Tag: morons

They’re just not that bright

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

Really freaking rough day at work today. The day started off with an emergency staff meeting. As you can probably imagine, an emergency staff meeting, this one called on literally three minutes’ notice, is never a good thing, and this one was worse than most, as we lost a student over the weekend. Apparently she had a massive seizure while in the tub. Halloween was her fourteenth birthday, and was also the day her parents decided to take her off life support.

She was not one of mine, and not a kid I knew, but the building was a mess as a result. We were given a statement we were asked to read to our second hour classes, and there were grief counselors in the building all day long.

And as much as I would like to blame that for my kids’ academic performance today, I really can’t do that, as once again a huge percentage of my students decided to pretend today that they had not only not attended a single second of any sort of 8th grade Math class, they had spent their entire lives living in a small, dark box and had never encountered the concept of numbers in general. Far, far more kids, unfortunately, than could be reasonably presumed to have known this girl. Plus it was also happening during first hour, before anyone knew what had happened.

I don’t know if non-educators can really understand the frustration of spending an entire month of class time talking about solving equations every single day, and then to wait a week and have a solid majority of your students act as if they have never encountered any such nonsense before. Or to ask an eighth grader what three plus nine is as part of explaining an admittedly somewhat tricky story problem and be greeted with a blank stare and three obvious guesses before you finally pry the answer to that first-grade math question out of them.

I still can’t figure out how it is fair that I get judged on the academic performance of people for whom being a moron is aspirational. “When am I going to use this?” indeed; you will never in your life use anything, and I wish I could get across to you how intensely depressing that all is.

Are there standardized tests later this week? Of course there are. They are never fucking dumber than right before something that is important to me, but not to them.

I quit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

All of it. Forever. Forever and ever, and ever and ever.

This is a review of a local high school, and I hope the author steps on a Lego every time she gets out of bed for the rest of her stupid life, and I hope her mattress is lumpy and her pillow is fifteen degrees warmer than her room:

Also, guess what LMS my district uses?

There’s currently a screen up saying Canvas is undergoing “scheduled” maintenance, which … no. No, it isn’t.

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

GUESS WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music, Politics1 Comment

I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.

In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.

I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.

In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.

Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.

So yeah. I hate it here. How are you?

Literacy was a mistake

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I just witnessed someone asserting, with no apparent irony, that Abraham Lincoln had non-violent alternatives available to him to end the Civil War. I mean, if I want to be charitable for some misbegotten fucking reason I suppose he didn’t actually append “and win” to the word “end,” but Christ and fuck, how does just existing keep getting dumber?

Yesterday I had another, different human explain to me with no small amount of exasperation that just because I had lived through the thing he was talking about, a thing that happened before he was born, it didn’t mean I knew anything about it. Not even “knew more than he did”! Knew anything at all.

The older I get, the more I want to roll all technology back to somewhere between 1998 and 2005. Actually, hell, I can give you a date: let’s say back to November 6, 2000 and just erase every single Goddamned thing that’s happened since then and start over again. That was when the world went off the fucking rails, right?

They broke me today

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I ended instruction early with my sixth period class, with the words “To hell with this, you’re on your own,” went to my desk and put in for a personal day tomorrow on the spot. When you put in for a personal day you’re supposed to include a note to your administrator explaining what’s going on. Here’s mine:

My initial draft, “fuck this and fuck them,” was lightly edited by AI.

How to Drive Without Killing Me: A Basic Lesson for People Who Don’t Want to be Fucking Morons

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, y’all, see that lane I’ve marked with a blue arrow?

If you are driving in that lane, and there are stopped cars in front of you because of a light or a stop sign or whatever, and someone is waiting to turn left across traffic into a parking lot or a retail establishment or whatthefuck ever, do not ever ever ever under any circumstances stop early to let that motherfucker turn left in front of you.

Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. You’re not being nice. You’re trying to cause a fucking car accident, and I hate you because you’re an idiot and you shouldn’t be driving.

Had some dipshit pull this move on me this morning, while I was in the lane on the far left, and of course that fucking slapnuts was driving a F4500 or whatever the fuck the big truck for guys with tiny dicks is, and because the yellow car can’t see through the car that is waiting for them, and the oncoming traffic in the far left lane can’t see the yellow car either, that stupid son of a bitch turned directly in front of me and damn near got T-boned for his trouble. Even a tiny bit of ice on the roads or the slightest bit of distraction and my ass would have totaled my car and his.

And, I tell you what, if I get into an accident under those circumstances, and I live through it? I’m not gonna blame the person I hit, even though they’re also a moron for turning directly into a blind spot. I’m coming after the idiot who stopped and let them through. I will flip your Goddamned car over with my bare hands.

You’re not being nice. You’re going to get someone killed. Anyone who needs to turn left should expect to have to wait until it’s clear.

Don’t fucking do it.

In which tomorrow is a new day

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.

I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.

Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”

And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.

I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.