Tag: substitute teachers

FFS are you KIDDING ME

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

So the amount of snow in this image is not necessarily a guaranteed close, but I’m hearing that some places are predicting up to ten inches of snow tomorrow? And I somehow(*) didn’t find out about it until getting to the comic shop after school? I haven’t been able to verify that number, but that dark blue blob is directly over both me and my commute. I walked out of work today telling everyone who would listen that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was coming in tomorrow, because not only can I still not breathe but I got to play Fun With Alternating Chills And Fever all day long, while administering ILEARN to every single student I have, making this an absolutely stellar day from start to finish.

My son– have I mentioned this around here? Maybe not– has been sick for most of the last two months, and has missed a shit ton of school, and we had a meeting with his advisory teacher and the school counselor at 5:00(**), which I masked up for. Then I got home and took a combined Covid/Influenza A/Influenza B test, which was negative for everything, and then after that my thermometer told me my temperature was 98.4, so I’m about to fight all the medical technology in the house.

The question now is whether I go through with the original plan and just call in sick tonight, which gives me a chance of having a sub tomorrow rather than just hoping for class coverage, but if we get a delay out of the weather I may tough it out and go in, and if we actually get cancelled that would be fantastic, because I could just put up an assignment and then sleep all Goddamn day without taking the day off monitor my email and attend my office hours in case my kids need help. But if I wait until tomorrow morning I’m almost guaranteed no sub, and now that I think about it, if we have a delay, that’ll cancel the ILEARN language arts test that we currently have planned, which will change the schedule, which means what I’m planning on right now won’t work, which means …

… shit, even if I do go to work (worth pointing out: tomorrow will be a shitty day to drop onto a sub if we’re testing) I’m not going to be able to do any planning until I know what the day’s schedule is going to be. So no matter what I’m getting up at regular time and making a decision. And I’d prefer not to call in and then have to cancel the absence. That feels unfair to the hypothetical sub that I may or may not get.

Maybe I’ll just die tonight and then I won’t have to worry about it. Here’s hoping.

(*) This is nonsense, because I know exactly why; administering ILEARN all day meant I wasn’t allowed to have my watch or my phone with me, and monitoring testing all day meant no extraneous web surfing on my computer; I was effectively cut off from any source of information that might have given me this information, especially since I spent my lunch break photocopying work for tomorrow that I may or may not need.

(**) It should be made clear that this was heroic on their parts, because the meeting was so late because his advisor already had an after school commitment, and then both of them decided staying even later was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We weren’t done until nearly six. I would not have agreed to this meeting!

God, enough

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Stayed home from work today, not because anything was wrong with me but because my son was sick, and he spent the day asleep, so I spent the day sitting around and feeling vaguely guilty for no Goddamned reason at all except that I’m a teacher and apparently I’m supposed to prioritize other people’s kids over my own, I guess.

Meanwhile, the world is visibly ending in about twelve different ways, and this is really starting to feel like the run-up to Katrina, where it was plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that New Orleans was about to be wiped off the map and that didn’t seem to be nearly as frightening to most people as it ought to be. This thing’s going to be a fucking monster, and if you’re anywhere in central Florida, please swallow your ego and get the hell out of town. Unless you used to be President, in which case, please drive west.

I’m gonna vote tomorrow. I’m gonna vote, and then my role, at least, in at least one of the impending apocalypses will be done. Then maybe I’ll drink myself into a coma until the second week of November and see what’s still left of America.

Ew, gross

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Everyone in my house has something abdominal going on right now, although we don’t appear to all have the same thing and in my case I’m pretty sure it’s a medicine side effect. But it’s not exactly leading to the home front being a relaxed and peaceful place to be, what with a bunch of us being in various forms of pain and some of us occasionally needing to spill terrifying amounts of liquid from some orifice or another, often on short notice. I myself stayed home from work today, not because I was too sick to go in but because the precise kind of sick I am means that going to work, where I have to wait for the office to send me coverage in order to go to the bathroom, is an automatic no-go even if I feel absolutely fine 95% of the time. It’s my least favorite thing about teaching, the way we absolutely cannot leave these little crapweasels alone for any amount of time, or half of them will start having sex and the other half will start drinking alcohol and then some of them will set things on fire, possibly while drunk and fucking. And that’s before the fights start.

Sigh.

My classes this year are absolute hell on subs, too, which on the one hand I’m supposed to be professionally angry about and on the other hand what-fuckin’-ever, so long as none of them are dead at the end of the day and they don’t destroy any of my shit. I don’t know why these groups are so bad to outsiders; I’m certainly not having perfect days or anything but, halfway through the first quarter, so far as a whole this is one of my more manageable groups of kids. They just fall the hell apart when I’m not there, to the point where it’s going to start being difficult for the office to convince people to cover for me when I’m not at school.

(I am hoping to make it to November before I miss another day. I’ve already taken the election and the day after off as personal days, and there’s a four-day Fall Break in there, so hopefully I’ll be able to pull this off. Most of my missed time has been medication-related, which, again, annoys the hell out of me.)

Anyway, I’m going to go find a surface to wipe down with bleach. Stay away from norovirus, kids, it’s nasty.

In which my head explodes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

I am deeply tempted to upload today’s entire assignment so you can see it. I thought it was going to be an easy Halloween blowoff, ten dead-simple story problems, most of which boiled down to “multiply these two numbers together,” and maybe two of which boiled down to “divide these two numbers.” Like, this is the first question:

Six spooky scary skeletons each send shivers down seven spines. How many shivers are sent?

Only 33 of the 59 students who have completed the assignment managed to figure out to multiply six and seven to get 42.

Also, I have 142 students and as of 3:15 only 59 have completed the assignment.

I don’t know how to fix middle school students who literally can’t figure out when to multiply. They actually and genuinely don’t know what the four basic operations of mathematics are for. I’ve never not had kids who were behind, but this is shockingly bad nonetheless.

One more class period today. I can do this.

(Oh, and also, one of the biggest and most obvious lies the school corporation was telling when they were talking about us returning to class was that there were somehow going to be enough subs during a pandemic, when there are never enough subs, period. There was an email every day this week begging teachers to cover for other people who were out. Today we had five teachers out. Total number of subs: zero. They just kept saying “Oh, we’ve contracted out for that,” like that was an answer that was going to matter.)

How to lose your shitty job

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories, Teaching8 Comments

ku-mediumIt is fourth hour, just past lunch.  I have had a remarkably easy morning; my first class of the day, miraculously, has had so few questions about their assignment that I have been able to– wait for it– sit at my desk, and not only sit at my desk, but sit at my desk long enough to sort through some of the ridiculously huge piles of junk everywhere.  Did you know I had a desk calendar?  Not only can you see it, but it even knows it’s March now!  This is a miracle.

And, of course, I paid for it.

So, right, fourth hour.  There is, suddenly, an immense amount of yelling coming from next door.  Keep in mind that my door is shut and the wall in between our classrooms are made of cinder block.  I hear swearing.  Really loud swearing.  From inside my classroom, with the door shut.

Oh, fuck.

I bail on what I’m doing and head into the hallway.  The sub is already out in the hallway, screaming into the face of one of our seventh graders.  Not one of mine, but his sister happens to be in my classroom at that very moment.  He’s swearing at the kid.  Red-faced, practically on top of him.  The kid is swearing back.   And in tears.

Sigh.  Suddenly I really don’t want to tell this story anymore.  Long story short: I had to physically separate the two of them and I spent at least a few real moments trying to figure out if I was going to have to knock the sub down to get him away from the kid.  By that point basically every adult male within a hundred yards, including an armed police officer, was heading toward our part of the building at high speed, and the sub was in the building for about another fifteen minutes before being removed from the premises.  It was… ugly.

Weirdly, it’s the second time in my career I’ve been in the vicinity when a sub went insane on a kid.  The first time, many moons ago at my first school, started off exactly the same way except this time there wasn’t an administrator in the building to hand it off to.  I told the sub that I couldn’t literally tell him to go home but I was taking over his classes for the rest of the day (at the time, due to the complexities of my position, it was actually possible) and he was to go sit in the teachers’ lounge until the actual administrator got back.  I remember thinking I was probably going to end up in some trouble for it and not caring.

Yeah.  It was a long day.