State math testing tomorrow and Wednesday, and then I’m … well, it’s middle school, so never, ever stress-free, but at least a lot less stressed than I am right now. I sat down during our team meeting with the other 8th grade Math teacher and once we went through everything we knew we had to do already for the rest of the year I realized I only really have like eight more assignments to plan.
I told them today that I was going to keep things super simple in class for the next couple of days, and that tomorrow’s assignment in particular was going to be extremely short. Like, five problems short. I have entertained myself by making those five problems insanely complicated,(*) and I’m going to put the answers on the board and not mention it to anyone. We’ll see how many of them notice! I’m going to guess roughly a quarter do not.
(*) Insanely complicated and yet within the skill set of anyone who has been actually paying attention. So, f’rex:
I may throw some extra credit at anyone who actually solves them instead of just circling the right answers. We’ll see.
My CPAP still isn’t working properly, so last night I stuffed earplugs in my ears, took three Tylenol PM and slept so hard that somehow at some point during the night I pulled the hose out of my mask and didn’t wake up. I would have called that impossible before yesterday, as it’s both loud and suddenly even more difficult to breathe than normal, non-CPAP-assisted prone breathing is. And I slept until nine, which hasn’t happened in long enough that I don’t remember the last time I slept in that far. And then I spent the entire day hanging out with my son and reading, and I’m currently at peace enough with the world that my district sent out the internal transfer list and I only very briefly glanced at it, which I would have done anyway, because that type of thing is always fun.
We need way, way too many math teachers in my district right now, and I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to end up with another Goddamned overload next year. Which I’m of two minds about. It means another year with no breaks– remember, I walk into my classroom at 8:00 AM and I’m supervising kids until 3:20 with no pauses of any kind– but it also immunizes me against getting asked to cover anyone else’s classroom on my prep period, which I absolutely hate doing.
But whatever. There’s six weeks of school left– and the next two ought to fly by, since we’ve got state testing– and then I’ve got summer break to recenter myself. I needed today. Hopefully I can go into Monday with a better attitude.
January 2025 has been a long year, and I am way too tired for Sunday night right now, especially given that I was literally in bed by 8:00 last night and made it eleven hours before I even woke up to pee. I didn’t actually get out of bed until 9:30 or so, and other than taking the Christmas tree down, doing some reading– I am going to finish Wind & Truth tomorrow– and writing an assignment for tomorrow, I really haven’t done much. This image is prominent in tomorrow’s assignment:
This is going to be one of those annoying assignments that conceptually isn’t actually that difficult– you have two numbers in your coordinates, and you have to manipulate them in one of three ways to get your second set of coordinates, and those manipulations only involve making them their opposites or possibly putting them in reverse order– but it’s gonna break some brains anyway, because the sensible way to do this is to write down the coordinates of a point, look at the rule, then rewrite the new point, but my kids don’t want to write anything at all ever, and they’re going to try to remember the coordinates instead, and that’s … not gonna work.
Then I’m gonna get a chorus of “this is too hard!” and have to resist the urge to reply with “no, you’re just too lazy to do it right,” which is true, but … unhelpful. Also, if I’m tired, I’m gonna start making mistakes myself. So yay.
I hate teaching this unit. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that or not? But I hate transformations. I really do. I think Pythagoras is next, and that’s a little bit more fun.
… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?
No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.
Dammit.
On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.
I have mentioned this already, I think, but it’s always worth repeating stories where I’m stupid: in June I bought a bunch of LED light ropes and took them to work and left them in my classroom. I then forgot that I had bought them and bought a different set of LED light ropes in July, and didn’t realize my mistake until emptying my closet in my old classroom last week.
Those are the first set of lights I bought. I have the second set up too; I like these a lot more. That design isn’t meant to be anything in particular but somehow ended up looking sort of like an anglerfish (look on the left) and I’m fully expecting my students to name it. One interesting thing: the lights are from different manufacturers and run on different apps, but it’s clearly based on the same underlying architecture, as the interface is nearly exactly the same. Those lights have thousands of different “special effects” and light patterns– enough that it’s almost too many– and the other set has, like, twelve. I need to see if there’s a way I can get the good app talking to the other lights, or maybe a generic one that can run both. Failing that, I bet I can swap out the controllers; the lights themselves should work exactly the same way.
In other news, I have 200 postcards in front of me, and over the next couple of months I need to handwrite a message to a voter on each of them encouraging them to vote and then mail them all out on the same day. Handwrite a message. This is … insanely intimidating. I haven’t heard anything about being a poll worker yet; I tried a different way to sign up yesterday, so maybe someone will get back to me soon. If not, I’m calling it good and taking Election Day and the day after off anyway.
(Election Day because my students do not remotely deserve the ball of stress and anxiety that I’m going to be on that day, and the one following because no matter how the evening goes, I know good and Goddamned well I’m not getting any sleep on the night of the 5th. I need to figure out exactly how far in advance I can take a personal day so that I can sign up for that shit the second it becomes available. Under normal circumstances the district isn’t allowed to say no to a personal day request if it’s filed on time (and most of the time administrators don’t care if it’s filed on time) but I’m anticipating I might not be the only person wanting to be gone those days, so I gotta get a jump on it.
If they had any sense it would be an e-learning day anyway.
It’s worth pointing out, I think, that in a lot of ways I am happier right now than I have been in a really long time. The new job is going great– I have some philosophical objections to certain aspects of how the new district works, particularly related to grading, and I’m doing what I can to blunt the edges of what I’m “supposed” to be doing while still technically staying within what for-the-record-they-haven’t-explicitly-mandated-I do, but it’s still kind of annoying. The kids are a fucking delight, and I’m actually getting to teach in every class, which is something I haven’t been able to say in years, if really even at all. I’ve not raised my voice in two weeks and some change. It’s amazing.
I’m just tired, and my nights are stuffed, and the simple fact is I write better when I’m pissed off. And right now I’m not writing a lot because I’m not as angry. And I gotta feel like, blog statistics be damned, that’s a good thing.
What you’re looking at here is the engine block of the Lego model for the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters. I’ve had it for a little while and wanted to get it built this weekend, so I’ve been been coming back to it intermittently for the last couple of days and right now I’m about halfway through the build. I’ve been really impressed with it so far, and it continues to amaze me how much entirely unnecessary complexity Lego builds into their modern models. First of all, they modeled the engine block. I don’t actually know if the hood for this thing is going to be removable or openable or what once it’s finished (if there’s a hinge assembly for it, I haven’t built it yet) but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they modeled the engine block carefully enough that you can actually identify individual parts of the engine and then covered it with a hood assembly that wasn’t meant to be removed. The grille in the front? Each of those little silver rectangles is an individual piece. That yellow X-shaped piece in the back with the yellow circle around it is attached to the steering wheel, which is actually set up in such a way that turning the steering wheel turns the front wheels of the car. There’s a whole steering column and what appears to be a gearshift next to it. There are stickers in places on the car that you will never see. The engine has belts, for Christ’s sake– you can see a bit of one of them, the red band next to what is clearly meant to represent the battery.
Do I want to find out what model of Cadillac the Ecto-1 was supposed to be and see where the battery actually is? Yeah, I kind of do.
I’ve been kind of in a funk lately regarding writing and the internet and a few other things, so this has been a nice change for me to focus on for a few days. The problem is these sets are expensive and they’re starting to kind of build up around the house and I don’t really need one more fucking thing to figure out how to display. But fuck it, that’s a problem for later, for right now I’m going to continue enjoy building the car.
EDIT: The hood does open. Entertainingly, the hood is one of the few actual flaws with the build, as it doesn’t quite close as tightly as I like and wants to be no more than about 98% closed. That doesn’t sound like it should be an issue but it means a few things don’t line up. I just need to make sure to display the car with the passenger side facing out, I guess. 🙂
EDIT EDIT: The hoses from the battery were in the way. I shoved them deeper into the engine and it’s fine now.
I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.
Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.
What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.
I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.
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