ignore the fact that there’s debate about whether 00 equals one or zero. They’re not going to get asked about that in 8th grade. Literally every other fucking number equals 1 when raised to the power of zero, and I’m willing to tolerate a tiny inaccuracy in what I thought, again, was a clear and unambiguous statement.
(**) I have had this exact conversation, multiple times: “The rule is any number to the power of zero equals one. What’s three to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s twelve to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s three hundred to the power of zero?” “One.” “What’s negative four to the power of zero?” “… negative one?” “The rule is any number to the power of zero is one.” “Oh, one.” “What’s point five to the power of zero?” “… point five?”
Witness my latest addition to my classroom, a “boneless loveseat,” that shipped compressed into a very tiny rectangular solid and expanded rapidly into that once I took it out of the packaging. It can supposedly support 600 pounds of humanity; I can say that when I sat on it the back did not feel especially comfortable but the seat held me up just fine and I didn’t have trouble getting out of it. I’m considering a matching chair to go with it. Supposedly this thing needs 48 hours in order to completely decompress and it was almost unsettling to look at it after the first batch of expansion was done; the damn thing always looked like it was moving, but in this weirdly imperceptible way. I’m going to take another picture of it tomorrow from as close to the same angle as I can and see if it looks bigger.
This is, as you all well know, my greatest hypocrisy; I genuinely think that teachers should not spend money on their classrooms and yet I lavish hundreds of dollars on mine for fun new shit every year even before we get to the school supplies. Remember, I already bought myself a new Goddamn desk chair. That loveseat was pretty cheap as such things go, but still.
(Donated supplies have begun arriving, by the way; my deepest thanks to those of you who have contributed. The link is here if you haven’t yet and want to; if you don’t, that’s absolutely fine.)
In accordance with prophecy, our new textbooks have not arrived yet; at this point I’m fully expecting to not see them before October. I hope I’m wrong. We should’ve had the damned things before school let out so that we could familiarize ourselves with them over the summer. I wouldn’t have done it, mind you, but at least I’d have spent the summer feeling guilty like I should have and not waiting for the opportunity to feel guilty.
Anyway, I got my desk beaten into shape; tomorrow we’ll look at starting to get things up on the walls. I also got a bunch of clothes shopping done today, so I can stop stressing about that for a while. Whee!
Also, here’s what the loveseat looked like before I opened it up. Note the bankers’ box next to it, for scale.
And I’m putting this at the bottom because I’m hoping no one notices it. I’m also considering this, because I’m an idiot:
I’m not even sure where I would put it. I’m running out of floor and wall space at this point.
Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.
I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.
So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.
Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.
