The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I dunno. I talked to the principal at The Other Building today, and I think it went well; in fact, I’m pretty sure that we’re clear so long as … well, so long as I decide to go, and assuming we can come to an agreement on salary. Now I just gotta decide if I want to go.
There were four fights in the building today. Four. I gotta do this.
Watch them give me a perfect Goddamn day tomorrow, the little brats.
Mental health is so much fun. There is nothing like being midway through a three-day weekend and finding yourself paralyzed and indecisive about what you should be doing, not because you’re overwhelmed with work, but because you haven’t finished Sandman yet even though every second you’ve watched of it has been amazing, and She-Hulk is probably one of your favorite comic book characters of all time and she’s sitting on your desk staring at you and wondering why you don’t love her enough and haven’t watched even a single second of her show yet, and oh by the way you have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on your leg and there is no work of human literature up to and including the Bible that has had more of an impact on your life than LOTR did and oh that new show started this week and have you watched that yet no you have not. How the hell am I eighteen hours behind on TV?
It is just amazing to be freaking out because you are so behind on things and what you are “behind on” is fucking television. Also I haven’t showered yet today, I’m halfway through like fifteen genuinely minor tasks that would take probably two minutes each to accomplish, and I need to write a blog post and record an episode or two of Raji: An Ancient Epic because like an idiot I found a way to make video games into an unpaid job.
An example of those minor tasks: there is a box behind me, maybe five feet away. That box is full of action figures and crap that I took off of my desk because I decided it was starting to look super cluttered and I only wanted it to look a little cluttered. I took a bunch of stuff off, put it in the box, and then put the box behind me, intending to move it into the closet in this room. We are talking about opening a closet door and moving the box ten feet. It might not even be that far.
The box has been sitting there for at least a week and a half.
There are three credit cards sitting on my desk that have been here for months. They need to be moved into my safe. The safe is locked and on a shelf down the hall. Months.
I’m really psyched about tomorrow. Why? Because I plan to spend all day at my computer getting shit done for work that didn’t get done before school started, so now that we’re about to start Week Four I probably ought to, like, get some vocabulary words up on the wall. Tomorrow at this time I expect to be happy at the amount of stuff I got done during the day, including a truly impressive pile of grading.
But that box? It’s still gonna be there.
I have absolutely had worse first days of school. Any time I make it through the whole first day without quickly and cleanly identifying the kids I’m going to butt heads with all year, I’m starting off the year in good shape. Remarkably, I don’t think my biggest class is going to be my troublesome group, although those two things go together most of the time. My fifth and sixth hour is squirrelly but feels like mostly nice kids; my other two groups seemed pretty chill. No major organizational clusterfuckeries today either.
Do I need to have a word with Mr. Hoe-puller up there? Yeah, maybe, although I’m pretty sure this was meant as a joke.
I’ve also set a new record for kids who made sure to let me know on the first day of school that they are somewhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, including this one (look at the bottom answer):
Gonna have to have a word with that one, I think, to make sure I know exactly what their guidelines are about their parents. Sometimes with these kids, too, you want to make sure they’ve seen how other kids react if I drop an unexpected “she” on somebody in class. I want to respect their wishes, but I also want to make sure they’ve thought everything through first.
Meanwhile– and this is entirely typical for the first day of school– I’m so exhausted that I want to die. There will be no video tomorrow on the channel; I don’t have the energy to do any recording tonight and I’ve been too busy lately to get any kind of buffer going. I’ll try and get ahead this weekend.I gotta go do lesson plans now, though, so y’all have yourselves a nice night.
Missing a day once in a while is no big deal, even if I don’t do it very often. But I refuse to be busy enough to miss two days in a row, even if the post for that second day is a ridiculous two-sentence half-assed excuse for a blog post.
This one is three sentences.
My son, who clearly does not realize what he has gotten himself into, has to do a report on a Famous Person from Indiana, and has somehow chosen Axl Rose, born in Lafayette in 1962. The ensuing discussion among my wife and I about what GnR song is their most iconic led to my brother suggesting that I get an immediate divorce. While I suspect I’m probably not going that route– I would be homeless in a month without my wife– her opinions on GnR are Wrong. My son, at one point during the conversation, looked at us and, I swear to you, quietly mumbled “What have I started?” to himself.
The correct answer is Sweet Child O’ Mine, by the way.
I think what’s probably going to happen is I’m going to write a 75-page pamphlet on GnR and give it to him, and he can edit it down to three pages or a hundred words or whatever passes for hard work in fourth grade nowadays.
I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow, as I have a training thing in the morning, which means that I’ll actually have my afternoon to myself. I’m going to take the rest of the night off after I finish this brief post and curl up with a book; I started John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society last night and it’s going to demand my full attention until I finish it, I think.
I cannot calendar. I don’t know if you can calendar, and I feel like I used to be able to calendar to some degree of accuracy or another, but I have lost the ability. I don’t know how long things take, I don’t know how long ago things happened, and it is generally impossible for me to keep track of such minor details as holidays, birthdays and dates that my son might have off of school that I don’t, where we need to provide some sort of child care for him, since it turns out that you really can’t just drop them off at school on days off.
And! For once! This deficiency has finally worked out for me, as I discovered today that April 1, which is not this Friday but is instead next Friday, and was previously thought of as the last day of school before Spring Break, is an asynchronous e-learning day. Did I know this? I did not. It’s even the day after Parent-Teacher conferences, so our district did something sensible and I didn’t even notice!
What that means is that this morning I thought I had to survive ten school days until Spring Break, and now, magically, I have survived one day and I only need to survive for eight more! Because days with no students do not count.
Woohoo!
Has anyone else, while perusing job listings, seen a listing for a job with what is obviously a tech company, taken one look at the tech company’s name, and decided that regardless of the job, the tech company was going to be out of business in a few years and so there was no good reason to apply? I just got kicked a listing for a company called Optimizely. Optimizely. And … nah. That’s got pets.com written all over it. As soon as the venture capital runs out these folks are gonna be gone. I mean … this is from their website:
Does that not absolutely scream “we are burning through our seed money as fast as we can move it offshore”? These folks are gonna have their pink slips before I can finish the application. I love this picture, too:
I’ll give them this: for a tech company, there do seem to be a fair number of women around, at least in the pictures. But you don’t get to have someone holding up an “embrace inclusion” poster when you only managed to find one black person to stand in the picture, and given how awful the Photoshopping is across the board on this image one wonders if he was actually in the room with everybody else. A couple of those people initially scan Asian or maybe Hispanic but that is still a group of white people with some pepper sprinkled on it, not anything that looks like “inclusion.”
Note also that in all of those posters there’s not a hint of what this company actually does, which I suspect boils down to nothing at all anyway. I bet half the employees at this place couldn’t nutshell what their jobs actually are for.
Anyway, I’m still job hunting. Just not with these guys.
I didn’t do anything substantive yesterday, which was 100% a deliberate choice, but that meant that I left everything I had to do today for today, and then got three inches of snow dumped on my driveway that demanded dealing with on top of it, meaning that today I have run errands, graded, tried out our new snowblower (A+ would blow again,) planned for next week, made some tentative plans as to how I’m going to teach Fatima to read, edited some videos, written this blog post, and done some reading. I’ve also … uh … supervised as my wife and son crawled into the crawlspace underneath the house, because we have a couple of leaks that are going to have to be dealt with, which I’m super excited about.
We watched Eternals yesterday. That’s the review. That one sentence. I’m not saying don’t watch it, but don’t go out of your way to expend any effort on watching it either.
I still have a ton of stuff to do tonight, or maybe I don’t and it’s just that the few things I have left to do feel like a lot, I’m not sure. Either way it’s probably time to cross “dinner” off of the list (right after “write blog post”) because it’s possible that I’m overestimating what else I have to do today because I’m hungry. Did I ever eat lunch? I think I skipped lunch. That probably wasn’t smart.
Anyway, see you tomorrow. There may be kvetching about technology purchases! Or maybe not. We’ll see.
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