Tag: teaching

Let’s see if you can make me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

I spent my first few hours of the new school year working in my room today; as per previous practice, we don’t actually start getting paid until next week, but if I wait until the days I’m supposed to be there, there’s not going to be anywhere near enough time to get everything done that I need to get done. Adding insult to injury, Open House starts at 1:00 in the Goddamn afternoon on our second day of the three we have before school starts, meaning that the real deadline for when our rooms need to be presentable isn’t even the day the kids come back, it’s a full day and a half before that.

I made two promises to myself at the end of last year, which were that I wasn’t going back into the building before school started, and I wasn’t going to spend a ton of money during the couple of weeks heading into school, and I’ve thoroughly broken both of those promises. (Want to help me out with supplies? My Amazon wish list is here.)

We got emailed a document a few weeks ago about the district’s new expectations regarding classroom decor and classroom furniture. I’m probably not supposed to post the entire thing, but I’m really, really tempted to do so. Needless to say, it bans several things I already have in my classroom, and I’ve already purchased, as in during previous years, specifically for use in my classroom. Shit that I not only have nowhere to put at home, but is too big to fit in my car to take home even if I had somewhere to put it. I’m not joking when I tell you they apparently want me to just throw away hundreds of dollars of shit I’ve bought for my room to make it more comfortable for my students. Hell, I decided I wanted to grab an end table we weren’t using at home (it’s been living in the garage for a couple of months) to put my iPad charging station on, and technically, I can’t even bring that in.

The policy basically boils down to “You are only allowed to use the furniture we give you, and we have no intention whatsoever of furnishing your room appropriately, so suck it.” The teacher chair from the district that I replaced with my $600 SecretLab chair was broken when I got it. Is somebody going to reimburse me for all this shit I already bought, that was perfectly fine in previous years?

Yeah, I know.

I don’t think most people realize just how bare a classroom looks when it literally only has the things in it that the school district paid for. They’ve even gone so far as to ban various kinds of flexible student seating (I don’t have them any more, because the kids popped them, but I’ve had fidget seats in the room before) that are commonly used in IEPs. They’re supposedly going to have the maintenance crew go through the buildings and mark the level we’re supposed to keep our lighting at on the switch plates. The maintenance people come through every single night and set my lights to the maximum before turning them off, a level of harsh overhead lighting that I absolutely cannot tolerate. We aren’t supposed to use staples or thumbtacks to attach things to the walls any more. Our walls are specifically constructed to take staples! They did that on purpose!

(My room didn’t even get fucking vacuumed over the summer, by the way. Everything is exactly where I left it at the end of the school year. I had no reason to put anything away.)

Anyway, my AP walked into my room today to say hello, and I’d moved my couch to a spot where it is clearly visible from the door, the same couch I’m not supposed to have in my room any longer, and she didn’t say a damn word about it. I’m not sure how much of a stink I’m willing to make about this, but I’m absolutely not complying with anything until my boss specifically tells me to, and I’m trying to decide if I’m petty enough for malicious compliance to kick in if that happens.

(The document also bans, believe it or not, cast iron bathtubs from being in classrooms. Specifically. There has to be a story behind this. I want to know what it is.)

I am never fixing anything again (clap, clap)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.

Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.

“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.

But why the quick onset of the killing rage?

Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.

We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:

I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.

MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.

A couple of quick notes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

I finished another really good book today— maybe you can use context clues to figure out what it was!– but I feel like I’ve maybe used up all of my holy shit this was good you have to go read it now reviews for July? Or maybe that’s not a thing, or maybe I ought to just review the two books I DNFed in between this one and There Is No Antimemetics Division. Y’know, to combat the idea that all I do is slobber all over every book I read. I dunno. Are my book reviews too positive? Maybe I’m not trustworthy anymore.

I will say that July has been weird in that it’s featured both more amazingly good books and more DNFs than a typical month does.

Anyway, what else happened today? I spent part of my afternoon clearing out my Literal Physical Inbox, better known as the wire racks on my desk that I dump mail and paperwork into when it is too important to throw away and yet not quite important enough for me to file away immediately. Getting this done was a goal over Winter Break that didn’t happen, and then a goal over Spring Break that didn’t happen, and I swore to myself that I wasn’t getting through July without taking care of it.

I found stuff dated 2022, by the way.

Along the way I uncovered a ton of professional growth paperwork for my license renewal, which isn’t a critical necessity yet– my teaching license doesn’t expire until July of 2028, which means that technically it’s good through the end of the 2028-29 school year, but I figured I’d get a jump on getting the paperwork filed.

About half an hour ago I told my wife I was going to worry about getting it done tomorrow, expecting it to take the whole morning, and then I logged into the license renewal site just to see what I was getting myself into … and I’m done with the paperwork already. It took less than fifteen minutes. I have to wait for them to approve everything, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, and then I need to get my CPR certification up to date, and I think after that I can officially apply for my renewal, so in theory this might be done before the school year starts. Tomorrow morning I’ll find a CPR recertification class, which will probably take longer than uploading my paperwork did.

That will square up my teaching license through 2038, a year so far into the future as to be meaningless, and it might be the last time I have to renew my license, as I’ll turn 62 in 2038 and you best believe I’ll be retiring as soon as possible, even assuming that I make it through twelve more fucking years of teaching. That, all by itself, feels completely crazy. Not as crazy as the idea that if I don’t retire in 2038, I’d have to renew through 2048. That year’s not even going to happen. Let’s be real.

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.

Just talking

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

The Marjan Kamali book I finished last night and the Julia Alvarez book my kids are reading for summer school are overlapping in some really interesting ways, but I want to finish the Alvarez book before I talk about either of them too much. Meanwhile I am sitting at my desk absolutely enthralled by this, which I just found out about on Bluesky and sought out immediately. I am hungry; all I’ve eaten all day is a couple of doughnuts and a turkey wrap, so maybe dinner would be a good idea, but I’m currently putting off food in favor of music. It’s that good.

The World Cup started today; the first match was apparently at 3:30. I initially planned on watching it but then didn’t in favor of mowing my front lawn in blazing heat, which tells you just how committed I am to following the World Cup. I don’t think I’ve ever not done anything in favor of mowing instead. But my front lawn is now mowed, and I’m no longer paranoid that my neighbors secretly hate me.

My back yard, meanwhile, is going to suddenly catch fire in the next couple of days and burn to a crisp and then I won’t have to worry about it or its ten-foot, carnivorous, mobile weeds any longer. Nobody can really see the back yard. I’m pretending it’s a nature preserve. There’s probably some insects in there somewhere, assuming the weeds haven’t eaten them.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t have anything staggeringly important going on at the moment. I had nine kids today, the most of them I’ve had, and they seem to be enjoying themselves well enough so I don’t think we’re going to drop down to four again anytime soon. The one I know from last year still hasn’t shown up, though, which is kind of disappointing. I’m doing a decent job acquitting myself as an LA teacher; some parts of my brain that I haven’t had to use in a long time are coming back online, which is fun. I was hoping for a decent change of pace with this job, and I’ve got it in a couple of different ways, and I’ll be even happier with the whole situation next week, when that first paycheck shows up.

What do y’all have going on tonight?

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.

RIP, Mr. Frank Nemeth, 1936-2026; Mr. Thomas Farkas, 1937-2020, and any sense I ever had that I’m not an enormous idiot

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

This will be my third piece about a former teacher who has passed away, and to be completely honest, had you mentioned Mr. Nemeth to me before a couple of hours ago, I would have thought that he had already left us some time ago. He was my math teacher in seventh or eighth grade– I think in eighth, so this would be 1989-1990, but I cannot remember my other middle school math teacher to save my life, so it’s possible I had him in seventh. He spent, according to his obituary, 45 years teaching, all of it at the same school, and once again I find myself flummoxed at the idea that I’m as far into my career as I am and may not yet have reached the halfway point of his. He passed away at 90, so he would have only been in his mid-fifties when I had him.

I am trying really hard right now to not think too hard about the fact that he wasn’t that much older than I am now when I was in his class, and I’m definitely not trying to reconcile that knowledge with the idea I had that he was much older.

I really liked Mr. Nemeth– everybody did, as far as I remember– and while my memories from middle school are sketchy at best, I feel like he was one of the better math teachers I had. He was definitely someone who enjoyed working with kids as well, which is not exactly the same thing as being a good teacher– you can, believe it or not, be a tremendous educator and not “like kids” that much.

Now, I need you to be aware that I wrote those three paragraphs along with several others, and then made the post live. After that I went and looked at my yearbook from 8th grade, and then my head exploded. I have left the paragraphs above unedited– you will note that I said that I don’t remember if I had him in seventh or eighth grade? As it turns out, I had him in seventh grade, and this story that I wrote about him for an RIP post, the story that I’m going to reproduce below, was not about him. Because I went and looked at my yearbook and, yes, I did have Mr. Nemeth, and I liked Mr. Nemeth, but my eighth grade teacher was named Mr. Farkas, and he passed away in 2020(*). So I wrote this whole story intending it to be a charming anecdote about a beloved former teacher who had passed away and I was writing about the wrong guy.

(Fun fact about middle school: A good chunk of adults have very few working memories of the years between 12-14 as compared to any other era of their lives, and it’s because your brains are so thoroughly marinated in puberty chemicals that forming long-term memories is actually inhibited. I could not have told you Mr. Farkas’ name until seeing his picture, at which point everything just completely shook loose in my head. To be clear, I did like Mr. Nemeth, now that I’m remembering him properly, and I’m going to tell the story about Mr. Farkas anyway, with the right name on it, because now that I’ve written all of this out it’s too good to delete.)

So, returning to the original post: I have a quick story I want to tell about Mr. Farkas, and for the second time, the story I’m going to tell is a cherished memory on my end and absolutely something that he would never be able to get away with were he to do it today. There was a particular Friday in Math class where a few of my friends decided to start telling everyone that I was having a party that night. I don’t remember what triggered this; it was likely nothing at all, as I was not at the time known for throwing parties, and I definitely wasn’t known for throwing parties that were attended by girls, and my friends were making no exceptions as to who they were inviting over to my house. No one took the joke especially seriously, and at any rate the guys weren’t sharing my address or phone number, so it’s not as if anyone could have found me anyway.

As it turned out, that night I decided to have a few people over anyway to play video games, including the friends that were telling everyone I was having a party. There were maybe four or five of us, I think. My mom and dad were watching TV in the living room and we were playing games in the family room when there was a knock at the door. We were all briefly confused, as everyone we were expecting was already there, and I didn’t live in the kind of neighborhood where neighbors dropped by very often.

I answered the door. It was Mr. Farkas.

He had a cotton candy machine with him.

I remember that he explained how he had come to be in possession of a cotton candy machine, but I regret to inform you that I don’t remember the reason. I don’t know if he specifically put the cotton candy machine into his car to bring it to my house and see if we wanted cotton candy, or if he was bringing it back from somewhere(**) and he had just decided to check and see if party rockin’ was taking place at the Siler household that night.

One way or another, though, my math teacher was at my door, asking if the four or five of us wanted him to spin up any cotton candy for us, along with my brother and my parents.

That is not an invitation that one turns down, believe me. So Mr. Farkas made all of us cotton candy and hung out for a little while and then vanished into the night, taking his cotton candy machine with him. And Monday at school, the same friends who had invited everyone to my house tried to tell everyone that there had been a party, and Mr. Farkas had shown up and made us cotton candy, and … okay, this bit could be partially invented, but I’m almost certain no one believed us, and I half-believe that Mr. Farkas denied the whole story as well.

I have to have gotten my habit of gaslighting my students to death from somewhere, after all.

Rest in peace, both of you, Mr. Nemeth and Mr. Farkas. I hope my students have as warm memories, accurate or otherwise, of me as I do of the two of you thirty-six years down the road, even if I don’t intend to show up at their houses to create any of those memories.

(*) The punchline to all of this is that Mr. Farkas’ obituary actually calls him The Cotton Candy Man, implying that this was not the first time he’d pulled this move and explaining why he had the machine.

(** I didn’t live far from school, so this isn’t entirely unimaginable, if there had been a sporting event that night or something that he was making candy for. I have a vague recollection that it was his machine, but again, this was a long damn time ago.)