Three or four Saturdays in a row now have involved a lengthy afternoon nap; my body has been doing this thing to me where I’m waking up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings whether I want to or not (spoiler alert: I don’t want to) and have been completely unable to get back to sleep. This has led to hours-long naps on each of those Saturdays, eating my entire afternoon.
Well, tonight the boy had a birthday party to go to that was a good 45 minutes from our house, so after driving him out there my wife and I had dinner at Das Dutchman Essenhaus and spent some time attempting to shop in Amish country; it turns out Amish country shuts down entirely at 6:00 PM on Saturdays other than that one restaurant so we didn’t really get to do any actual shopping, instead driving around and alternately dodging horses that were supposed to be in the road and chickens and deer that weren’t. We just got home; it’s 9:00 and I still feel like we dragged the boy away from his party too early.
(The family of this friend of his is richer than God; the building we originally thought was their house, because it was house-shaped and considerably bigger than our own house, was actually their gym, an entirely separate building from their actual house. When he got in the car at the end of the night he said that they had spent a fair amount of time at the party digging a tunnel in their foam pit, which means they have a foam pit. We do not have foam pit money in the Siler household.)
Anyway, I’ve spent all day writing a review of Keith Ammann’s new book in my head; I got an early copy of it and it releases this week, so absent any world-shaking events that absolutely must be written about, expect a book review tomorrow.
It’s generally a good thing that my students like and trust me. That said, I went nearly 22 years in the classroom before a kid decided I should be the first person she told that she was raped, and it would be fantastic if I could die before that happens again.
I could teach for another fifty years and I would not get over how comical the reaction of your average middle school kid is to change. Today was a hellaciously busy day– I got into work a good 30 minutes early, on purpose, to discover that yes, in accordance with prophecy, the renovations on my old classroom were complete and yet my stuff hadn’t been moved from the temporary classroom to my actual room. So I had to first haul everything downstairs– and the temp room is literally as far away from my original classroom as it can be and still be in the building. Then once I got downstairs I had to unpack and organize everything, and I mean everything– including finding the couple of things that didn’t come back from storage like they were supposed to and putting all my desks where they belonged. Despite leaving a note with a diagram on my teacher desk they put it back where it was originally and not where I wanted it, so I also had to flag down one of the custodians and ask them to move it before class started, then I spent the whole day throwing review worksheets at my kids and unpacking and organizing as quickly as I possibly could.
The whole room has essentially been flipped; if you look at my classroom tour from the beginning of the school year you’ll notice that my desk was in between my two whiteboards and thus prevented me from using about half of the whiteboard space in the room. So I moved everything to the back of the room where I don’t obstruct anything I could use for instruction, plus I can move the student desks closer to the board. The kids in the back of the room were really far from the whiteboards and I don’t have to worry about that any longer.
Watching the video– and I wasn’t going to do another classroom tour video, but I think I will now, so expect that later in the week– you can get a good idea of what the renovations were. A fresh coat of paint, new carpet (whee!) and most usefully, new and dimmable lights. I had to take down all of my LED lighting for the repainting, and not all of it is going back up until I’m 100% certain I’ll be back in this room again next year, but I have all the whiteboards now too, plus the ancient TV went away and I got a new projector, so the room really has improved substantially over the course of the school year. This is the second time, though, come to think of it, that they got halfway through finishing a job and then left me for the rest of it, because when they finally put the new whiteboards in (in, in accordance with prophecy, late December) they didn’t bother putting anything back where it was or cleaning up all the shards of hardened glue that went everywhere. I had to scramble the first day back from Winter Break, too.
Anyway, to circle back to the first sentence, despite having seen what the other renovated rooms looked like already, every single kid who walked into my room today had to have something to say about it, and a whole lot of them decided they didn’t like where my desk is now. “Shut up, it ain’t up to you” was my response to most of them, because I teach middle school and that’s how we roll.
(The blurred-out calendar, by the way, has everyone’s birthdays on it, and was damn near illegible in the original picture, and only had first names anyway, but … still. I’m going to continue with this in the future, though. Everybody gets a Jolly Rancher on their birthday or the nearest available school day, and the summer birthday kids get theirs on their half-birthday, which is fun because it’s always a surprise.)
The weird thing is I don’t even know why. I mean, I do sort of; it’s spring and I teach 8th grade, and Spring Break is six days away. And there was a field trip for all the band and orchestra kids today, which should have led to an easier day and somehow didn’t.
I am so tired of 8th grade boys that I’m starting to genuinely lose my shit about it, and something about today made that a much bigger problem than it has been. I literally told two of my boys to “sit the fuck down” in fourth hour. In my defense, the previous thirteen times I had told them to sit down apparently didn’t take. Tomorrow, “won’t sit down” will become an office-referral level event, because I need to be done for a while. If I have to be a complete asshole for the rest of the time before Spring Break, I’m perfectly happy to do that. It’ll be fine.
Anyway.
I was gonna shoot Nazis some more– I’m in the final level of Sniper Elite 6, so I’m starting to think about the next game after that– but somehow it’s 8:53 already, so maybe I’ll go to bed a little early and read instead. I have a meeting tomorrow morning to help pick the building’s Teacher of the Year, which is disappointing because presumably I’m not being invited to vote on an award I’m up for, but it’ll mean having to get to work a little early and eight or nine seven or eight hours of sleep tonight might be a pleasant change of pace.
One of my most unfortunate popular posts is this one, where I found a certain article of feminine attire in an excitingly vivid color in a place where articles of feminine attire should never be found. It did not occur to me that putting a more, uh, punchy description of the clothing item in question directly in the title of the post was going to lead to a lot of idiots who would search for that particular clothing item and then literally click on every single post that showed up on Google.
People actually do that, by the way. That’s the only way to explain some of my search results.
Anyway, my day got completely derailed by a massive child porn investigation, how was yours?
What you are looking at is the foliage in between our house and the house behind us. There’s a fence buried in there, and until yesterday there was a shitton of broken branches as well. That tree that is more or less in the center of the picture lost a couple of big branches during a storm last week, and while the tree itself is in their yard, the branches all landed in ours.
I don’t want to hear anything about the condition of my lawn. I hate green things. This is known.
So anyway: the way the rules work in Indiana, it doesn’t matter who the tree belongs to; if some shit falls in your yard, it’s your problem. And the branches were still attached to the tree up top but were way too high for us to reach so we had to call out some tree guys. I got an estimate on Monday and they took me by surprise yesterday by calling and telling me they were on their way. I was a little worried that they’d have to go into the neighbors’ yard for part of the job, so I figured it was at least polite to let them know that the work was being done– and, again, given the density of the plant life between our house and theirs, it was reasonable to believe they hadn’t even noticed the branches had come down.
Problem is, because of peculiarities in how my neighborhood is laid out, it’s either a good ten minute walk or an actual ride in my car to get from my front door to their front door. And the guys were on their way, and I’d literally just gotten “on their way” from the dispatcher, so I didn’t know if that meant “five minutes out” or “they’re coming from Dowagiac and they’re gonna grab lunch along the way,” so actually leaving my house to go talk to them seemed kinda problematic.
But lo! Standing in my back yard (I’d been doing yard work, as it turned out) I realized I could hear people in their back yard! A conversation! Multiple people! Okay, cool– I can just talk to whoever that is over the fence, right? No problem.
Well, except for, again, the dense foliage. I walked over to the fence and tried to figure out who was in their back yard. Complicating things: this house has what seems to be a huge cast of rotating teenagers and I rarely see the adults– they either have an enormous family, are constantly letting the kids have friends over, or are fostering a bunch of kids. So it was probably going to be kids in the back yard– and it sounded like teenagers– and, what, do I start the conversation with “Go get your dad”? Or do I just tell them and assume a sixteen-year-old is an acceptable vehicle to deliver the message “there may be strangers in your back yard soon”?
I do not normally suffer from social anxiety– I’m a teacher, for fuck’s sake, I stand in front of people and talk for a living— but I discovered quickly, standing in my back yard, that I had no idea how to begin a conversation with a stranger who 1) would not know in advance that I was even there and 2) would absolutely not be able to see me for a moment or two after realizing I was there and talking to them. I mean, how do you start that conversation?
“Excuse me! Hi, I’m over here, in the bushes. It’s your neighbor!”
(They do not know my name and I do not know theirs. It’s 2024.)
Yeah, it was gonna be awkward.
And then, still not sure exactly what I was going to do, I got closer to the fence and found an appropriate spot where there was at least a chance they would see me.
So, um, I’ve left out the part where they have a pool in their back yard? And I’d heard them but not seen them yet, and there hadn’t been, like, splashing or anything. And what I was greeted with once I’d put myself in a position of being able to see my neighbors was a high school-aged girl, in a skimpy bikini, and what I can only assume was her boyfriend, shirtless and in a bathing suit. He was sitting in a beach chair, and she was … enthusiastically twerking on him.
A whole lot of thoughts went through my head really fast, and I decided that under those circumstances I was not terribly interested in being hi-I’m-in-the-bushes guy. I retreated, as far as I know without detection, and decided that they would figure out that there were people in my back yard cutting down branches when they heard the saws, and that if I actually needed to talk to them, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
And that’s how I got arrested for being a Peeping Tom, your honor.
This week has already featured Blowjob Drama, which is not in my top five favorite kinds of drama, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is one of the very worst days to be a middle school teacher, as roughly half of the ongoing relationships in the building are going to abruptly end tomorrow, and most of them are going to end in desperately stupid ways for desperately stupid reasons. Meanwhile, I still have to teach math. Which they have even less incentive to pay attention to than usual.
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