Tag: summer vacation

Summertime, I guess

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Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

Three weeks and three days

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I’m worried that my kids think that the rest of the school year is going to go like ILEARN time did, with short classes and minimal work. It will not. My 8th graders have two tests and a final in the next three weeks, and my Algebra class currently only has the final, but tests are seventy percent of their grade, and they’ve only had two, so I probably ought to work at least one more in there somewhere. ILEARN ate April, is the problem, so I’m behind everywhere. I told all of them we were back to work f’real f’real on Monday, but we’ll see if they seem to believe it or not.

It’s 7:30. Twenty minutes ago, every person in the house was asleep. That kind of Friday night. We’re a high-energy family, what can I say?

I may cave and just go to bed soon, or I might dive back into Khazan, which I’ve ignored over the last couple of days in favor of … whatever the hell else I was doing with my last two days. The last two weeks have kind of been a blur, if I’m being honest– I knew they’d go by fast and they did. Now it’s just a matter of seeing if the rest of the school year follows suit. Let’s all cross our fingers.

And here we go

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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

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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.

And the livin’ is easy

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

So today’s my first real day of summer vacation, or at least I’m counting it as such– I suppose I could have counted Friday but I had all kinds of shit to do and the boy started his summer camp today so let’s say it was today.

I am, therefore, at the same place I’m always at whenever summertime starts: looking at something like seven or eight weeks off before school starts to ramp up again and pretending that I’m gonna be super efficient with all that extra time and Make My Summer Count.

Let’s take a moment and just contemplate the pure American-ness of being given time off and immediately feeling guilt that I, in the future, won’t spend it working hard enough, and mourn our deeply stupid culture.

But anyway. This is the first summer in a very long time that I haven’t actually had a job. Since the summer The Sanctum of the Sphere was written, I think, and technically I did have a part-time job that summer so this may be the first genuinely job-free summer since early in high school.

So, therefore, knowing that my one real responsibility all summer long during the weekdays will be to get the boy to his summer camp and pick him up a few hours later, I would like to do each or at least most of the following things every day until school starts again, excepting weekends and major holidays:

  • Eat something vaguely resembling breakfast;
  • Write a blog post;
  • Write a minimum of 500 words fiction and preferably 1500;
  • Be showered and dressed by 10 AM, if not before I take the boy to camp;
  • Once a week, at least, put something on Patreon, preferably a microfiction or excerpt from item #3 up there;
  • Play video games (yes, I have to schedule this);
  • Clean and/or organize and/or maintain something;
  • Move around a bit somehow so I don’t gain 300 pounds in the next two months;
  • Spend an hour reading, and time before bed doesn’t count.

So far today I have done all but three of those things, and I’m betting you can guess which three if you’ve been around here for more than a couple of weeks.

I want a new book ready by Kokomo-Con X in October. And unlike my last several I want to launch this one right. That’s only gonna work if I get to work now.

Anybody wanna take bets? Let’s take bets.

STATUS: Ridden Hard, Put Away Wet

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

So we ended up going with Pair #2, against the advice of virtually every single person who voted except for my entire actual family, all of whom preferred this pair– and since my wife, in particular, who has to look at my face a lot more often than y’all do, liked these the most, that was what we went with.

But man, do I look raggedy right now.

That face is the face of a man who has just completed his fifteenth year of working in schools, and who is mildly surprised that it only turned out to be fifteen when he sat down and did the math. In accordance with tradition, I’m completely and utterly fucking exhausted and I plan to sit in my chair for a couple more hours and then go to bed.

Oh, and I got rehired for my job. So … good news, I suppose? Sure.

In which it’s almost ready

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I did promise that I’d post a picture of the pool once it was actually full. The boy has been in it, briefly, but right now we’re making sure all the chemicals are balanced and shit before making it official. We will probably be swimming in it by Monday or so.

(Oh, also: don’t look straight down into a gallon container of muriatic acid to see if you’ve poured out half of it or not. Bad idea! Bad! Don’t do that!)

Anyway. Pool:

I am buying a new ladder today, one more suited for a man of my … robustness, and I plan on spending most of the rest of the day staring at this thing while it sucks all the little tree thingies out of the water. It’s fucking hypnotic, I tell you:

Three more days

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…well, five, actually. But I’m not going to work tomorrow and day five is a teacher work day. So three more days, with the kids, for me, specifically.

I can do this.