Tag: middle school

Wheel of Time fans can’t be real

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right?

I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else, and you should all be very proud of me for how little whining I have done about it here. Even if you feel like I’ve complained about these books a lot, you have no idea how much I have held back. Book Eight begins what even fans of the series call “The Slog.” Or maybe it’s Book Seven! They can’t agree.

I owe the publishers of the book I’m reading now a review, and I’m really wondering if I’m not being fair to the new book by putting it after a WoT book. Because oh man did I go straight to I Bet It Would Be Fun to Annotate This and Rip It to Shreds mode.

Anyway. For the record, I genuinely don’t care if you’ve enjoyed these books or not, and there are multiple people I really respect (such as, for example, my actual wife) who are fans of them, I just … I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will at this point. I’m still finishing the God damned things one way or another, though.

Had a weird moment during my prep/lunch period at work today, where a whole bunch of shit all piled up on me at once and I damn near had a meltdown over a bizarre assortment of objectively minor inconveniences. I’m still not used to the new glasses. I made bad lunch decisions, and on top of that I was given a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, or maybe it was just super low on syrup. I’ve bitten my lower lip in the exact same spot roughly seventy times in the last few days. My classroom hasn’t been vacuumed in several days, and the cruft that is still on the floor is resistant to my broom. And the anxiety over this summer school thing continues to ramp up; I looked a little bit more closely at what little information I have and I’m now definitively convinced they’ve handed me two grades at the same time.(*) And probably a few other things that I’m not remembering at the moment. And … man. I managed to work my way out of it before the kids showed up, which was good, especially since I had to double up my advisory again. Nobody wants Mr. Siler to lose his mind and go home early during the last week of school, especially since I just remembered another one of those little inconveniences and it was being handed yet another piece of essential paperwork that I needed to do about taking the last day of school off– which, remember, I told my boss about in January.

One good thing is I do think I’ve actually convinced myself that next year’s eighth graders should be fine. There’s still a billion ways that could go wrong, and my partner teacher continues to stubbornly refuse to admit that she’s jumping to the high school next year.

I would appreciate knowing something about anything involving the next few months within the next couple of days, thanks.

(*) Does this mean that both groups are tiny, and I’ll have a tiny group? Or are both groups normal sized, and I’ll have a huge group? What even is a huge group in this context, since they’ve told us nothing about the kids we have coming? Am I doing math and reading for both groups– so four preps in three hours? Is anyone ever going to respond to any of my emails?

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today has been more or less identical to yesterday, except with an hour or so of school stuff thrown in, the last hour of school stuff I’ll have to do on my own time for 2025-26. Thursday is my last day at work, and Friday is the last day of the school year– yes, I’m missing the last day of school for the first time in my career (forgive me if I’ve mentioned this; I don’t think I have, but who knows) because my son’s 8th grade graduation is right smack in the middle of the day. Ordinarily I look down my nose a bit at the concept of 8th grade graduations, but as he’s been at this same school for eleven years, I figure I’ll allow it, especially since it’s not as if I have any actual choice in the matter.

Hm. That looks familiar; I bet I have talked about this at some point.

Oh well.

I’ll follow my usual pattern for the next few days; the kids are getting lists of missing assignments tomorrow, and they can choose to use their time wisely or not depending on 1) whether they, personally, are wise or not and 2) whether they are pleased with their current grade. A bunch of them will have nothing to do! Some of them will do missing work that will have no effect on their grade, only because they want all the points. A somewhat larger number will do no work over the next few days because failure is fine now and they know nothing will happen to them.

As a society, we really need to bring back being ashamed of being stupid. People should know when they are stupid, and they should feel bad about it, all the time, until they do something about it. But whatever; I’m not succumbing to negativity this week, God damn it, no matter how reasonable it might be. I’m going to live through tomorrow one way or another, use Wednesday and Thursday to tear my room down, and then walk out of the door with a spring in my step Thursday afternoon. At some point during that time I’ll write lesson plans for my sub– unbelievably, I have a sub right now for the last day– that will basically say “no blood, no foul, and if there is blood, make sure it’s not your fault.” I’ll leave them a stack of various things the kids can color or draw on and a small stack of pencils and remind them to simply send away any child that displeases them because the office will be sending everyone home as fast as they possibly can. And if it goes poorly? Oh well.

Then I have a week of trainings and such, and … maybe I’m teaching summer school after that? Or maybe I’m leaving somebody in the lurch at the last second? Probably the first thing; I’d like to think I’m not that big of a jerk, but there are some blinking alarm lights about this summer program. Surely the pay will make it all worth it, right? Surely.

Anyway, I have a Wheel of Time book to finish, so I’m going to go do that. Go have a cheeseburger or something.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I wasn’t intending to skip posting for the second night in a row (Wednesday doesn’t count, that shit was funny) but I got home and fell asleep in a chair and that was it for the night. Good news, though: I successfully went to a full day of work for five straight days this week! Unbelievably, this is the first time this has happened in 2026. There are twenty-eight days of school left.

Also, Caskey Russell’s The Door on the Sea is really damn good and I should write a full review of it. Maybe tomorrow? We’ll see.

A real thing I was asked at work today

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

“Mr. Siler, can you help me find vagina?”

I declined.

I will not be providing any further explanation.

Victory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have made it to Spring Break. Certainly not the hardest year to do so, but I started my last three classes of the day with the words “your job is to make sure I don’t go to jail today” anyway. My official observation last week turned out literally perfect, and the guy who was in my room for the disaster lesson on Tuesday was back yesterday and everything went beautifully.

I even made it through April Fool’s Day without any particular nonsense, although one of my students did attempt to convince me she’d passed out, sticking to it until I stepped over her prone body and pointed out to the whole room that generally when human beings pass out they fall backwards.

“I guess she could be dead,” I said. “If that’s the case, someone needs to drag her into the hallway. There’s no dying in here. Y’all know the rules.”

One of the boys actually got up and that’s when she abandoned the joke.

And yes, I really do have a rule that no one is allowed to die in Math class, and I really am like this, and I guarantee if you ask my kids to name one rule in my class, about a third of them will mention that they need to stay in their seats and the rest of them will say they aren’t allowed to die.

Anyway, I’ve been playing video games all evening, and now I’m going to go read until I decide it’s time to go to bed. Hooray!

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

Some good news

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today— not that this is a hard bar to exceed— was much better than yesterday.

Honestly, I have no real complaints at all. The cafeteria was calm despite the presence of a lot of the same kids (the one who started all the nonsense in the morning wasn’t at school, and I’m at the point where I’m genuinely hoping his parents transfer him), my classes were at least as functional if not more functional than normal, and I didn’t have to cover a class during my prep. The next few days ought to fly by; I’ve more or less got them planned out and a lot of the stuff we’re doing is autopilot by now.

That said, I’m having a formal observation in the morning— these things always go fine but they’re stressful nonetheless— and I got an email from the district’s head of secondary Math instruction that he wants to observe in my Algebra class on Friday for some reason. It’s not a problem, mind you; my Algebra kids are my angels, but it feels kind of unfair having it two days after my formal.

Seven days of school until Spring Break. We can do this.

On a slightly different note: the new laptop had a system software update today, which did not solve the issues I’ve been having with Gutenberg, but it seems that simply turning Gutenberg off fixes the problem without creating any differences that I can see in how I interact with WordPress. So I’m going to assume that this is Gutenberg’s fault somehow, and that eventually they will update it in the background and I probably won’t even notice when the problem gets fixed. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

In which I’m not doing it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I’m not, God damn it. I refuse to do it. I am not dedicating another blog post or another minute of time with my precious mind on trying to make sense of ILEARN results and how it has been several years since they have correlated in any way at all with my perception of my students’ abilities.

That way lies madness. That way also lies comparing my results to the other 8th grade Math teacher and trying to come up with reasons why our scores might be different, and that madness is even worse madness than normal madness. I’m gonna walk away from this fucking computer and go read a fucking book, and I’m not thinking about school or the internet or teaching or math or fucking test scores for one more single second tonight because it is not worth it.

Bah.