Let’s see. I didn’t manage to accomplish much with my Monday; anytime I’m considering bragging about putting my laundry away and beating the final boss on a video game, it wasn’t much of a day. But whatever; the pool is almost ready, and finishing off Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has genuinely been on my nerves lately, and I got both of the spelling challenges right today in one of my Arabic programs, so fuck it, I’m gonna call today a win and go sit outside and relax.
Tag: summer
In which I haven’t failed yet
I was able to successfully get myself up out of bed and showered before 8:30 this morning. I had a cup of coffee and screwed around on my phone for a while, then spent an honest to goodness solid hour studying, and managed to successfully regain at least some of my knowledge of trigonometry in the process. I think what I’m going to do this week is spend the next couple of days filling obvious holes in my knowledge (“obvious” meaning “I remember knowing this, and now I don’t,” as opposed to, say, calculus, which is an entire domain of knowledge that I never really had a grasp of) and then take a practice test on Thursday. (Why Thursday? It’ll take a while, and Friday’s going to be busy. I’ll have time to study but not for an entire practice test.) If I do okay on the practice test, I may go ahead and take a shot at the real test next week and see if I can just knock it out. I only need like a 60% to pass, I think? If I do crap on it, I’ll stick with the original plan and study through June or until I can pass a practice test solidly. I don’t want to have to pay for this thing more than twice, and ideally, only once. I’ve also literally never failed a standardized test so I have some pride on the line here too.
In other news, school is out, and I’m finding that I don’t have a lot to say about that. This was a pretty good year, all told; it had its moments, like they all do, but my honors class was awesome enough to carry through the rest of the year and even my most annoying kids continue to pale in comparison with what I’ve had to deal with at previous schools. That said, I think I’m due for another round of reevaluating classroom procedures; everything I’m doing right now is still very COVID-informed and I’m seeing signs that certain policies may be starting to bite me in the ass a bit. I didn’t really try to reinvent the wheel when I changed districts, but I’m comfortable enough in the new place now that I think I can tweak some things. We’ll see.
I’ll end on a question: certain sectors of American society have been claiming that attempting to impose any sort of penalties or punishments for the obvious criminality of certain individuals was going to cause widespread civil unrest. Locally, I am aware of one (1) house that is now flying a very small (comically so, in fact) American flag outside their house, upside down. Is anyone reading this aware of any civil disobedience or protests literally anywhere other than the tiny little group that’s been outside the courthouse in New York since the trial started? Any downtowns flooded with fash lately? Trucker rebellions? Anything at all?
Summer Goals, Or: In Which I Write Fiction Again
With only four days of school left, none of which are really going to count for a damned thing– three days of babysitting and grade finalization and then a field day– it’s time to think about how I’m going to get through the summer without turning into a greasy lump. Since we all know I will turn into a greasy lump over the summer, let’s set some goals that I can feel bad about not fulfilling. Note that, for the most part, these are weekday goals; on weekends I still get to laze about.
- Up by 9:00 AM every day. This actually won’t be that hard, as my body chemistry is finally starting to alter in such a way that I’m waking up earlier than this even if I don’t want to. I have tried to sleep past 8 AM for the last two days and not managed to do it. No, this is going to be the hard one:
- In the shower within 20 minutes of waking up every day. The way my brain works, my day can’t start and I can’t do anything until I take a shower. The goal here is to have Things to Do and to Get Things Done. This means I need to bathe immediately, or close to it, every morning. I manage to do this every day during the week when school is in session and there’s no reason, or at least no good reason, why I can’t continue doing it over the summer. That said, I’ll be genuinely surprised if I manage to make it a week. Hell, I’ll be surprised if I pull it off on the first Monday of break.
- Get licensed for high school math. This has a number of sub-goals. In case you’re not aware, I have a chance of being able to teach Honors Geometry next year, but in order to do that, I have to be certified to teach it, and as it’s a high school class and my math licensure is 5-9, I’m not. Therefore:
- Pass the 5165 Mathematics Praxis Exam. Which I am currently not even remotely qualified for. I’m hoping to have this done by July 1. That should give me enough time to get the paperwork through the state board by the time school starts, even if I don’t pass on the first try. However in order to do that, I have to:
- Study math for an hour a day, preferably in the mornings, after my coffee. I’m allowing myself some lounge time after getting out of the shower. Go sit in my chair in the library or on the back porch, drink a cup of coffee, idly fuck around on the web or read a book. But I want to spend an hour stuffing math into my brain each day. Right now the tentative plan is to take a practice test on the Monday after break to see just how far I have to go and see if an hour is realistic or I need more than that. That’s 20 hours of study during June for three years of high school math. One course a week plus some flex time. Sure, I can do that, right? I taught myself enough German to pass an exam in three days. I just need — heh– to be disciplined and to remember how to study.
- Actual Arabic study, using some of the print resources I’ve purchased and haven’t paid much attention to. The apps have their place– which reminds me that I haven’t talked about an excellent vocabulary app I found– but I need some sustained grammar work and the apps genuinely don’t care about that.
- Find some projects around the house. Stand by; we’ll see. There are tons of things I could be doing.
- Maybe a part-time WFH job if I can find one. I don’t need more money, but if I could make enough to get this new computer completely paid for by the end of the summer that would make a lot of things easier. I need to remember that the overage pay goes away in a couple of paychecks. That’s not a problem– I was doing fine before I had it and I’ll be fine after it– but I’ll need to get a little more disciplined financially again. Luckily, summer is cheaper than the rest of the year most of the time.
- Get the boy off the fucking couch. He will transform into a greasy lump if I let him– greasier than ever before, in fact, since he’s going to be a teenager in a few months and his Greasy Years are coming– and I should probably treat him like I’m his dad and not, like, a creepily older roommate who lives in the back office studying esoteric mathematics and languages he will never speak to anyone. He will literally spend the whole summer playing video games and watching YouTube if I let him; I should probably find a way to encourage other activities, even if that’s just making sure he has friends over every so often so that he interacts directly with people.
And, because not everything has to be serious:
- I have video games to beat. I spend significantly less time on the PS5 since I turned off the YouTube channel, but I’ve developed this vexing habit where I play 90% of a game and then abandon it for something else, which means that I’ve got this vile backlog of games that I want to get off my plate and haven’t yet. Some of them are never going to happen– I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate III— but several of them are games I enjoyed and just got distracted by the next shiny. Literally all I have to do in the new Prince of Persia is beat the final boss! That’s, like, an hour or two! I can do this!
- Reeeeeeeeead. Still making progress but God damn it I want the unread shelf cleared by the end of June. I can do this. I will do this. This is actually the thing on this list most likely to actually happen.
What about you? Any big summer plans?
Let’s see if this works
My internet has melted, and has been at best intermittent throughout the day, so lemme just throw up a quick proof-of-life before it goes down again: it was brutally hot outdoors today; I think the heat index reached somewhere in the 105-110 range, with tomorrow expected to be just as bad. Amazingly, though, it wasn’t nearly as humid as I was expecting, meaning that outside was unpleasant but not the immediate death I was planning for. We spent the evening in the pool. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
Something is happening!
I am told that this will eventually be a pair of owls; I don’t really know what I’m going to do with a pair of owls but at least the printer hasn’t burst into flames or fallen off its table or anything like that yet. It is currently 14% finished with the owl printing and has been printing owls for probably forty minutes if I leave out the time it took for everything to heat up. It’s a bit louder than I wanted it to be without being super annoying; that said, it’s occurred to me that trying to do game recording with this thing running could potentially be an issue.
Speaking of the channel: I’m now something like 10 days into the hiatus that was started by catching Covid, and I’m thinking regular programming will resume this weekend. I’ve had absolutely no brain space left for anything lately other than getting through the end of the school year alive, and now that I’ve mostly managed that– the 8th grade recognition ceremony was today, so those kids are gone-gone, and everybody else’s last day is tomorrow– I think I can redirect my attention to, y’know, important stuff.
Fifty-eight minutes including heating, so probably 50 minutes of printing, and we’re at 20%. I can see owl feet now! S’cool.
I have more to tell you, but again: brain space, and May is somehow not fucking done with us yet, so more regular programming around here will be resuming soon enough too. I’m so close to summer break I can taste it. A day and a half more. I can do this.
Some recent developments
I listened to Down With the Sickness and Fuck Dying on the way home from work two different days this week.
We have recently discovered that not only is Fatima deaf, or at least very close to it (at least one ear appears to be completely bollixed, which I’m pretty sure is the medical term) but she may have been so for her entire life. How no one appears to have noticed this until now is left as an exercise for the viewer. How this will affect her ability to learn English, however, remains my problem for at least eight more days. I would love to say that I’ve been able to help these kids adapt to living in America, but … not so much, I think. If I stay in education, I do plan to spend some time this summer learning at least a little bit of Pashto, because I don’t think these families are going to stop coming anytime soon.
In other news, I covered for one of the 7th grade teachers yesterday afternoon, and without realizing I was doing it, I did myself a big favor. One of the problems with working in a school where you don’t know all of the kids (and I don’t know any of the kids below 8th grade, nor do I know all of the 8th graders, although I’d bet I’m at 90% or so) is that the only kids who are visible to you are the shitheads. I’m pretty sure I can identify at least half of the 7th grade shitheads at least by their faces, although I don’t know a lot of names. The good kids? They’re invisible, because they don’t fuck up in the hallways (they’re mostly not in the hallways in the first place) and so you never notice them. It was the same thing as when I worked at the grant coordinator at the school before I quit– I was working in the office. Who gets sent to the office? Shitheads! Whose names do you know? Shitheads! So it’s easy to assume they’re all like that.
Well, one way or another, I got lucky and landed on what turned out to be this particular teacher’s favorite class. And they were fun! It’s not like we did a lot of academic stuff or anything like that but I sat and chatted with several of them for a while and just in general interacting with all of them was pleasant. There’s always a lot of trepidation in covering kids you don’t know in a class you don’t know, because who the hell knows what kind of shit you could be getting yourself into, so this was helpful. At least I know a few who might actually be nice to have in class next year.
If, y’know, I lose my mind and come back again.
It begins, pt. 18
Because capitalism, let me begin by reminding you of two things: that I have a new book out and that my YouTube channel is going strong and could use some more subscribers. The game we’re in now, A Plague Tale: Innocence, is particularly narratively strong and I think would probably be quite a bit of fun to watch. It’s a game where you’re occasionally called upon to feed Inquisition soldiers to rats! You’ll love it.
(Why “Pt. 18,” in the headline there? This is year eighteen of teaching. Eighteen fucking years. Madness.)
School has not started yet, and won’t for nearly two weeks (two weeks from yesterday, I think, is the kids’ first day) but my rosters showed up today when I went looking for them, and I was greeted with smaller classes than I thought I was going to have (alarmingly small, honestly; I can imagine a world where if some of these kids don’t show up they collapse a section on us) and an organizational change that will make grading and record-keeping a lot easier, at least once I get done redoing the planning that was predicated on things working like they did last year. I am fighting off the urge to go to Target tonight to do a touch of supply shopping for stuff I know I’m going to need, and I will be in my classroom for the first time this school year tomorrow. I likely won’t be there much longer than an hour or so– long enough to take a quick inventory of what I want to do with the classroom now that I’m actually decorating it (remember, I’m in the same room I was in last year, but I never really decorated last year) and figure out what I might need to buy over the weekend.
I will be in my classroom Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week doing setup, Thursday and Friday are all-day meetings downtown, Monday the week after I’ll be in my room, then Tuesday is the first day for the teachers and the kids are back Wednesday. So this is the last weekday of summer, basically, since I’ll have Job Stuff every weekday from here on out.
So, yeah: here we go.
Let’s see, what else? I have a Family Thing this weekend; not one as extensive as last time, just for a day– but it’s for my wife’s side of the family, and I don’t know any of them especially well. Unlike my own family, I’m also not a hundred percent sure I can trust the vaccine status of everyone who will be there, a lot of whom I won’t know at all, and while I like my wife’s cousin and her kids, her cousin’s husband is still … I’ll say a potential danger spot in terms of his and my mutual ability to get along with each other. I have, as of yet, no concrete reason to distrust the guy beyond vibes, but we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years for obvious reasons and in general the people I might be interested in staying away from seem to have gotten worse at hiding their bullshit since this all started. I will do my damnedest to be a good guest– or, at the very least, I will make damned sure that while we’re driving home angry after leaving early, it won’t be because I was the asshole.
This is where my life would be easier if I was capable of talking about sports, by the way. Sports is a great thing for men to talk about when they don’t want to talk about other things. That said, talking about sports right now is pretty much talking about politics anyway, so even that refuge may be gone. Hopefully what happened last time will happen again– that the teenagers will decide to hang out with me, and I will thus immunize myself (heh) of any accusations of refusing to socialize while still insulating myself against stumbling into a Don’t Want None Won’t Be None situation with anyone else.
It’ll be fine, but cross your fingers for me anyway.
In which I don’t know what’s going on
It has been one of those days— and, I suspect, this is going to be a pattern that’s not going away anytime soon– where never at any point was I really sure what day it was, or what, if anything, I’m supposed to be doing. I’m going to have an extra child in my house all day tomorrow, and two days after that I have a sleep study, then I’m out of town for three days, and the week after that I have a three-day work thing, then a couple of one-day work things the week after that, and then it’s August and pretty much the second August 1 hits I’m off to the races, because school starts the 11th, I think, and I have stuff to do nearly every day of August before then.
All of this is just to say that I spent today either in the pool, finally framing my wife’s Christmas present, or recording myself playing the vidya games, and other than never being quite sure what day it was, I am perfectly content with how the day went.
I have an enormous amount of stuff I want to accomplish before Child 2 arrives tomorrow; anybody want to take bets on whether I get any of it done?