The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I was given twelve years, nine months and twenty-two days of fatherhood before my kid became taller than me.
I’m 5’10”, by the way. He just finished sixth grade, which means he will absolutely be topping six feet before the end of seventh.
Christ, I’m old.
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.
Hooray!
This looks terrible, I know, but the genuine truth is that it happens at the beginning of nearly every quarter, nearly every year. We are about to start the third week of the third quarter. At the end of a quarter kids get used to the idea that no one assignment is going to have a huge impact on their grades. Then they forget how averages work and suddenly they’ve missed one assignment and bam all by itself they’re down to a D or an F, because there have only been two or three assignments that went into the grade book in week two of the quarter.
And one of the things people don’t realize about teaching is just how much acting is involved. Because I know exactly what’s going on here, and I know it’s going to get fixed, but did I begin every single non-Algebra class with a five-minute “Fix this or I will end you” lecture? One where I demonstrated that if I want to terrify my students my most effective tool is not to yell at them but, rather, to lower my voice? Did I use the word “pathetic” a whole lot more often on Friday than I usually do in a typical day, much less a typical week?(*) Yep. Sure did, to all those things, and not a single peep was uttered by 96% of my students (actually, let’s do the math, since I bounced three kids to the office during the lectures … ninety-eight percent) during any of it, because in stark contrast to most of my previous schools, very few of these kids have ever seen me genuinely pissed.
Which, uh, I wasn’t.
But I’m good at this, so believe me, they didn’t know.
I’d say a third of those kids got their grades up to passing during their math classes on Friday, and another third will be up to snuff by the end of the weekend. The rest will require some more individual work. But most of my classes this year haven’t had more than one or two kids failing, and I’ve seen more than one, miraculously, where at the end of the quarter every single student was passing. So they’ll fix it. And then fourth quarter I’ll have to scare the shit out of them all over again.
(*) I have never described an individual student as “pathetic,” just for the record. I have used that word to describe specific work outputs, however, and I’m entirely comfortable with using it to describe the current grades of an entire class.
Today was not a bad day by any measure, and a few revisions in my rosters led to two classes becoming substantially easier and one becoming slightly– manageably, I think– more difficult. You could tell that it was the first day back from break– I’ve never had more kids fall asleep or try to fall asleep in class than I did today, and by the end of the day I just stopped worrying about it. Yeah, it’s fucking stupid that you went to bed at 4:00 in the morning and only got two hours of sleep, but none of these kids live in my house and I can’t control their sleep schedules and I know they’ll be back to normal by the end of the week.
Which, granted, still means some of them are going to try and sleep through class every day, but not remotely as many. I’ll take “back to baseline” without complaint, I think.
Meanwhile, speaking of sleep schedules, it is 7:20, I am dead tired, I am anticipating a two-hour delay tomorrow (they won’t cancel, but the worst of the weather will be between 1 and 7 AM, which is never a good sign) and I will be in bed by 9:00 tonight or die trying.
How was your Monday?
I was in bed before 9:00 last night, and probably dead to the world before 10:00, and as a result spent the day feeling much more human. I even got home still feeling human, which is a definite improvement over the last several days. We’ll see how long it lasts; I have plans to play Armored Core VI after finishing this blog post and hopefully once I start I’ll be able to tear myself away after a reasonable amount of time.
A brief (very brief) tale about today, one of those sorts of stories where the lead-in takes way longer than the actual story. I have talked, in this space and many others, about how Kids These Days don’t give a damn any longer about shit we, meaning The Olds, used to think of as private. I had a kid straight-up introduce themselves to me last year with “Hi, I’m <name,> I’m an asexual lesbian.” Like, that was the first sentence. Shit, I’m straight and there was no way that I would have actually admitted I liked girls to a teacher when I was in middle school. The Internet is fond of school bathroom discourse, and one of the frequent arguments of people who think we should let kids go use the bathroom at any time and for any reason(*) is that Girls have Periods and how dare you prevent her from doing whatever her teenage menstrual cycle might be demanding at any given moment just because she’s so embarrassed to admit it’s happening.
It is to laugh, because teenage girls do not give one single shit any longer about telling anyone and anyone who might have even the slightest claim to such information that they are on their periods. And while I’ve been teaching middle school long enough to have amassed a fair-sized stash of stories involving menstrual nonsense in some way or another, today was the first time a student looked me in the eye and volunteered, entirely unsolicited, that she needed to go to the bathroom so that she could change her underwear. The answer was going to be yes. It wasn’t even going to be “can you wait a few minutes?” Straight-up yes. And I got to find that out about her anyway.
As a reminder, this kid has known me for twelve days.
Teenagers are a lot of things, but they are absolutely not shy any longer.
(*) We will not be engaging in this discourse in this space at this time; suffice it to say that these people are Wrong.
Trigger warning: suicide.
Spoiler alert: everybody is OK.
Note that, at least if you’re reading this on desktop, there’s a “pages” link underneath the like button at the bottom of the post. Or you can just click here, I guess.
I don’t remember buying this book. I don’t remember where I first encountered it, either, but it must have impressed me, as I must have pre-ordered it immediately. I got a notification from Amazon that it had been shipped and actually had to look it up to figure out what it was. And then I read the blurb and I was like, oh, right, this is definitely something I want to read.
I can’t call this the first great book I’ve read in 2017– it’s the third, actually– but one of those three was a kids’ book and the other was the third book in a trilogy. So is it okay if I call this the first new hotness of the year? It’s my blog, so yeah, it is.
This is one of those books where the premise will let you know right away whether you should buy the book or not: Daniel Tozer is a fifteen-year-old boy who happens to be the closest person when the world’s greatest superhero is killed, and he inherits the powers of that superhero, Dreadnought, when he dies.
And the first thing Dreadnought’s new powers do is remake Daniel’s body into the perfect body Daniel has always wanted. Which means that Daniel becomes Danielle, and wakes up with unimaginable power and a woman’s body.
So that’s the first three pages, and there we go from there. The broader beats of the story are sorta predictable, and you can probably imagine several of the complications that work their way into the story– friends, parents, a superteam that may not be what Danny thinks they are, and another high school friend who turns out to be a hero too. The worldbuilding is solid (this is the first book of a series, so there’s room for not everything to be explained) and the action is solidly written– as fascinating as the premise is, you absolutely have to be able to nail action sequences to properly write a superhero novel, and Daniels excels at it.
So, whoever it was that turned me on to this book (Charlie Jane Anders blurbs it, so maybe it was her?), thank you. I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and you should go read Dreadnought right the hell now.
I have some really angry kids in my class this year.
That’s new.
I should explain. I’ve had plenty of kids with anger management issues. I’ve had plenty of kids who had explosive tempers. That’s part and parcel of working in an urban middle school, and frankly is probably part and parcel of working with middle schoolers no matter where you find them. But I’ve got a handful of girls in my afternoon class for whom pissed off at the world seems to be their only available emotional state. They walk in angry and they somehow manage to stay angry for the entire time they’re in the room. That’s the weird part. Kids get angry all the time; they get angry at me all the time. I’m used to that. They don’t stay that way for long. For a kid to keep up an angry mood for three successive class periods is exceptionally rare, and to do it for multiple days in a row practically unheard of. Being mad is hard. It takes work. Most of them don’t have it in them.
And somehow in this group I have more than one of them.
I’m being weird today. My son’s birthday was last Sunday, and today he got a gift card for Toys R’ Us in the mail from my aunt, so the three of us went to the comic shop (it’s Wednesday, after all) and to the toy store after I got home from work. And the toy store managed to depress me. I don’t even know why, but I’m still fighting it off.
I owe you two stories, I think. The first one is the Holy Water story I teased the other day. One of my girls in my afternoon class– not one of the angry ones– came up to me on Monday and asked if she could go to her locker. Later in the year this will be met with a near-automatic “no” except in case of emergencies, but they’re fifth graders and they’re not used to having to bring all of their stuff with them into classrooms so I’m being nice. I do generally ask what they need, though.
“I need to put something in my locker,” she says.
Ah. This is automatically lower-priority than needing to get something from a locker. “What do you need to put in your locker?”
“My holy water.”
Um.
“You’re carrying holy water with you?”
“Yes.”
Parts of my brain immediately start a cage match with other parts of my brain, doing their best to starve the entire thing of any residual oxygen.
“Why, my dear, do you have holy water with you in class?” Because Holy shit this is actually a new one.
“It helps me concentrate.”
“And… you have decided that you don’t need to concentrate any longer? We still have an entire class period left after we finish with math.”
“No. I’m tired and I think I’m done concentrating for today.”
“I think your holy water needs to stay with you, then. Perhaps it could use a recharge this Sunday; it appears to be losing some of its potency.”
“So I need to keep concentrating?”
“Indeed.”
She stands there and stares at me for a minute.
“Back to your seat, dear.”
She turns and leaves.
Today, as we’re working on two-digit multiplication, a concept they all appeared to have a decent grasp of until I began trying to teach it, one of my girls came up to me and demanded that I yell at her.
“Why do you need me to do that?”
“Because you yelled at me yesterday and I went back to my seat and did my work.”
I think about this. I didn’t yell at anyone yesterday. In fact, I’ve made a big deal with this class that I didn’t even need to raise my voice on Monday or Tuesday after a reasonably rough first couple of days.
“I don’t remember yelling at you yesterday.”
She thinks for a minute. “That was my teacher last year. Sorry. Can you yell at me anyway?”
Brain, cage match, starving, etc.
“Honey, I don’t think–”
“I really think it’ll help.”
What in the blue sadomasochistic fuck is going on right now.
She finally got me to bark GET AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW at her, at which point she smiled, thanked me, and literally skipped off back to her seat. I watched her for a moment and then looked over my shoulder, fully convinced that one of my bosses would have taken that moment to appear in my classroom for the first time all year. No one was there. The kids all looked shocked for a moment, then realized what was going on and went back to what they were doing. They were so blasé about it, in fact, that I find myself suspecting that this was a regular move that this kid pulled last year. Which… hell, I don’t even know what to do about that.
I’ll stop being tired all the time soon, right? How the fuck is it 9 PM already?