How my day went

On April 21, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I sent this email to my principal, my assistant principal, and my dean of students this morning, after sending six students out of my classroom:

There are twenty-four days of school remaining. If I start every third and fourth period with five referrals for the next twenty-four days, then so be it. The guy who wanted to be reasonable has left the building. The ragey asshole is all they have left now. I am not spending one single additional second during this school year arguing with rude children who have no academic agenda.

Not tonight

On December 3, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Today has been a festering shitfest of a day, and I’m done. Just done.

Aaaaand I’m out

On April 17, 2021April 17, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life

Well, that didn’t last long: I had planned on spending most of the day sitting on my computer in the office working my way through the course I was supposed to complete for the IU thing, and instead I lost patience with it immediately and quit the IU thing. I suspect, but cannot prove, that there has been a massive hemorrhage of people they’d hired for this this week once everyone looked around and realized what they’d signed up for, and I’d rather just quit now than get two or three weeks in and either bail after I’d spent actual time and effort on it or fall for the sunk cost fallacy and stick around just for the stipend. The $2500 would have been nice, but I have always valued my time far more than my money, and this simply wasn’t worth my time.

Y’all, I’m tech-savvy. I’ve had jobs recently where explaining tech to people was basically all I was being paid for. But what made me hit the brakes on this thing was hitting a point in this course where they wanted me to do the following:

Acquire (somehow) a Canvas account that allowed me to create courses;
Use that account (that I don’t have) to create a course that
Used my teacher account (that I also don’t have) on another site called Perusall so that I can
Copy material from the Canvas course I’m in right now in order to
Create assignments from the material already posted in that class which
No one, anywhere, will ever look at and then
Reflect on what the assignment has taught me.

Adding insult to injury, this entire process was labelled “optional,” but it was made clear at the beginning of the class that if you wanted any PGP points (useful for license renewal) for this process you had to do all the optional parts.

Could I do all of this? Absolutely. Maybe. I don’t actually have a way to create a teacher account in Canvas, at least not without using my work Canvas account for it, which I’m not going to do. So that could have been challenging. Am I going to jump through all of these hoops– the instructions were three screens long– to create an assignment that isn’t going to do me any good at all? On Saturday? Nope. I’m not. And most people are not remotely as good as I am with tech stuff, and the dizzying array of different accounts we were supposed to be creating and monitoring for this thing was too much for me.

So, yeah. Looks like I’ve got a bit more free time than I’d counted on for the next nine weeks. I almost wish I could watch this thing from a distance, fly-on-the-wall style, because as I said I think I’m far from the only person to look around and bail on the spot, and I think the whole thing is going to end up messily imploding in short order. I removed myself from the Google Chat room we were supposed to be doing all of our team communication in (yet another account I had to create) so I can’t keep an eye out, leaving only a GBCW post in my wake letting them know I was done. Good luck, y’all.

In which I did not

On January 29, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized

I appear to have hit some sort of “sitting at your desk too damn long” wall today, because my everything hurts, and I don’t think I can blame the new chair, which indeed I am growing to like quite a lot, although I’ll never be able to recline in the motherfucker.

…and, yeah, I’ve been staring at an empty screen for ten minutes trying to get back whatever idea I had this morning, where I thought I had a quick and easy idea for a post (along the general theme of “I am dumb,” which is my favorite subgenre and I’m sure yours as well) and I cannot recall it to save my life.

Oh well. Y’all are going to have to find a way to forgive me.

Nope

On February 12, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn life

I wasn’t feeling well yesterday– had a one-day case of the stomach flu that’s been going around for the last couple of weeks, I think– and I was in bed for the night by six, so I didn’t post. Today I have been in a simmering rage for the entire day for no clear reason that I can identify. In a few minutes I’m going to take one of my “only on really bad days” brain pills and try and get an assignment pulled together for my 7th graders tomorrow and I think that’s going to be all I can accomplish for the day.

Something more normal tomorrow, I hope.

Speaking of noooooooope…

On February 27, 2018February 27, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I was applying for a teaching job? That wasn’t quite true, at least in the strictest sense of the word “teaching.” It was a job, in a school, that would involve occasionally interfacing with kids but which seemed, from the description, to actually mostly involve backing up teachers and being a resource for them rather than a job where I was in front of a classroom all day. I messed around with my work schedule a bit this week after getting a couple of emails from the HR director, who indicated there would be an informational meeting at the school that it might be useful to come to.

(I’m leaving out a lot of details, obviously; this program involves a pretty substantial infusion of money and is a new thing for the school to the point where renovations are happening in the building right now for it, so the idea that they’d invite people who are applying for the job to this informational meeting makes more sense than you might think– the building staff was also invited.)

So. Yeah. I went to the meeting. There were maybe a dozen staff members present and at least three people who were there because they were applying for the same job I was– me and two others, in other words.

The lack of buy-in from the staff was a physical force in the room, and the sinking feeling that started moments after the presentation began never really got any better.

I happened, after the meeting was over, to walk out of the building with one of the other two applicants.

“Was that job what you thought it was when you applied?” I asked.

“Not even a little bit,” she said. And she didn’t say “You can have it,” but it was pretty damn clear she didn’t want it any longer.

They are actually looking for two people to fill this job, who will both be in the new facility at all times. Along with sixty kids.

Sixty. At once.

Three blocks a day, of– lemme say it again– sixty kids. Seventh and eighth graders. In a program that, in my professional opinion, is a massive waste of time and resources if they’re going to treat it as a class that you get a grade for. In a nicely renovated, brand-new space featuring two load-bearing walls in the middle of the Goddamn room that cannot be moved and guarantee that there will be no place where a single teacher can stand and see all of his or her students.

So.

oh-shi