In which it happened again

On July 23, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life3 Comments

Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.

I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.

So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.

Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.

On my inner magpie, and other thoughts

On May 23, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching1 Comment

So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.

Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.

Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.

Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!

I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.

Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.

Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.

And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.

Mental note, don’t put the question in writing.

Done-ish

On May 18, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.

I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.

(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)

Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.

In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker: Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?

And here we go

On April 13, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I would typically expect to be Sundaying pretty hard at the end of Spring Break, but that’s not what’s happening. I’m not stressed at all. That said, I’ve had one hell of a time figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my students this week, and more specifically what I’m going to do with them tomorrow, and I finally settled on a super basic, 20-question paper assignment with a mix of stuff from the last quarter on it. I’m titling the assignment “I Hope You Remember Math.” They’re all going to be lethargic and asleep tomorrow anyway so I think trying to start anything new (and the next unit is probability) is probably going to work against me. Then Tuesday through Friday on the basic principles of probability, skip the test, and two weeks of ILEARN review? Sure. Why not.

And after that … well, I chose the image up there for a reason. Right now I don’t even know what classroom I’m supposed to be in tomorrow (I was supposed to be back in my original room, but the weekly staff bulletin says otherwise, but the weekly staff bulletin also shows significant signs of having been copy-pasted from the last weekly staff bulletin) and that makes it really hard to plan. So tomorrow is going to have to be the last gimme day for a while, but that’s fine. It’s all fine. It’ll all be fine.

Unless the world blows up or something, but I’m gonna try not to worry about that too much.

Another short one tonight

On May 22, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I am bound and determined to get some agendaless lazing-about time in tonight, and for the first time all week I don’t have anything to do for school and therefore don’t need to struggle with my Goddamn desktop— I’m typing this on my iPad, which would have been a monstrous pain in the ass to write tests on but works perfectly fine for bloggery. I published a post at some point about the several stages of being “back” at the beginning of the school year, and I think I’ve probably reached the first stage of being “done,” or maybe the second, the first being finishing all lesson planning for the year and the second being accomplishing all teaching. As they have finals tomorrow and then three days to finish off any missing work they care to do, while I’ll almost certainly show someone how to do something on an individual basis at some point between now and next Friday, I’m done with whole-group instruction for the year.

Done with Grading will be the next step, which I’ll hit next Wednesday, and then The Children are Gone. I might need to go in the Monday after school lets out— or at least sometime that week— to finish off closing out my room, since I’m changing classrooms in the fall so the job is a touch more involved than usual. But that’s it, and I think I can probably call myself done-done once the kids are gone.

Anyway. Back to the lazing.