Tag: teaching

This is why I don’t leave the house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I made a quick run after dinner, to the very same grocery store that I got a senior citizen discount at yesterday, because I needed even more shit for school that I should have just bought yesterday. I pulled into a parking spot and put the car in park, and at that precise moment the car next to me and the car facing them on the other side of the aisle both started pulling out of their spots at the same time.

My sense of proprioception went absolutely batshit, and I was completely convinced my car was moving. Have you ever slammed on the brakes on a car while it’s in park? I don’t recommend it, especially if the car already wasn’t moving, because it won’t help. I had a couple of seconds of full-on panic, trying to figure out why my car was moving when I wasn’t moving it, before it clicked what was going on.

I went inside and immediately walked past a former student, who did not acknowledge me– possibly because I had her in class fifteen or sixteen years ago and she didn’t recognize me, which is reasonable. I remember liking the kid well enough, and the last I heard about her she was doing fine, but man did she look like hammered shit today. Like, possibly unhoused and with the flu. Really, really rough.

I collected my various purchases, noting with some irritation that some of them were literally twice the cost that they would have been had I gone to Target, but fuck it, I was already there. I bought everything and went back out to my car, checked my mirrors and my back-up camera and started backing out of my spot, like a normal, responsible driver, and just before I got to the point where I’d take the car out of reverse the car behind me (so on the other side of the lane) starts pulling out of their spot, clearly not looking to see if the way was clear. I slammed on the horn and came within an inch or two of getting hit, but they stopped in time and pulled back into their parking spot so I could leave.

As I was driving away, I saw a large man in a Punisher shirt and bright red shorts standing on the side of the entrance to the parking lot. A moment later I realized that this man, at 6:30 PM on a Thursday night, in broad daylight and in public, was energetically masturbating.

I once watched from my fourth-floor apartment window in Chicago as a woman squatted in the entrance to a business across the street and took a piss on the sidewalk, but I’m almost certain I’ve never seen somebody just randomly jerking off on the side of the road at passing cars before.

On the other hand, hey, it got me a blog post.

A disappointing fact

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

I finished the Tesla book last night, and the most interesting thing I learned about Nikola Tesla is that J.P. Morgan had rhinophyma and was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a colossal asshole about it. Unfortunately, that isn’t a fact about Nikola Tesla!

Anyway, I started Soraya Bouazzaoui’s Aicha last night, and based on the first chapter I suspect I’m going to like it quite a bit.

… and after staring at my screen for five minutes without writing a word, that might be the most interesting thing I have to say tonight. We had a field trip this morning; the 8th grade split up and went to three different colleges, and apparently everyone had very different experiences. We had a campus walking tour and that was basically it. Not bad, necessarily, but not worth the large amount of legwork and nonsense that a field trip requires. Tomorrow I have a study session after school for however many of my algebra kids want to stay after school to prepare for their final on Thursday. Thursday I have the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club. And after that, I’m basically done, except for the part where I have five more days of actual school to survive.

Well, I’ll survive it; I’m fairly confident of that, having done it many times before. The operative question is how many of them will survive it. Hopefully all of them, but I’m not making any promises. The words “If you two idiots don’t sit down I’m going to set the entire room on fire” came out of my mouth today, so I may be nearing the end of my patience.

I mean “idiots” in the most loving way possible, and “set the entire room on fire” as a metaphor for the power of my love, of course.

Help me out here

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?

I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.

In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.

(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)

Fair warning

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Coming home and dying on Fridays seems to have been a thing lately, and indeed, that’s what I did tonight, and we are going to be at a wedding out of town tomorrow night, so don’t expect much more than a hotel picture unless I can con the bride into something vaguely compromising. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of planning to do for Monday, because I suspect once we get back on Sunday all three of us are going to collapse into separate rooms and not speak again for a while.

I quit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

All of it. Forever. Forever and ever, and ever and ever.

This is a review of a local high school, and I hope the author steps on a Lego every time she gets out of bed for the rest of her stupid life, and I hope her mattress is lumpy and her pillow is fifteen degrees warmer than her room:

Also, guess what LMS my district uses?

There’s currently a screen up saying Canvas is undergoing “scheduled” maintenance, which … no. No, it isn’t.

Well, that didn’t work

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was going to write a post about an annoying-but-hopefully-ultimately-rewarding task that I set myself to complete tonight (take the word “task” with salt) except, oops, I didn’t actually finish it. Which kind of leaves me without a post and without the possible “ultimately rewarding” bit, because I think I might die if I continue working on said task.

On the plus side, I had a meeting tomorrow that I wasn’t looking forward to, and then I realized that I was the chairperson of the committee that I don’t want to go to the meeting of, so I emailed everybody and said “Hey, I’ve really got nothing to say tomorrow. Y’all mind if the meeting is an email?” So far the only person to respond is the principal, who was fine with cancelling (she hasn’t attended the last few anyway) but she’s the big boss so we are totally making the meeting an email.

Anyway, maybe we’ll do that post tomorrow night. We’ll see if The Task gets completed or not.

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.

How did that happen?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.

(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)