Tag: parenting

Some miscellaneous thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

One week until Spring Break. And really the last day before the break doesn’t count, so only four teaching days until Spring Break. I can do this. And apparently ILEARN starts a week after we get back? I had no idea. I thought we had at least a couple of weeks, or maybe the last week of April. One way or another, I don’t even look at the results any longer.

We’re taking a road trip tomorrow for an academic competition for the boy, and we have to be up at like 5:30 in the fucking morning for it. I am complaining here because the boy does not read the blog– I’m pretty sure as of right now he is still unaware that it exists– and I will not complain about it around him, because I’m not going to be that kind of dad. It can be taken as read that the entire thing makes me want to die, though.

Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on April 19th. If you’ve been around a while you probably already know they’ve been my favorite band for basically my entire adult life. They just released a new single off of the album today, and along the way announced that they’re doing what they’re calling a “Dark Matter Global Experience” on the 16th at 500 theaters around the world. One of the 500 happens to be nearby, so I snagged tickets for my wife and I since they were basically the cost of a movie. They’re going to play the new album twice, once in darkness and once with “mesmerizing visuals.” I gotta be honest: even as a huge fan, huge enough that I just bought tickets to this thing, I have no idea if I think this is a good idea or not, but I’m willing to burn $24 on it, and I can’t wait to get home and wash the weed stink out of my clothes so that I can go to work tomorrow without raising eyebrows. If nothing else, this will be a unique experience, I imagine.

Speaking of new music, Fletcher, the other woman in the Miley Cyrus video that turned every woman on TikTok into a lesbian for a few days,(*) released her sophomore album this week. I’m four songs and– sigh– ten minutes into it and so far I’m liking it quite a bit except for the way streaming has fucking ruined music, because I should never be four songs into an album if only ten minutes have gone by. There is one song at 4:09, one at 3:05 and one at 3:02, and every other Goddamn song on the album is less than three minutes long.

I need the whole world to get off my damn lawn.

Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and say a little prayer that I’m about to discover the shitgibbon died while I was asleep. I am going to add more Republican resignations to the prayer, because that shit is getting more hilarious by the Goddamn day and it’s not like God is listening anyway so I can ask for whatever I want.

I note that Jimmy Carter is still hanging on, though, despite all odds. He’ll outlive that fat bastard yet.

(*) It’s me, I’m women

‘Twas the night before Christmas…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting3 Comments

And it has occurred to me that that entire poem is kinda bullshit, because it’s 8:30, all but two of the presents are wrapped and under the tree already, and whatever my wife and I are about to settle down to it is sure as shit not going to be a “long winter’s nap,” because we both know good and goddamn well the boy is going to wake both of us up before seven. There’s no way those children were all snug in their beds. They were waiting.

I, of course, in my role as Chief Troll of the household, have told the boy that he can’t open any of his presents until our small coterie of guests arrives at 4:00 tomorrow. We won’t hold him to that– and he knows it– but it’s still fun to say. I probably shouldn’t enjoy crushing my son’s soul as much as I do but at least he knows me well enough that he never believes a single thing I say any longer.

End-of-year posts will start soon; I usually do my Best Books post a couple of days after Christmas, but I feel like my book choice over the next few days is going to be really important to my timing. I know I just finished one today that might make the list, and there’s a couple that are high up in the rotation right now that have been really positively received. We’ll see what happens, I suppose. 

Four more

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I made it through my first real day of teaching six straight classes plus advisory with no breaks, and while I’ve definitely had better days, I’ve also had way way worse. Today’s real problem was a persistent brain fog that I couldn’t snap out of; I kept getting kids’ names slightly wrong and I couldn’t hear a Goddamn thing to save my life, plus a lot of sitting down at my computer with a specific task in mind and then immediately forgetting the specific task. Now, these things happen to me at home all the Goddamn time, but normally the amount of focus I have to keep up at work keeps them from happening there. Not so damn much today, apparently. All that said, I got through the day, and I’ll get through the next four. There’s a contract ratification meeting tomorrow evening, and I’ve heard rumors that it’s going to make everyone happy, so hopefully that’ll be all true.

The boy had a drama class presentation thing after school today. It was fine, although I feel like the teacher for his drama classes (it’s an actual class and not a club) maybe has a slightly more, uh, grandiose idea of what her position is than I might in the same situation, and there’s some inherent silliness to watching 12-year-olds reciting memorized speeches no matter what, but if those speeches are supposed to be especially profound or tear-jerking or, well, dramatic, the silliness is going to be intensified and not the other way around. He got to use his saxophone to literally play some of the kids off stage, and I think that was his favorite part of the evening, honestly. I had a weirdly strong moment of damn, he’s growing up too fast at one point during his monologue, but I fought it off as quickly as I could because the last thing I need to do is make this lady think she’s doing a good job by getting all maudlin while my kid’s up there giving his speech.

Off to bed. I finally started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s magnum opus, a ten-book series called Shadows of the Apt, and … well, I’m not surprised that it’s going well and I’m racing through the first book. I ordered the next two today. We’ll see how long it takes me to read all six or seven thousand pages of it. By then he’ll probably have released another three trilogies. I will never get caught up to this dude’s productivity, I swear.

In which I get an award

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave 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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave 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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, TeachingLeave a comment

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 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.

Pages: 1 2

On exhaustion and bad parenting

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Music5 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.