Tag: summer school

Time is meaningless

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

My schedule lately is messing with my head, and I don’t like it at all. There’s something deeply weird about it being 12:30 and being home from work for the day. Like, I’ll get home, eat some lunch, fiddle around on my phone, read a bit … and then look around and it’s only 2:30 somehow and my wife isn’t even home from work yet, and mentally my day is over, and then it just, like, starts over again somehow? I’m doing this weird thing where I’m somehow packing two days into every day, and as a result I continue to not have the vaguest idea what day of the week it is at any given time. I thought maybe it was just an artifact of my wife being out of town for a week, but it’s still going on on whatever day today is, so clearly it’s gonna stick around for a minute.

Meanwhile, the horror hell storm that we heard about for two straight days appears to have curved south, and so far my social media hasn’t filled up with videos of tornadoes, so hopefully that’s because there hasn’t actually been any destruction and not just that I haven’t heard about it. There was all kinds of chatter about losing tomorrow again because of power issues, but at least as of right now the northern part of the state appears to have been spared. We’ll see what happens. For all I know, the kids will stay home anyway. We’ll see, I guess.

Also, I just found out that this exists, and I’m experiencing Big Weird Feelings right now, so I’m gonna go.

Excellent

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

At least, I hope so, although we may be in a good-news-and-bad-news situation. I had six kids today, and they were all nice kids, and they were willing to participate, although a couple of them have insanely quiet voices, and my two Hispanic girls who are good friends and look enough alike that they could be sisters have names that are only different by a few letters, which in a class of six is not fair. I should not be having to worry about mixing up names in a class of six.

Hopefully we’ll get more kids tomorrow, and (this is the maybe bad news part) hopefully they won’t decide that my attendance is so low that they need to combine my section with someone else’s. I’m a little worried about getting booted out of my cushy high-paying job early, now that I’m done worrying about it being horrible.

Anyway, I have reading to do, so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully the booing from Madison Square Garden will be loud enough that I can hear it in Indiana. We’ll see.

Here we go again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Tried to find an appropriate image for summer school and couldn’t find anything I really liked, so feel free to enjoy this ultra-rare photo of two of my three cats sharing my lap. It could have been better if one of them was looking at the camera or both of them were in focus, but I was worried that any movement at all might cause one or both of them to bolt, so I took what I could get.

Anyway, summer school, or, sorry, the Summer Learning Program, since technically I’m not employed by any school district for the next several weeks, starts tomorrow. I have to be there at 8:00, have an entire hour of prep, then three hours of teaching, then I do that 21 more times and then I’m done. I have ten kids on one roster and twelve at another, so we’ll see how many actually show up. I know one of them already and she’s awesome. Tomorrow is a survey and a pre-test and some getting to know you activities. Tomorrow there’s a different pre-test. Actual regular day stuff starts Wednesday. The curriculum is all pre-baked. There’s literally no accountability for anyone involved. This should be easy as hell.

Please, let this be easy as hell.

In which I am trained

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Because bitching about teacher training never gets old, and because I have three full days of online training and have to maintain my sanity somehow, I live-blogged my six hour summer school training today. Some of you do not yet follow me on Bluesky! Enjoy:

Door number 3

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I had two different possible plans for tonight’s post, and I’m putting both of them away for the time being– one of them because, well, it’s a book review and because of a family event tonight I haven’t finished the book yet (and, to be honest, I may need to ruminate on this one for a minute before writing it anyway) and the second because there is another related family event in a couple of days that might be a more appropriate venue for it.

Unfortunately, that leaves me with “Damn, it was hot today! One more day of school! I’m weirdly anxious about summer school!” and I kinda wrote most of that three times this week. I told the kids I had a game planned for tomorrow, one where I was going to let them throw things at one another, and it didn’t hit me until late in the day that overseeing kids throwing things at one another was going to make getting all of the end-of-the-year shit that I have to do done a bit more complicated. So that will be interesting, and I’m expecting a late night tomorrow night.

I did get confirmation that they are definitely planning on me teaching two grades at once for summer school. So that’ll be interesting.

Anyway, I gotta go find a bunch of activity pages for the sub on Friday before I can sleep. So I’ll catch y’all tomorrow.

Wheel of Time fans can’t be real

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

Come on, guys. It’s okay. It’s your old pal Luther, here. You can admit it. This is all one giant, decades-long piss-take, right?

I finished Book Eight of this nonsense last night, nearly seven hundred pages in which absolutely nothing happens until the last twenty pages and then not much happens in the climax. I am going to finish this series this year, powered by pure spite and nothing else, and you should all be very proud of me for how little whining I have done about it here. Even if you feel like I’ve complained about these books a lot, you have no idea how much I have held back. Book Eight begins what even fans of the series call “The Slog.” Or maybe it’s Book Seven! They can’t agree.

I owe the publishers of the book I’m reading now a review, and I’m really wondering if I’m not being fair to the new book by putting it after a WoT book. Because oh man did I go straight to I Bet It Would Be Fun to Annotate This and Rip It to Shreds mode.

Anyway. For the record, I genuinely don’t care if you’ve enjoyed these books or not, and there are multiple people I really respect (such as, for example, my actual wife) who are fans of them, I just … I don’t get it, and I don’t think I ever will at this point. I’m still finishing the God damned things one way or another, though.

Had a weird moment during my prep/lunch period at work today, where a whole bunch of shit all piled up on me at once and I damn near had a meltdown over a bizarre assortment of objectively minor inconveniences. I’m still not used to the new glasses. I made bad lunch decisions, and on top of that I was given a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, or maybe it was just super low on syrup. I’ve bitten my lower lip in the exact same spot roughly seventy times in the last few days. My classroom hasn’t been vacuumed in several days, and the cruft that is still on the floor is resistant to my broom. And the anxiety over this summer school thing continues to ramp up; I looked a little bit more closely at what little information I have and I’m now definitively convinced they’ve handed me two grades at the same time.(*) And probably a few other things that I’m not remembering at the moment. And … man. I managed to work my way out of it before the kids showed up, which was good, especially since I had to double up my advisory again. Nobody wants Mr. Siler to lose his mind and go home early during the last week of school, especially since I just remembered another one of those little inconveniences and it was being handed yet another piece of essential paperwork that I needed to do about taking the last day of school off– which, remember, I told my boss about in January.

One good thing is I do think I’ve actually convinced myself that next year’s eighth graders should be fine. There’s still a billion ways that could go wrong, and my partner teacher continues to stubbornly refuse to admit that she’s jumping to the high school next year.

I would appreciate knowing something about anything involving the next few months within the next couple of days, thanks.

(*) Does this mean that both groups are tiny, and I’ll have a tiny group? Or are both groups normal sized, and I’ll have a huge group? What even is a huge group in this context, since they’ve told us nothing about the kids we have coming? Am I doing math and reading for both groups– so four preps in three hours? Is anyone ever going to respond to any of my emails?

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today has been more or less identical to yesterday, except with an hour or so of school stuff thrown in, the last hour of school stuff I’ll have to do on my own time for 2025-26. Thursday is my last day at work, and Friday is the last day of the school year– yes, I’m missing the last day of school for the first time in my career (forgive me if I’ve mentioned this; I don’t think I have, but who knows) because my son’s 8th grade graduation is right smack in the middle of the day. Ordinarily I look down my nose a bit at the concept of 8th grade graduations, but as he’s been at this same school for eleven years, I figure I’ll allow it, especially since it’s not as if I have any actual choice in the matter.

Hm. That looks familiar; I bet I have talked about this at some point.

Oh well.

I’ll follow my usual pattern for the next few days; the kids are getting lists of missing assignments tomorrow, and they can choose to use their time wisely or not depending on 1) whether they, personally, are wise or not and 2) whether they are pleased with their current grade. A bunch of them will have nothing to do! Some of them will do missing work that will have no effect on their grade, only because they want all the points. A somewhat larger number will do no work over the next few days because failure is fine now and they know nothing will happen to them.

As a society, we really need to bring back being ashamed of being stupid. People should know when they are stupid, and they should feel bad about it, all the time, until they do something about it. But whatever; I’m not succumbing to negativity this week, God damn it, no matter how reasonable it might be. I’m going to live through tomorrow one way or another, use Wednesday and Thursday to tear my room down, and then walk out of the door with a spring in my step Thursday afternoon. At some point during that time I’ll write lesson plans for my sub– unbelievably, I have a sub right now for the last day– that will basically say “no blood, no foul, and if there is blood, make sure it’s not your fault.” I’ll leave them a stack of various things the kids can color or draw on and a small stack of pencils and remind them to simply send away any child that displeases them because the office will be sending everyone home as fast as they possibly can. And if it goes poorly? Oh well.

Then I have a week of trainings and such, and … maybe I’m teaching summer school after that? Or maybe I’m leaving somebody in the lurch at the last second? Probably the first thing; I’d like to think I’m not that big of a jerk, but there are some blinking alarm lights about this summer program. Surely the pay will make it all worth it, right? Surely.

Anyway, I have a Wheel of Time book to finish, so I’m going to go do that. Go have a cheeseburger or something.

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.