Tag: nonsense

Just in case you’re bored

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

A game I enjoy playing every year: on one of the three days before longer breaks (Spring, Thanksgiving, Winter) I hand the kids a word search called Famous Mathematicians. It’s their names. I usually do a few of them and split the classes up or sort of randomly spread them around, and this year I decided to pack everyone’s names into one 35×35 grid. There are 119 student names on that grid, and yes, some of them are backwards.

Ordinarily I don’t use anyone’s real names on the blog, but I don’t intend to provide you with a key, which means some of these names are absolutely not going to be uncovered, and I figure finding out that out of my 119 8th graders, one of them is William and another is Sarah is probably not actually any real breach of confidentiality, especially when they’re all embedded in an image and not actually in searchable text. (The “Sara” in the bottom row is an accident! I do not have a Sara.)

At any rate, I can’t come up with any way this could bite me in the ass, so if you’re really bored over the long weekend I hope you have coming, feel free to print this out and see if you can find 119 human-sounding names in there. If I come up with a way this could cause me trouble, I’ll throw the post behind a password, but I don’t think it’s too likely.

(My bank password’s in there too, just for the hell of it.)

(That’s not true.)

(… or is it?)

Too tired to even explain why

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

… but I’m taking the night off.

As per your previous request

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I was asked after posting about my boneless sofa to remember to post a video next time. Today is next time! I now have a boneless sofa and a boneless chair in my classroom for my kids to sit in while they read.

They don’t read, mind you, but whatever. I’m an optimist, dammit.

Also, I’m not entirely sure why iMovie decided to change the aspect ratio of the video, but I’m not concerned enough about it to go back and fix it.

Meanwhile, I have survived my first full day of work for this school year without any particular drama or stress, although I do think the 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting we had this afternoon was, in a lot of ways, the wrong faculty meeting. In particular we had a dreadful half-hour or so where we got way too deep into the weeds about a hall pass policy that the seasoned teachers took one look at, realized it would never work, and immediately resolved to ignore; the less experienced teachers asked two hundred and forty thousand “well, what about this?” questions, causing no small amount of suicidal ideation among those of us who have been around the block a couple of times.

(We have new APs, and two of them are new-new, not just new to us; this has all the hallmarks of an idea put forth by someone with their heart in the right place but no sense of how an initially-reasonable-sounding plan might scale to a building with hundreds of kids and dozens of teachers. It’s kind of cute, in its way, and I can imagine our principal pushing back mildly against it a bit and then shrugging and saying “Give it a try and we’ll see,” knowing full well that a bunch of us were … well, gonna take one look at and resolve to ignore it. I’m not mad about the plan, necessarily, just that it led to a half hour of increasingly obvious hypothetical questions. Y’all have been in meetings, you know how it goes.)

Anyway. My wife and son both had to go out of town today to take my brother- and sister-in-law somewhere, so they won’t be back for a few hours; I’m gonna go play Wuchang: Fallen Feathers until they get back. I really will post classroom pictures tomorrow, I promise.

Public Service Announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.

You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.

Anyway, point is, go do that.

Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.

Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.

(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.

EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂

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?

Wait no

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I said it was the first day of spring last week? That was wrong. Today was the first day of spring, and the way I can tell was the fact that half the building was pissed off and the other half was crying today. All of my ability to can has been replaced with cannot. I still haven’t finished that Lego set so I think I’m gonna go do that, for real this time. Maybe go to bed early. Really early.

Four more

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I went out after work and made some bad decisions, so if anyone wants to recommend a part-time job I can do from home over the summer, it would be appreciated. 🙂

Never change, Duolingo

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I can literally hear my students whining “When am I gonna use this?” right now.

Also, Duolingo, I think it’s fair to suggest that an American English speaker will never say “Ghassan a is very hungry,” and while I admit that that would be a genuine PEBKAC* error, it would be super cool if you could just fix it and move on.

*we may need a more phone-appropriate version of this acronym.