My son is fifteen, and a freshman in high school. He spent his early years at a small private school, and transitioned to a much larger public high school this year. As such, he’s encountering several aspects of the human existence that he was more or less sheltered from prior to this year. As neither my wife nor I particularly care to fight with him about anything growing from his body, he has a scraggly teenage semi-beard and an absolutely glorious mane of blond hair that reaches the middle of his back.
We have warned him that, given his appearance, it is absolutely inevitable that someone will eventually attempt to buy weed from him. It’s ridiculous to deny it; if I picked him and 20 other white kids from his class and asked a cop which one of these kids is holding? mine would be the first he turned to. He doesn’t dress like a stoner, necessarily, but the rest of the look is there.
Today he went into the bathroom and two kids were passing a vape back and forth. They left when he came in, he took care of business, and then another student came in. That student came in and, no doubt detecting a whiff of the vape on the air, asked him if he wanted to buy “a smoke.” I assume that’s a cigarette; I don’t know if kids call vapes “smokes,” but whatever.
My son’s response? “No thanks. My parents love me.”
My wife and I both reacted in the same way to this story, which was that he was probably lucky he didn’t get popped for it, but he said the kid was chill about it. I did let him know that a simple “no thanks” would probably suffice next time.
I left the house ten minutes early today, wanting to get to work a few minutes in advance of the morning’s staff meeting, and promptly encountered a car accident on the highway that slowed me to a complete stop and got me to work at pretty much exactly the same time I usually get there– ie, a minute or two late, but not enough that anyone will ever notice or say anything. But God damn if it hasn’t led to me feeling half an hour behind on everything, for the entire day. I ran some errands after work and picked the boy up from school after a club meeting, so I didn’t get home until after 6, and then we ate dinner, and now somehow it’s 8:15 and I’m working on this blog post. I’m completely convinced it’s going to be 9:30 when I finish, no matter how long the post ends up being, and if you can’t tell it’s not like I have a ton of material to work with today.
(A brief digression, where I attempt to find a picture for this post, and find one that keeps getting more bizarre the longer I look at it until l realize that two different girls in the picture have extra knees and therefore the picture is AI. I’m not posting it, but feel free to Google “quiet kids sitting in rows” and see what comes up.)
(Also, Adobe, if something is AI-generated it cannot, by definition, be a stock photo.)
(I type “classrooms” into GIS looking for something generic and the first picture I see also turns out to be AI.)
(Fuck, and I mean that with every ounce of disrespect in my body, generative AI.)
Anyway.
Yesterday was not a bad day at school by any means but all of my classes have been wilder the last couple of days than previously, so I decided to pull back on the reins a little bit today and made everybody stay in their seats for the entire class period. Typically my move this year is that everyone stays in assigned seats for the instruction portion of class, and after that I don’t really care where you sit so long as you’re in the room and you pick a spot and more or less stay there. I wasn’t mad and didn’t act mad in class, I just said that they’d been a little rowdy so we were doing to dial back for a couple of class periods and then things would probably go back to normal.
Here’s how good my classes are: you could have heard a pin drop in my fifth and third hour classes during work time, and my sixth hour was quiet until 90% of them were done with their work, at which point a class discussion erupted that was entirely my fault and made it nearly impossible to keep everyone quiet. Which, again, wasn’t my goal anyway— I wanted to limit movement and chaos a little more than usual and cut down on the noise, but I’m rarely interested in silent classrooms unless I’m teaching or they’re taking a test. Silent classrooms full of kids creep me out, to be completely honest.
All that said, my honeymoon may be coming to an end, as the counselor pulled me aside this afternoon to tell me that a currently homeschooled student would be visiting my classroom on Friday (??) so that she could decide (???) whether she wanted to attend our school part-time (????) or go to the district’s alternative school instead. (?????) As none of this is usually the child’s decision– you have to have made some serious mistakes for part time or alternative school to be an option, and at that point the “option” is not usually your option, it’s the district’s– but I look forward to seeing what sort of bomb this is going to drop into my lovely, peaceful day.
I can only assume that I should have put homeschooled in quotation marks up there.
I called in today, after getting … maybe three hours of sleep last night? I woke up around 2:00 in the morning to take a piss. Not unusual; this happens most nights. Most nights I take care of business, put my CPAP mask on, and go right the fuck back to sleep. But every so often my brain decides that I would be more comfortable if I left the mask off and tried to sleep on my stomach. And last night the mask was occasionally singing me the song of its people, a sign that I’ve let it go a little too long without cleaning the air holes or just replacing the mask, and I succumbed to this stupid, stupid instinct.
I need it to be clear: I will always sleep better with the mask on than the mask off, and there are no exceptions. I don’t know how I survived as long as I did without the CPAP mask. It is virtually impossible to get good rest without it unless I’m deathly ill, and what’s happening under those circumstances rarely counts as “good rest” anyway. My brain convincing me to try and sleep on my stomach without the mask is mental illness. There’s no other reasonable way to describe it.
What’s worse? You would think that after an hour of tossing and turning and being conscious of the fact that I’m not breathing correctly, I would put the mask back on? No. On these nights, I can never convince myself to put the mask back on. I’m always right about to fall asleep, and “waking up” (I’m already awake, and miserable) to put the mask on would be a bad idea.
It would not be a bad idea, it is in fact the only thing that will allow me to break the cycle and go the fuck back to sleep, and yet I don’t do it. Some nights I can pull this mess off and not be a disaster the next day. I could tell within minutes of “waking up” this morning that school was just not happening, and I was blathering and incoherent for most of the day.
It sucked and I hate my stupid broken brain and my stupid broken fat body.
Okay, it’s only day seventeen, but maybe it’s time to stop knocking on wood: I am having an amazing time with this current group of kids, better than last year, which was a tremendously good year. I’m having literally zero discipline problems– one of the kids asked me the other day what my worst class was, and while I’d never tell a kid the answer (or at least give any answer other than “yours,”) the truth is I don’t have a worst class. Still. Surely, by now, one class should have emerged? Like, my first hour is my hardest, but that’s because I have a ton of special ed kids in that room and we don’t have enough staff in special education. I really should have a co-teacher in that group and I don’t. But it’s not behavioral difficulty, and it’s not even really disinterest difficulty– it’s that they’re really low and that’s hard to work with. That doesn’t make them a bad class, just a challenging one. I don’t mind a challenge.
I have never had a year of school where I didn’t have at least a small handful of kids that could make me happiest by not showing up to school. I don’t have a single kid who fits that description this year. My most ADHD kids are still nice. I had a couple of kids the first day who I had pegged as “I will either love you by the end of the year or you will be my worst enemy,” and they all straightened out already.
If this keeps up it’s going to be the best year of my career, and it’s not going to be close. There’s a hell of a lot of school left; there’s no doubt about that, and the end of September is always rough, and February-March is always rough; there are tougher times genuinely baked into the calendar that aren’t going to change. But I’m at the point where I feel like it would take some truly catastrophic transfers in to drag this crew down. I’m crossing my fingers.
I mean, hell, they took their first test of the year yesterday– do y’all remember the last time I used the phrase “first test of the year” around here and didn’t also use the words “shit the bed”? Because I don’t. I’m actually happy with the results. They were using their notes. I don’t know what the hell is going on.
I have spent today setting up spreadsheets, looking at IEPs, looking at 504 plans (not done with either of those tasks by a long shot,) setting up my Canvas classes, editing last year’s How My Class Works presentations, putting together an explainer so that new staff know how to sync grades between Canvas and PowerTeacher, redoing seating charts, planning out next week, and somehow, despite the fact that tomorrow will only be the third day of school, grading. I’m not even teaching until Wednesday, guys, and right now Tuesday in my plans is reserved entirely for physical tasks like “give everyone their workbooks and notes folders” and “name calculators,” which is a real thing all of my classes have to do. There is also a section that just says “Whatever else I forgot about.”
Mental note: I need cotton balls and alcohol to remove last year’s names from the calculators. I’m told that erases paint marker nicely. We shall see.
My 23rd first day of school– I counted, I know I’m right this time– is done and dusted. One down, 179 left to go.
I have been talking for seven and a half hours, and I’m exhausted. I’m changing my plans for tomorrow so that I don’t have to talk as much. I’ll make Monday another big talky-talky day; these kids are gonna have to move around tomorrow. It was pretty nondescript as these things go; I have no immediate problem kids and the handful I had an eye on at least managed to come off as friendly and approachable. No obvious rage beasts just yet, which is good. I said “You will either be my favorite student or my nemesis” to at least two different kids, and of those two, I’m pretty sure I got lucky by having him in first hour. The kid who was widely regarded as the biggest discipline problem in the 7th grade last year is in my fourth hour and did not draw attention to himself today.
All positives, basically. That said, I’m so tired I could die, so I’m going to go do that.
A double shift of Open House was already going to be bad enough— 1:00-3:00 and then 5:00-7:00– but I was not prepared for a fucking tornado warning to happen during the first half. Not fun.
Gonna die the moment I get home. Today started out with moving the cars away from the hail, so I’ve pretty much had enough of everything at this point.
That absurdly tall, gloriously-haired kid on the right there— who is the same kid as this kid— graduated from 8th grade today. Which means that he is somehow a high school student now. Sooner than you might think, as he’s taking summer school classes right away and they start in a bit over a week.
That fat bastard on the left is going to be fifty in a month. He is somehow still alive.
I am feeling my mortality a bit more than usual this week, if you haven’t figured that out.
And my god have I been writing on this site for a long time.
