Let’s see

On June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

SATURDAY: Wake up, go visit wife’s family, a number of whom are in town for the day. Go from there directly to the high school graduation of the first group of fifth graders I had in South Bend, wearing the same clothes I wore at their 8th grade graduation, a fact that entertains only me as there is no chance any of them will notice. Go from there directly to OtherJob. Proceed to have one of the busiest nights of the year. Don’t get home until after midnight.

SUNDAY: Wake up early. Go to brother’s, who is liquidating his home in preparation to move to Illinois and live with his fiancée. Spend three hours moving furniture, including an antique oak armoire and three old-ass tube televisions that weigh so much that I can’t believe TV was ever even a thing before flat-screen TVs. Go home. I don’t remember the rest of Sunday; it involved a nap and a lot of moaning.

12:30 AM SUNDAY NIGHT: I am jolted out of a sound sleep by what sounds like glass breaking. I stagger around my bedroom with a baseball bat for a moment, thinking rather unreasonably that someone has thrown a brick through our bedroom window. It turns out that the cat has jumped up to a shelf of photographs and knocked the shelf over. Not the pictures on the shelf. The entire fucking shelf.

I never really get back to sleep.

MONDAY: There are three days of school left, and I have ordered tens of thousands of dollars of supplies for next year. I arrive to 25 large, heavy boxes that need to be opened, unpacked, checked in and sorted. Miraculously, no one bothers me all day and I spend the day doing this, including taking care of the extra boxes that arrived today. I send repeated emails to teachers saying things like “I know I emailed you earlier that you had stuff and you should come get it. This is not a reminder. This means that you have more stuff and now you should come get that.”

I don’t speak to students all day. No one even asks me to. There have been two days so far this year where I have felt like the invisible man in the office, and I’m not complaining about that– I need to figure out how I tapped into that power so I can use it more often.

There are two days of school left. 8th grade graduation is tomorrow and after that they go away and aren’t supposed to come back. This ought to lead to an easier day than usual with 25% of the students occupied during the morning and gone after that but who the hell knows; after how easy today was I’m not making any predictions.

It is hot. I want fall back.

The end. Have a music video.

“Road trip”

On September 27, 2014September 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am not sure I was properly warned about the nature of this expedition.

In which I love you, really, I swear

On August 16, 2013August 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Effective immediately, there is going to be a large and angry Viking armed with several sharp and spiky implements of bodily destruction guarding the door to my classroom. If you happen to need or want anything from me, that’s fine; you just have to get by Sven. His name will be Sven; I just decided that. I may feed him some LSD from time to time, too; don’t worry about that. Norsemen don’t get addicted to things.

This is honest truth: I don’t mind helping people in my building with things. It’s part of my damn job. But holy shit. I got nothing at all done yesterday, and with two work days left until the school year starts (after which point, as every teacher knows, nothing organizational will get done until December) I am seriously running up against the limits of how much any sensible human being can get done in the time I have left, and I have much much more to do this year than I ordinarily would at the beginning of the school year. I’ve said it before, many times: the week before school starts is my busiest week of the year, and this week has been substantially worse than usual in terms of how much I’ve had to do and how few hours I’ve had to do it in. The crowning moment of yesterday’s ridiculousness came when my former assistant principal called me from his new job to ask me something about a spreadsheet I’d created for him to keep track of disciplinary issues. While I was answering his questions for him (which quickly devolved into me saying “email it to me; I’ll fix it and send it back, because that will be quicker”) my current assistant principal came into my room… to ask me about the exact same spreadsheet.

And, again, because 1) it’s true and 2) I know my co-workers read this: I don’t mind. I really truly honestly and totally am happy to help people when they need help from me. But I also don’t want my kids skinning me and dancing on my corpse next week because I didn’t manage to get ready for the new school year properly, and I’m down to two days to get about four days of work done. Thus: my new friend Sven.

He’ll be answering the phone and handling my email, too, by the way.

(For real, though: I was in my classroom for about 2 1/2 hours today, because I was on Daddy Duty this morning and couldn’t get in before early afternoon, and then had to cut out before I wanted to because it’s Friday and the building was closing a bit earlier than usual. In that two and a half hours I got about six hours of work done, and still looked around before I left my room and could only see shit that I still had left to do. And, unfortunately, money that I had to spend, too. Christ, the last few weeks have been expensive.)

UPDATE: About fifteen minutes ago I took advantage of it being slow time at OtherJob, opened up Wunderlist on the iPad, and started putting together a to-do list for Monday and Tuesday. It is currently at 38 items, and that is not because I went crazy breaking things up into subtasks. Fifteen. Minutes. Ago. I’m sure it will increase in size by at least 50% by the end of the night.

SECOND UPDATE: Item #39? “Write lesson plans.” Oh, right, I have to do that too.

In which we try again

On July 31, 2013July 31, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, TeachingLeave a comment

I’ve got the BlueTooth keyboard hooked up to the phone again; this resulted in a deleted post yesterday, so I’m probably pointlessly repeating history here, but we’ll see what happens. I’ve been in the building for about three and a half hours so far today and have succeeded in completely moving myself out of the old classroom. I’ve got some more teardown to do in there, but we’re probably talking about twenty minutes, max, and I may not even do it until I know who the new teacher in the room is going to be. For all I know he or she may want to keep some of the stuff I’ve got up.

I did break down and buy a new laser printer yesterday, but I bought a new laser printer for home, not for work, and brought the old one here. The new one is wireless and AirPrint ready, so I can print from my iPad and my wife can print from her computer and her laptop, none of which we ever figured out how to do with the older printer hardwired to my Mac. It cost more than I was planning on spending, but I think it was probably the right move. The old one, luckily, quickly paired with my work computer, which I was nervous about– the school corporation has a terrible record on pointlessly disabling useful technologies, and I was nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to use my printer on the work computer because of some nonsense over OMG VIRUZZIZ or some stupid shit like that. (“Viruses” is always, always the answer to any why-can’t-I-do-this-perfectly-reasonable-thing question, even when the activity in question is one that cannot possibly produce any sort of computer security issue– like, say, hooking a non-wireless-capable printer to a desktop computer.)

Anyway. I have another ukulele appointment in a couple of hours; constant scheduling conflicts have kept us from meeting again since the first one, so this one will be a double session. Hopefully I’ll walk out of the session feeling like I have some idea of what I’m doing. I haven’t been practicing as regularly as I should have, which probably won’t surprise anyone. I have, however, discovered that the boy is positively entranced by watching Daddy play, which will give me some motivation to keep going. The boy certainly likes music; he apparently was over the moon about watching a drummer at SerbFest last weekend. That’s worth some extra practice time.

Possibly a double post day, especially if this one actually goes through. Stay tuned.

Well, that was stupid

On July 30, 2013July 30, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, TeachingLeave a comment

That picture doesn’t suck nearly as much at regular resolution; apparently the technology to make it clickable just doesn’t exist yet, or something. I call bullshit; Xanga could handle it so WordPress ought to be able to. JUST DISAPPOINT ME AGAIN, WEBSITE, THAT’S OKAY, I DON’T MIND.

(OH, OKAY, I FIXED IT.)

I was all proud of myself this morning; I’d gotten the bright idea to hook my Bluetooth keyboard (which I carry around for when I want to write on my iPad) to my phone– since my phone actually has connectivity in my new classroom, I’d be able to use it to write and upload a post. Well, I wrote a post, and I uploaded a post… it just didn’t post a post. There was even a notification put up on Facebook that said post existed, only it didn’t. It stayed live in my phone for a while, then deleted itself for no clear reason and then the link on Facebook and Twitter went to nowhere.

Woo?

Anyway: I spent the whole day moving stuff from the old classroom into the new one and making vague, half-assed attempts to get the new one beaten into shape, none of which actually worked out very damn well. I’ve come up with a whole lot more reasons to spend more money but precious little that actually seems to count as completed work. I’d be more annoyed by it but it isn’t actually August yet and I’m under no real pressure to have my classroom ready for a while. I should be out of the old one this week; that’s just being polite to whoever inherits it from me– but I don’t need to be done with the new one for weeks yet.

It’s that damn alcove that’s driving me insane. I’ve got a couple of tables in there right now, but I don’t especially like them. I think I’m going to find some cork rolls and see if I can find some way to get that attached to the cinderblocks (god, my KINGDOM for a damn classroom with bloody drywall in it!) behind it, which will make that space more usable. Also driving me insane: the barely-visible computers on the right side of the image, which are blocking my bulletin boards, although I think I have a sneaky way to make those not a problem anymore that doesn’t involve accidentally leaving them outside.

Also fun: the realization this afternoon that there is literally no place in the building that is farther from my current classroom than the one I was in last year. There are classrooms that are farther apart, but I couldn’t have moved farther away from where I was than this room. I probably walked for an hour today just in trekking back and forth between the two rooms.

Now to talk myself out of buying a laser printer. I don’t know where the hell the computer in this room prints to, but I sure as hell know it’s too damn far away.