My classroom is completely ready to go other than a single piece of furniture, which needs to be delivered, removed from its box, and placed in its appointed location. I still don’t have any goddamn textbooks or anything like that, mind you, but the room is ready. I’ll probably go in tomorrow anyway just to see what kind of trouble I can get myself into.
In the “good news/bad news” department, it looks like we’ve got a fully staffed Math department for the first time since I’ve been in this building. This is good news because it means I don’t have to teach an overload, but it’s bad news because it means I don’t get to teach an overload, and I’m vulnerable to getting called for class coverage on my prep period. So I won’t be getting as big a paycheck as the last couple of years, because that bump from overloads is substantial. But I actually get to, like, breathe, and occasionally take a leisurely piss, during the school day. That’s gotta count for something, right?
I think I’ll work on sub plans and early photocopying tomorrow. God forbid I get that shit done before school starts. I’ll also get some pictures; I forgot to do that today.
There’s still plenty to do, of course– I have never once in 23 years started the school year feeling like I was completely ready– but given that it’s Tuesday and I don’t even start getting paid until next week, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape right now.
I am going to put a lot of effort into being more explicit about my procedures this year so that I can tighten up behavior a little bit. These are going to be scattered around the room in appropriate places, and I think I’m probably going to actually laminate little cards for the “Start of Class” and “End of Class” ones and tape them directly to the desks. They won’t last the whole school year, obviously, but hopefully after a few weeks they won’t be strictly necessary any longer.
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.
There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.
Maybe?
That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?
Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.
That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.
Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.
(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)
(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)
(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)
I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.
Ain’t nobody asking to go to your room. We all know it.
This is the second to last God damn day of school and everybody is done with everything. Speaking as someone who only had five kids in his room in 3rd hour because everybody left and 32 in fifth because everybody showed up, there’s not a single damn thing wrong with letting them hang out with their friends/teachers they like under these circumstances. So long as you know where everybody went there’s no real problem.
There was no reason to email the whole staff about this because now the boss has to get involved and shut the whole thing down.
We’re gonna do it again tomorrow even though she said not to. Email? What email?
Also, fire me, I dare you.
Shut up.
Also you’re retiring in two days just shove them all out the door and relax.
We are going to the zoo for a special Nighttime Zoo Experience tonight, so this is all you get for today, since I got home and took a nap on the couch. So have a great night.
The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.
I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.
(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)
Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.
In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker:Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?
It’s too bad I can’t post pictures of students, because we had the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club today and took a group picture at the end. Somehow the same amount of pizza that they devoured like fucking fire ants the last time we had a pizza party left me with two entire pizzas this time, which might be the first time a group of seventh and eighth graders have left pizza uneaten in the entire history of humanity. Then again, that meant I got to send entire pizzas home with a couple of kids, which was more fun than it should have been.
We start reviewing for finals tomorrow, and I somehow managed to write all of one of my study guides and half of another at work today, meaning that this is going to be a significantly easier weekend than I was anticipating. Classes are going to be light in the morning tomorrow because of a field trip so I’m hoping I can get both of them finished off before the weekend even starts, which will mean the end of any lesson planning for 2024-25.
And we’re going to the Niles Renfaire on Saturday, so if it goes poorly I can at least buy a murder weapon for next week? Surely someone will be selling something bladed there, right?
Meanwhile, it was nearly 90 God damn degrees today somehow, and I’m gonna wear shorts tomorrow, because I’m not putting myself through another day like today was and it’s only supposed to be a couple degrees cooler.
(Twenty minute distraction)
… yeah, I don’t remember what else I was going to talk about, so I’ll see you tomorrow. 🙂
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