In which I get an award

Luther M. SilerLeave a comment

I mentioned to my first hour that I had a band and choir concert to go to tonight at my son’s school, and a moment later joked that I kind of had to go because I am still married to the boy’s mother and we still all live in the same house and it would be rather difficult to pretend that I had something else that I needed to be doing other than going to the concert.

This provoked a literal chorus– multiple kids– telling me that their dads were still married to their moms and never showed up for any of their concerts anyway, and why was I such a good dad (calling it “doing the absolute minimum” probably didn’t help) and could I be their dad instead of the actual dads that they have now.

Uh. Oops?

At any rate, middle school band anchor concert, and it’s 9:00, and we just got home, and I’ve been there for (no exaggeration) hours, so I’m gonna cut this short and go to bed now.

Quick note tonight

Luther M. SilerLeave a comment

It’s not like I’ve been writing at length lately, but I had two hours of parent/teacher conferences tonight, not as the teacher but as the parent, and while none of my kid’s teachers had anything especially surprising or bad to say about him, shit, that was exhausting.

I have had a number of post ideas rattling around in my head this week that haven’t made it to the screen yet, and honest to God as I’m sitting here right now the only one I can remember is one I definitely don’t want to write tonight. The Algebra kids did not do well on their test today, which took me quite a lot by surprise, and I’ve completely rearranged the next few days as a result; I’m giving them the test back ungraded on Friday and we’re going to go over every single question as a group, and next Thursday they’re going to take another test. It’s going to be the same as this one, but with the numbers changed; I am hoping with a couple of extra days of preparation and with absolutely no ambiguity about what they’re getting into I will see a better result. The rest of my classes will spend tomorrow either frantically trying to bring their grades up on what may as well be the last day of the quarter or demonstrating why they have the grades that they have. Hopefully more of the former than the latter; we’ll see.

Now this

Luther M. Siler

I may have picked the wrong weekend to completely redo my office, as this week my wife is out of town on business and I’m a single dad until Saturday morning. Really all I’ve done so far is get up half an hour early to make sure I have time to make the boy’s lunch and feed the cats before I take him to school and I’m ready to curl up and die already. I slept like hell last night, probably not related to the lack of a second person in the bed with me, but I took her to the train station quite late– we left after I would ordinarily have been in bed, and it’s a good 20 minutes away– and it just threw my schedule entirely off, and I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. Combine that with getting up early and … yuck.

And then it was Monday at work, and Mondays at work are never great, especially after three-day weekends. Today was really weird, though; first hour wanted to talk about anything and everything other than math– I rarely have to fend off questions about the afterlife from my students, but holy shit did they want to know every single thing about my opinion about what happens when we die today– and sixth hour was all about the what is this forrrrrrrrrr that I have a lot of trouble answering coherently for some reason.

Here’s the thing about algebra, right? You don’t use algebra, necessarily. Nobody majors in algebra in college. But if you don’t know algebra it locks you out of a whole lot of shit that may or may not have any direct connection to whether you can properly square a binomial or not. And if you want any future in a career involving math, forget it. I tried to make an analogy today to the alphabet. Imagine a kindergartner asking how they’re gonna “use” the alphabet in the future. Well … you don’t, really? Because the alphabet itself is just a baseline entry skill to a shitton of other stuff that is not, in and of itself, the alphabet. Do you want a career that involves reading or writing, kindergartner? Well, sure, or at least maybe, but what does that have to do with learning which letters are vowels right now? Am I gonna have a job in vowel-identifying later on?

You’re not gonna “use” a whole lot of algebra, honestly. You’ll need it because it’s building blocks to all future mathematics, which are useful to a whole lot of skills and careers, and even if you don’t go into those careers, I’m training your ass to think logically, which is useful to make you a more functional person.

But they don’t want that. They wanna know why they have to multiply binomials, and tomorrow they’re gonna be all about when am I gonna have to factor things, and my answer will be “Today, shut up,” and on we go.

Today kinda sucked

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

Trigger warning: suicide.

Spoiler alert: everybody is OK.

Note that, at least if you’re reading this on desktop, there’s a “pages” link underneath the like button at the bottom of the post. Or you can just click here, I guess.

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On exhaustion and bad parenting

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

I have done some grading tonight, but not much, and I regret to inform you that you cannot make me do any more. Nor can you make me get any lesson planning done; this week is going to be by the seat of my pants, more or less, and it’s going to be fine anyway because this shit is muscle memory by now. This weekend was kind of nuts; my father-in-law’s memorial service was Saturday morning in Plainwell, Michigan, which means I got up earlier on Saturday than I typically get up during the week and spent the drive up hurriedly composing the eulogy I was supposed to deliver in my head, sans paper, because for some fucking stupid reason I hadn’t written it yet.

Don’t leave eulogies to the last minute, people. I pulled it off and everything went fine because I am exceptionally talented, but … don’t do that.

Oh, and the … hole? Is it still a grave if you’re just using a box with an urn and some Beefeater Gin in it and not a casket? Well, whatever it was, the Goddamned thing was too small, and everyone got to take turns digging the hole wider and deeper with what I think were technically stolen shovels before the service started. My wife briefly considered putting the box in sideways, an idea that was quickly vetoed out of existence, and we all just sucked it up and got to digging, my father-in-law’s amused laughter echoing from inside his box.

Afterwards the whole extended family went out for Mexican, because really, what else are you going to do? Sure.

And because emotional whiplash is how we do things nowadays, we had tickets to see Barenaked Ladies Saturday night. By “we” I mean all three of us; it was slated to be the boy’s first concert, and I think he was pretty excited about it. Which meant we were all a bit surprised to be leading a sobbing child out of the theater barely four songs into BNL’s set, meaning that we really only got to hear the (shitty) opening band’s set, and we didn’t get to hear the one BNL song that the boy has memorized and really wanted to hear, as I’m sure it was the last song of the night.

Parenting advice! Concerts are fucking loud. This particular concert was perhaps too loud. And, like, I mean that as a reasonably veteran concertgoer; it was too loud for me, and I’ve seen shows in that venue before. That said, though, like, BNL doesn’t need to be blowing my Goddamned eardrums out. This isn’t a hard rock band or some shit like that, and even the shitty opening band was too fucking loud, and they were going for some sort of pop/bluegrass nonsense or something like that, so they definitely didn’t need to be super loud.

Anyway, we were unprepared. We should have brought headphones and/or earplugs, or at least warned him thoroughly, and we did none of those things. I’m not mad at him and this is one hundred percent our fault as the adults in the scenario. He doesn’t necessarily Have Sensory Issues in the way people generally mean that, but we should have been able to see this coming and we didn’t. The worst thing is that he was clearly upset about ruining the concert for us, and it’s hard to convince an upset eleven-year-old that you’re not mad at him and you’re not disappointed in him when he’s absolutely certain that both of those things are true.

So … yeah. I’ve mostly laid around like a lump today. I have started the new Stephen King book; it is terrible, and I am currently deciding if I’m going to drop it or hate-read it. It is about a seventeen-year-old who is somehow actually however old Stephen King is, and said fake teenager uses slang that no teenager, including King when he was a teenager, has ever used, except it’s not about that somehow. We’re supposed to believe that this ancient old man who refers to earning money as “folding green” is just a regular teenager and pay attention to the rest of the story, where he’s inexplicably befriending an old man, except the old man is actually an old man and not an old man masquerading as a teenager.

Anyway, it’s bad and I’m tired and I’m a shitty dad and somehow I have to go to work again tomorrow and I kind of want a redo on the last couple of days.