I’ve sat down three times tonight, intending to write something, and it hasn’t worked. Brain melty. Students test tomorrow. Four days until Spring Break.
Tag: stupid
Child, please
I’ll forgive you if you don’t see the, uh, conspicuous image-editing going on here immediately, especially on a smaller screen, but I was super excited to discover just now that this child, who was in ISS all day today, had actually been turning in missing work.
Pfah. Not only did she go through and guess on every assignment, not only did she edit her scores in an utterly incompetent fashion– there are two examples here, but she did it at least five or six times– but because she came into my class late in the quarter, she didn’t even have to do any of the assignments she failed so badly to edit her score on! The bar has been raised, here– I can’t find the post quickly, but one kid last year actually edited the source code in Safari to change his grades, and got away with it for a little while. That was good cheating. This is just lazy and sloppy. At least copy and paste the 1 that’s right there on the screen if you’re going to cheat; there’s at least a chance I won’t notice that. Fucking unprofessional. I thought I was raising them better than this.
God. Kids these days.
In which I don’t know what to do
As someone who cannot Art, this AI-art-generation phenomenon is completely fascinating to me; this is what the Wonder app came up with when I selected “Oil painting” and “very difficult decisions” as the prompt. Sometimes you get duds but I enjoy this one quite a bit.
Anyway, we lost two more teachers last week. Between the seventh and the eighth grade right now we have about six teachers. There are signs that downtown is starting to take our issues seriously but this game of chicken that everyone is playing is driving me slowly insane, and I just don’t know what to do if we, say, lose another language arts teacher, or if we end up down to one math teacher for the entire building, or whatever other bullshit might happen. I kind of think the folks who are likely to quit are mostly gone by now, but there are a couple that I’ve got an eye on.
And, well, I’ve got an interview on Tuesday and could potentially have a second soon too. And fuck me stupid if I didn’t get two good days in a row on Thursday and Friday and now I’m all oh, I can’t abandon these kids, wash wash blah blah blah. I fucking hate that I can’t make what is obviously the correct career decision, a decision I would have already made were I anything other than a teacher, and flee. And yet I had the whole weekend to finish the application for this other district and I haven’t done it yet. Because apparently I am a fucking moron. It’s not even goddamned October yet. This can still get so much fucking worse.
Well, this post ended up a little angrier than I thought it was going to be. Originally I was very much planning on Oh, I don’t know what to do and now I think I know what I’m going to do and I also know what I should do and I’m pretty sure those are two different things and I am making a stupid career decision again, and I am deeply, seriously, intensely angry with myself about it.
Meanwhile, this is my schedule tomorrow: Dentist appointment at 8:00 in the morning. Following that, go to school and do not teach first and second hour because my student observer is doing one of her mandatory lessons tomorrow. Then leave the building to go back to the doctor because, remember, I was injured breaking up a fight last week, spend however long that takes, then return to the building probably just in time for my prep periods and nothing else, because if I go home I have to take a half day and if I come back I basically don’t have to count the absence for anything since worker’s comp covers it. Remember that this building where I was just injured during a fight is the building that I feel like I can’t leave because waaah bjaaah the chiiiillllldrennnnn.
Fuck.
In which I’m still annoyed
Can we just get rid of the apostrophe, please?
I found this three hours ago, and I haven’t Tweeted enough today to scroll the irritated tweet I wrote about it off of my screen, so it’s still sitting there bothering me. I don’t know if the person who designed this shirt (and there’s a whole line of clothing with this idiotic design) doesn’t speak English as their first language or what, but a whole bunch of people looked at this fucking shirt and didn’t do anything about it before it showed up on Amazon to annoy me.
I mean, before an R? Who the fuck thinks we need apostrophes before the letter R?
Seriously, though: there are seven apostrophes in this post so far. There’s not a single word— and there’s apostrophes number eight and nine– that would suddenly become ambiguous or unclear if the apostrophe was removed. I don’t have any fucking clue why this is so complicated to so many people– seriously, it’s not fucking hard— but society just needs to get rid of the fucking thing. We don’t actually need to have a whole punctuation mark to indicate removed letters any longer. I’m not completely convinced we ever did, to be honest.
There is a sports bar a few miles north of me called Mitch’s. Or maybe it’s Mitchs’, I don’t fucking know, because the front of the building and their road sign spell the name of their own establishment two different ways. I have never set foot in this place and I never will, because I hate them, and I drive past the place fairly frequently, and every time I drive past them, I have to think about how much I hate them and decide for the ten millionth time that I’m not going to burn the place down.
I give up. It’s enough. Human beings cannot be educated to do this properly, they’re not capable. For my sanity, society needs to abandon the apostrophe.
Hold my beer and watch this
So I think I found the dumbest possible way to end up in the ER, guys, for serious.
Friday afternoon I found myself craving both corn chips and queso and potato chips and French onion dip at the same time. I texted my wife and requested that she obtain at least one of those two pairs of things on her way home from work. My wife, being wonderful, came home with both sets.
“OM NOM NOM,” I replied, and I had me some corn chips and some queso. And a piece of chip promptly got stuck in one of my wisdom smilebones. While this was an unwelcome development, it wasn’t the end of the world or anything. I dislodged it after probably less than a minute, had a few more chips, then decided it was a touch more hurty than such things usually are and discontinued my chip-eating.
The next morning my goddamn jaw still hurt. Still hurt a lot, actually; quite a bit more than it had the night before, and with a touch of dizziness and lightheadedness (are those the same thing?) to boot. I went to work anyway, of course, because driving when you’re dizzy is what you do when you’ve already made one stupid mistake in the last couple of days. I did not last at work, however, as the pain intensified and I decided after about an hour that spending all day 1) on my feet and 2) talking to people was not what I wanted to do. So I left work early and came home.
I spent the whole day fighting with myself about whether I was going to urgent care or not– it was Saturday, after all, so a regular doctor was out of the question– and finally decided I needed to go around dinnertime. By that point I was assuming I had some sort of quick-onset jaw infection. It wasn’t the first time that this had happened to me and the pain felt pretty familiar from the last time . So, fine: off to urgent care, where they’ll give me a scrip for an antibiotic and probably some sort of painkiller and then I’m home free.
Hah. First of all, there was only one urgent care center anywhere near me that was still open. Second, they refused to treat me, since jaw pain is “dental-adjacent” and as the lady behind the desk very apologetically explained, they were administratively banned from dealing with anything “dental-adjacent.”
Here is a list of dental urgent care centers. They are all closed on weekends. Which violates my understanding of the meaning of the phrase “urgent care,” but whatfuckinever I don’t have the energy for this fight right now.
I contemplate the idea of being in this much pain until Monday and have to fight off tears in public, because shit’s getting worse.
“Do I have any options here?”
“The ER.”
No. I’m not going to the goddamn ER for jaw pain that I created by eating corn chips. The ER is where you go when you get shot, or when you’re so sick that you literally don’t know what else to do. I need a simple goddamn antibiotic and a pain pill. There’s seriously nobody who can do that for me?
I went home. I told my wife what had happened. And she pointed out that my options were basically 1) Go to the ER now, or 2) go to the ER at 3:00 in the fucking morning once I entirely lost the ability to handle my shit.
Which is the story of how I spent my Saturday night– part of it, at least– in the emergency room, apologizing to nurses for wasting their (very efficient, it must be said) time. And I left (quickly!) with an antibiotic and instructions to see a dentist ASAP for a tooth that the doctor thought miiiiight be cracked and a scrip for a much stronger painkiller than I’d expected, and instructions that if at all possible I wasn’t to drive while on it and that it therefore would be best to not go to work the next day either.
Which is why it took until 8:30 tonight for me to write about any of this, because I’ve kinda been in a bit of a haze.
Because of corn chips.
The end.
IDIOTIC POSTSCRIPT: Despite all this I am literally at this very second considering finishing off the queso. I might have to use a spoon, though.
Blecch arglebargle yucch hoccch PTUI
This is all I have at the moment.
In which my day starts off strange
I should have taken this and gotten a picture on the spot; I apologize for my failure as a blogger.
My day began with an irate parent in the office– before I was even able to get to my desk and put my stuff down. She’s mad that a teacher has sent a note home without any “useful” information on it, including her signature, and is furthermore angry that her daughter was prevented from leaving the gym at the end of the day so that she could go to said staff member and acquire this all-important signature. She’s demanding to speak to the teacher in question immediately.
Right away I smell a rat, for several reasons, not least among which is the fact that the teacher in question has gym duty at the end of the day and would, therefore, be in the gym. I ask to see the note. The parent hands me two pieces of paper: her daughter’s progress report, which has every single grade carefully scratched out with what appears to be both black pen and Sharpie, and the handwritten note from the teacher.
Note that the parent is mad at the teacher, which means that I don’t help her mood any when I immediately start laughing and tell her daughter that she has exactly one chance to tell the truth before we have a serious problem. Because this is basically the note:
MS WHATSERNAME:
YOURE DAUTERS GRADES ARE INCORRECT THESE IS THE REAL ONES:
1) A
2) B-
3) A
4) B
5) B+
6) A-
7) A
SHE IS DOING A LOT BETTER LATLY PLEASE CALL US IF YOU HAS ANY QUESTIONS.
I didn’t memorize the motherfucker; I remember there was definitely one word in there that had a superfluous “e” in it somewhere, but you get the idea. Furthermore, every letter on the page has been gone over at least two times in a way absolutely no adult anywhere writes but is currently a popular affectation among teenage girls.
Note also that the students have eight classes, not seven.
What’s Mom mad about? That the classes aren’t labeled. She apparently hasn’t noticed the… uh… various other issues with the note. She then proceeded to get mad at me for declining to punish her daughter at school; sorry, lady, this one is clearly your problem. I’m not doing anything about it.
And, say it with me: if the daughter doesn’t pass ISTEP, it’s my fault.
On how NOT to talk to parents
It snowed rather a lot, and rather unexpectedly as well. I had no idea that it was snowing until I opened my garage door. It’s a bit of a mystery how I managed to not look through any of the three windows in my bedroom, but I did it. I am normally able to leave the house around 7:00 AM and arrive at work with a cup of McDonald’s coffee in my hand at around 7:25. I wanted to be in by 7:15 today, so I left ten minutes early, at about 6:50. It took 54 minutes to get to work. Highways were shut down, cars were spinning off the road everywhere, and, as it turns out, there were a number of minor school bus accidents as well.
Keep in mind: everyone who lives here drives in snow for half the damn year. Or at least what feels like half the damn year. It was slick as hell outside; even taking the approach to my school very carefully I still managed to miss the damn parking lot, and even at lunchtime my anti-lock brakes kicked in on the very first turn out of the lot. It was shitty outside today, people.
Anyway. Back to those minor school bus accidents. The district made the decision very early in the day to cancel all after-school activities and all field trips (I don’t know that there actually were any, mind you) and other things requiring transportation during the day as well except for that which was absolutely necessary to get kids to and from school. So they decided to do an all-call to every parent in the corporation, because, well, that kind of decision is going to affect a lot of kids.
Important: I have not heard the all-call, but I’ve seen the carnagey aftermath, so it’s possible that I’m slightly misrepresenting this? But apparently the all-call included, in addition to the cancellation information, the fact that there had been “several” minor bus accidents in the morning but– and this was apparently delivered with a cheery tone of voice, which given the person who I know sent it, doesn’t surprise me– there were “no serious injuries.”
Guess which words every fucking parent who got the call heard? “Bus accident” and “injuries.” The goddamned phones were ringing off the hook all day. In addition to the usual complement of assholes who don’t answer the phone then don’t listen to their voicemail and just call the number back without knowing who it is they’re calling– those are always fun– we got a number of irate phone calls from parents who were mad because we hadn’t called them to let them know that their kids were in a bus accident.
Because, see, they weren’t.
One parent was even angry that we hadn’t notified her that her child had been injured in a bus accident, and wanted to know what hospital she was at. If her child doesn’t pass ISTEP, the school is blamed, people.
Not having an “I love my job” day right now, guys.
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