The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
The first sentence of this post was going to refer to “nameless dread” initially, but nah, work starts on Monday and I know perfectly well what the name of this dread is, along with its home phone number, address and probably the motherfucker’s social security number if I look through my files.
One way or another I’ve been in a mood all day and I’m taking tonight off. Go be nice to somebody.
Don’t tell anybody, because I’ll deny it, but if school started tomorrow, other than needing maybe half an hour to clean up a few things and put some stuff away, my room is ready to go. It’s not finished, mind you, but it’s the kind of unfinished where if someone who wasn’t me walked in, they wouldn’t be able to tell. No one is going to look in an empty corner and go “Weren’t you planning on putting your hex lights there?”
I have two more days this week before teachers are officially back on Monday. All good. Time for something to go terribly wrong, in fact.
The problem is, the whole rest of the building is not me, and I just realized today how much trouble the rest of the building is in. There were a lot more teachers back today, and … yeah. There are a bunch of things that absolutely must be finished in a week in order to open school, and … I have my doubts. And from what I’m hearing, although this is entirely hearsay, the other middle schools are worse off than we are.
There are no functioning student bathrooms in the building, for example. The bathrooms were all completely gutted over the summer, and the sinks are in but there are no toilets or urinals, nor are there any partitions, because you need the toilets in place before you put in toilet stalls. You literally cannot open a school if none of the hundreds of students who go there have anywhere to pee. Na Ga Ha Pen. And that’s before we get to things like none of the new reconfigured classrooms have cabinets or countertops yet. Like, you can have a classroom without those things? But it’s a big pain in the ass.
Our band and orchestra rooms are not remotely functional yet; I’m not sure about the details because I haven’t seen them. But what I did see is that when they moved all of the stuff out of those rooms– and you can imagine just how much stuff is packed into your average middle school band and orchestra room– they Tetrised everything into one of our social studies classrooms. And I chose that word on purpose, because there is no room in her classroom. All of her desks are triple-stacked on top of each other against the wall farthest from the door. There was a narrow path to her desk, but you can’t do a whole damn lot to get ready in a classroom that is completely full of shit.
There are a bunch of teachers changing classrooms this year, too, and for a lot of them one of the two rooms isn’t ready yet, so none of them can go anywhere, and …
I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the middle schools have the start of school backed up by a couple of days, is what I’m saying. We can’t even do e-learning days, because none of the kids have their devices yet. We can find temporary workarounds for the classrooms– worst case, we have a lot of kids in the gym and in the library for the first few days of school, and it’s whatever; we’re annoyed but it’s manageable. But if there are any more delays to the bathrooms, we’ve got a major Goddamn problem on our hands.
There’s still plenty to do, of course– I have never once in 23 years started the school year feeling like I was completely ready– but given that it’s Tuesday and I don’t even start getting paid until next week, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape right now.
I am going to put a lot of effort into being more explicit about my procedures this year so that I can tighten up behavior a little bit. These are going to be scattered around the room in appropriate places, and I think I’m probably going to actually laminate little cards for the “Start of Class” and “End of Class” ones and tape them directly to the desks. They won’t last the whole school year, obviously, but hopefully after a few weeks they won’t be strictly necessary any longer.
Am I missing anything obvious?
Holy shit, y’all. I applied for my high school math licensure literally yesterday and I got an email today that my addition had been approved and my license was updated. This from, remember, sending them test results from a test that took forty days to get official score results on, and in what is almost certainly their busiest time of the year.
I’ve talked my fair amount of shit about the IDOE during my time working here, but they’re absolutely on point with getting licenses up to date. Damn.
And, yes, that’s seven different content areas I’m licensed for. I really should get my science licensure just for the hell of it.
Adding to the level of today’s miraculousness, of three meetings I was expected to attend today, two ended early– one by forty-five minutes, and that was the one I was fully expecting to eat every single second of its allotted time– and the third took within a minute of precisely the time it was planned for. Tomorrow is going to be a crazy-long day because it’s parent-teacher night, and I have to dress like a grown-up and everything, but Wednesday should be pretty chill and then on Thursday the children arrive.
We are still missing two math teachers– a department that should be five people is only three– so I got another overage approved today. It went fine last year, so unless this group of kids is markedly more evil than last year’s– cross your fingers– I should be able to manage it just fine. I would always rather have an overage and soak up the enormous amount of extra money you get paid for it than be constantly getting phone calls to cover random classes during my prep period anyway.
That said, because I’ll be at work for twelve hours tomorrow, expect a video update at best. I will be in full no-brain-only-sleep mode by the time I get home, especially since I got no meaningful sleep at all last night and am kind of running on fumes already.
Here we go here we go here we go.
I am probably 95% done in my classroom. I have to put some things in closets and do some cord management and things like that, but if school was starting tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be terribly worried about it. Since I have a week, we’re absolutely all good, and I can start focusing on curriculum.
Want a tour?
I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.
Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.
I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.
(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)
I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.
I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.
Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.
Yesterday I said I was genuinely excited about school starting this week. Today I’ve mostly been a ball of anxiety, although I think I’ve been masking it pretty well, maybe? I don’t know. I did a better job keeping busy yesterday– for the most part I had no choice, being honest, as we went to a birthday party in Indianapolis, and driving back and forth to Indy in a single day is gonna keep you busy whether you want it to or not. Today … not so much. I have done a lot of sitting and staring. Finished the crossword and the Spelling Bee on the NYT app. I’ll probably finish the book I’m reading today. That’s about it.
I’m hoping to find out one of two things tomorrow– either that we hired a new math teacher and therefore the size of most of my classes are going to drop by about a third, or that they’ve agreed to split my Honors class into two classes, which will put me into an overload status (bad) but substantially increase my pay because of said overload (good). One of my current life goals, and it’s entirely reachable provided no major crises this year, is to be completely debt-free other than the house by the end of this school year. With the extra pay from an overage class it goes from “entirely reachable” to very close to easy. One way or another I should know by the end of the day. I’ll finish up the classroom tomorrow and then I can spend Tuesday and Wednesday worrying about curriculum. All good, right? Sure.
I didn’t make it over to school today; I woke up this morning and the thought of getting out of bed was just unimaginable, much less driving a million thousand miles away and throwing desks around all afternoon. So I get to do it tomorrow! Hooray!
Instead, today got swallowed up by, to start, (other than lazing about, I mean) some research into what it would take to add high school mathematics to my teaching license. I don’t want to move up to high school but it’s come to my attention that I have a fair number of seventh graders in my honors algebra class, which is already a ninth-grade class, which means that those kids are going to take Geometry next year, which technically I’m not allowed to teach? So I’m looking into that. I have to learn enough calculus to pass an exam, though, which … eek. I may have dropped out of Calculus 3/4 of the way through my senior year of high school and not looked at it since then; don’t tell anybody.
Tonight was eaten up by a kind of ridiculous little project; I have 152 kids on my roster so far (that number will– is guaranteed— to change) but just for the sheer hell of it I went through last year’s Student of the Month database and compared that list of kids to my class roster. I discovered that 58% of the students who won SOTM last year are in my class, which is already a nice slant, probably accounted for by the fact that I have the Honors kids, and that of those 152 kids on roster eighty-four of them won SOTM at least once last year. 55%. And it’s not like that guarantees that the other 45% are knuckleheads, either. I have a couple– literally, two– who I know to keep an eye on from last year, but it’s literally two kids. I think I can handle two Project Kids(*) during the first few weeks while I figure out who the rest of my hot spots are.
(*) This looks kinda racist. I mean Kids Who I Have Decided To Make a Project Of, not Kids From Project Housing.
I’ll post classroom pictures tomorrow, especially if I make any serious changes from how the room looked last year. The problem is with the style of desks I have and the layout of the classroom I have, putting everything in straight rows is really the only solution that makes sense, or at least the only solution that I’ve been able to come up with so far, but maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration tomorrow. We’ll see.
Also, I think that everyone who spoke up the last time I mentioned having BlueSky invites is taken care of, but I got another code today, so if you’re still out in the cold and you need one (or if I missed you last time) let me know.
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