The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I bet, at your job, whatever it might be, you didn’t have to tell anyone that taking their pants off was inappropriate. You probably also didn’t have to tell anyone to take the staple out of their nose.
I had to do both of those things before 10:30 this morning.
Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.
Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.
To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.
(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)
I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!
Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.
The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.
My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.
Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.
The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.
Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.
All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.
I kind of need tomorrow to go well.
(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.
We had a surprise snow day today— I woke up, thought “Man, it would be great to find out we had a two-hour delay,” and then we did, and less than an hour later it turned into an asynchronous cancellation. We had an ugly burst of sleet and lake effect snow at the worst possible time, apparently, and the rural roads were disastrous. This is somehow our seventh snow day of 2026, which is absolutely insane.
On Thursday a student walked up to me and asked me what the plan was for the walkout protest next week, since she had heard I was “in charge” of it. And holy fucking Jesus I have never shut an incorrect idea down so quickly. High school students across northern Indiana (and I assume most of the country, but this was definitely the week for them around here) had walkouts this week, and there are more planned for next week. Our district sent out a communication to the teachers explaining precisely what their expectations were for the staff were our students to decide to walk out of class. I have been talking with a lot of my students about the protests (at, to be clear, their instigation, not mine) and to be completely fair, the idea that I was “in charge” isn’t completely out of left field. I quietly distributed whistles into the staff mailboxes late last week, and it was hilarious how no one in the building, including my principal, hesitated for even a moment to decide that it was me behind them.
The problem is that I genuinely don’t love the idea of middle school students doing a walkout. Teachers have been told that they must remain in their classrooms if even a single student does not walk out, and we are to “continue instruction as normal,” and if everyone leaves, we are to contact the office for further instructions. I strongly suspect that there will not be enough supervision. This is a very different thing from high school walk-outs, where half of the students are at least on the verge of adulthood, have drivers’ licenses, etcetera. There are eleven-year-olds in my building. It is not the same thing. And while I’ve quietly encouraged a handful of students to take leadership roles if and/or when, the social environment in a middle school doesn’t work the same way a high school does either. Not to mention the fact that in my specific building, without providing a lot of detail, the physical layout of the building and the surrounding streets aren’t great for marching.
The notion of these kids spreading themselves out over a few blocks while they march around the building or whatever— or, worse, some of them deciding to do that while others congregate near the doors and chant or whatever— is … kinda terrifying, to be honest. All we need is one rogue asshole to decide to start a fight and all hell is going to break loose. Again, high school is different; there are going to be some of the same concerns, of course, but the kids are more able to self-police themselves.
Oh, and we already know ICE is in the area despite this being a red state, and all it takes is one fucking car full of Nazis to try to snatch one of the brown kids.
I happen to have an eye appointment scheduled toward the end of the day on one of the days that is being frequently discussed for a walkout. I could, technically, take the afternoon off, and then none of it would be my problem. But if I did that and something happened— or if I followed my district-issued instructions and stayed in my room for one kid or whatever— and something happened, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I find myself genuinely hoping they don’t have the guts to go through with it.
Fuck.
No school again tomorrow, so we’re doing another synchronous day, and I looked at my Algebra class and realized that for the life of me I have no idea what the hell the next unit is supposed to be. One of the things that has really frustrated me about this year is that no one seems to be in control of the scope and sequence for either of my classes, and there’s been a lot of flailing around as we try and figure out what to teach when. The district hugely mistiming both of our ILEARN checkpoints so far hasn’t helped. We have a meeting tomorrow (virtual, of course, but the agenda mentions breakout rooms, so it’s going to be horrible) to try and iron some of this out, but for right now my Algebra kids are doing the same thing as my regular 8th graders tomorrow because whatever I plan for is going to change tomorrow afternoon anyway and I really don’t have the energy for this nonsense at the moment.
We’ve gotten maybe seven to eight inches of snow today— I went out and hit the driveway around 2:00, and there was between five and eight depending on where I measured, plus another inch or two since then. Hopefully we don’t get hammered overnight; I don’t want to have to schedule another driveway session in between classes or meetings.
Anyway, the call-out didn’t happen until after six, so it took me a minute to get all my shit set up, and now it’s 8:49 and I have no brain or energy left. I’ll try to post tomorrow when it’s still daylight outside. This thing where I never post before 8 PM lately needs to stop.
So for the last several years Indiana has had this thing called a Teacher Appreciation Grant, or TAG. We’ve gotten it before Christmas and it’s amounted to maybe an extra $300 or so. It’s generally gone to anyone who spent the previous year working for whatever their district is and didn’t get a bad rating on their yearly evaluations. It might have been slightly more for teachers rated Highly Effective than teachers rated Effective, but it wasn’t a huge difference.
The morons in the statehouse, who have never seen anything that wasn’t worth making worse, decided this year that the award needed to go to significantly fewer teachers and that it needed to be competitive, because there is no better way to feel appreciated than to have to fight everyone in your district for a check. They’re no longer allowed to give the grant to more than 20% of the teachers in any given district, and it has to be based on test scores.
I’ll spare you quoting the borderline-incoherent email we got from our district “explaining” how to apply for this thing, but apparently we do need to apply– God forbid the district figure out who deserved this thing on their own– and we need to provide our own evidence of how we’ve increased test scores over, presumably, the previous school year, although the email does not actually say that the data you send them has to be from the 2024-25 school year. This feels like an oversight and is not especially surprising.
I teach 8th grade. My students leave me and immediately go to high school.
You get one guess about whether I have access to any data about any of my previous students, at all, during the time I’ve been working for this district.
Shit’s due next Wednesday, so I suppose I ought to get to making shit up soon.
The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:
I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and
I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.
That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m gonna go die.
To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.
I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.
Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?
I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.
I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.
(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)
My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.