Tag: wasting time

I’ve completely lost it

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I walked into my house after getting home from work with a good idea for a post in my head, did a couple of quick around-the-house tasks, and then promptly completely forgot what the hell I wanted to post about, and despite spending several hours since then trying to reconstruct my thought process, it’s completely gone.

So screw it, I’m going to complain about my job instead. Have you ever been asked your opinion on something and immediately realized from the way you were asked about your opinion that there was no way on God’s green earth that anyone was going to actually pay attention to what you thought? We had a teacher inservice day yesterday, and the math department’s big job in the morning was to go through a bunch of vendor kits for next year’s new textbook adoption. There were, I dunno, nine of them to go through? All of them with, bare minimum, 7th and 8th grade teacher editions and copies of whatever materials the students got, some with access to websites and digital tools and pacing guides and various and sundry other things that I won’t get into because they’re probably a touch too inside baseball for a non-teacher crowd. Many of them also included 6th grade materials and Algebra 1 as well.

Now, this is actually a pretty decent use of an inservice day, don’t get me wrong. There was no world where any of us were going to have time to do this on our own– remember, every math teacher in my building is on an overload right now because we’re so understaffed, so all of us teach for every second of the day except for our lunch breaks. (And I generally have a dozen students in my room during lunch, too, but that’s another story.)

Basically what we were doing was taking 20-30 minutes for each publisher, looking through the books and making notes. My notes were mostly bullet points. Some publishers were out immediately, sometimes for reasons having little to do with the actual quality of instruction– for example, one of them was not only organized in a way that made absolutely no sense to any of us and didn’t really seem to conform to Indiana standards, but had seven different thick consumable workbooks (250-300 pages each) for the kids, one for each major unit of study.

Now seven different workbooks is already impossible even before you get to the ridiculousness of the idea that you’d get through even one 300-page workbook in a single school year. I have about 175 students right now, total. 175 students times seven workbooks is 1225 workbooks. Each was, conservatively, an inch thick. That’s a hundred and two linear feet of workbooks.

Where the fuck am I supposed to keep all of that? Giving them to the kids is not an option. I will never see them again. Furthermore, since nothing is in the right order, we might be in Workbook 1 this week and then need Workbook 5 next week and Workbook 3 the week after that.

I don’t need a lot of notes for this one! It’s literally a physical impossibility. It’s a non-starter. The second I see seven workbooks per kid where everything is in an order that doesn’t match what the State of Indiana needs, I’m done.

You can imagine the shit fit that was thrown when our department head found out later that afternoon that we– as in each of us– were supposed to complete a seventy item rubric for, not each publisher, but each grade level for each publisher.

That’ll be the last animated .gif, I promise, but it felt appropriate. Not only were the rubrics huge, but they were Google forms, and they were written in eduspeak so ridiculously arcane that none of the three of us, nearly seventy years of teaching experience among us, could really parse what the hell some of the items were actually asking. And to do that for all grade levels for nine different publishers? Fuck you. Fuck you a lot. Two days of work, bare minimum. We had three hours, and by the time we saw the rubric the three hours were already over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what a complicated Google form looks like when it spits out its results, but it’s a completely ridiculous spreadsheet. They’re terrible, and they’re user-unfriendly as hell. So to come back around to what I asked earlier in this post, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to attempt to look at what we were doing, because not only does no one have any time for that shit– remember the three teachers at our school are not the only ones being asked to complete this task– but it’s being generated in a way that makes pulling useful information out of it virtually impossible.

We all suspected the board was just going to order the cheapest curriculum anyway. So we sent in our notes and a tiered list of the ones we liked, the ones we were indifferent to, and the ones we actively didn’t like. If the people in charge want more than that they can find all of us subs for a couple of days.

I fully anticipate being told to find somewhere to put 1200 workbooks this fall.

Unfair Reviews: METAL GEAR SOLID V

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews7 Comments

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He’s got no drawers.

I was gonna start this piece with “fuck this game,” but that’s not quite accurate.  I have to say “Fuck Metal Gear Solid V,” because I have not done anything so far that even remotely qualifies as playing a game.

I admit it, I should have known better.  The last Metal Gear game I played was MGS2, and I hated it.  Hated every miserable poorly-written cutscene-bullshit second of it, and to this day I can’t tell you why I even finished the thing, but I can tell you that for the last third of it I was frequently putting the controller down and going away to do something else while I was “playing.”  Something about the reviews for this one convinced me that it would be different.  That was stupid.  I should have known that it would not be different.

Here is how the first, oh, 45 minutes to an hour of Metal Gear Solid V went, on Sunday night:

    • Turn the PS4 on.  It starts beeping and trying to eject things.  It’s never done this before, and there’s nothing in there to eject, so I spend a while not quite realizing that something wrong is going on and I think it’s part of the game.
    • Hit X approximately forty-five times to get through a ridiculous number of screens about known bugs and other bits of nonsense that after a while I’m not even reading.  I know one of them was about how a character in Scene 27 can cause a game-stopping bug if she’s with you; I’m not going to remember this by the time I get to Scene 27, whatever that is.  There are lots and lots of white words on a black screen to ignore here.
    • Watch a ridiculous several-minute long cutscene involving waking up from a blur and then something about a cassette tape that provides no useful information and certainly nothing fun or interesting.  Right about here is where I started pounding on buttons trying to skip stuff.  I eventually discover that the way you skip cutscenes in this stupid game is by swiping right on the touchscreen, which is stupid and unintuitive, and it takes me several times doing it right before I realize what it is that I’m doing right.
    • Sooner or later, I get to the actual title screen of the game.  I have to hit the option button to get to the start menu, which is also stupid, and which ordinarily wouldn’t bother me at all except for the fact that it’s even more nonsense being thrown in your way before you can actually play.  No other game that I can remember makes you give the game permission to bring up the “start new game” screen.  This is ridiculous.
    • Right about here is when I realized that the beeping and loading were the PS4 freaking out and not the game.  I stopped and unplugged it for a minute, which cured everything but then I had to watch the damn cutscenes and click through the warning messages again.
    • At this point you’re in a hospital, and there’s a doctor, and you keep passing out, and nothing happens, and I give each cutscene a couple of minutes and nothing happens and by this point I start skipping them.  This literally takes ten to fifteen minutes even though I am skipping stuff and not paying attention.  I have no fucking idea how long they think people might have patience for these scenes.  Note also that I damn near never skip cutscenes in any other game; the ones in the Metal Gear series are 1) just that bad and 2) I haven’t gotten to do anything yet. I’ve hit X a hundred times to skip a bunch of text screens full of meaningless information and moved a thumbstick to look around a room.  Other than that I’m listening to this doctor yap at me.
    • Eventually I get to choose what I look like.  I make myself black and give myself a ridiculous long beard, thinking that maybe I’ll get to play now.  The doctor shows me a mirror with what I look like, but a moment later and for no clear reason (granted, I’ve completely stopped paying attention to him) I’m back to being white and looking like Solid Snake.  I have no idea why they let me choose a face.  They did fool me into thinking I might be able to play, though.
    • At some point after that, as I’m about to skip another scene of the doctor yammering, I notice the nurse getting killed in the background.  Something possibly exciting might be happening!  Nope.  The doctor takes like 20 minutes to get garrotted, then someone comes in the window, then that person’s on fire for some reason, and at no point anywhere do I actually get to affect what’s happening.  At this point I sent out this Tweet:

Forgive the extraneous Z; I was typing fast and frustrated. It had been at least half an hour and I had done nothing at all other than hit X on command.

      • Two minutes later, I sort of got to move around, if by “move around” I mean “hold up, because you don’t get to choose what direction you’re moving, and by the way you’re crawling and it’s insanely slow and laborious, and you don’t get to do anything but hold up for a while, and I hope this fools you into thinking you’re playing a game.”  Which cost $60, by the way.  I turn the fucking game off because fuck this.

Last night!  I had a few minutes, and I decided to hell with it, I paid $60 for this motherfucker and it’s getting fucking perfect reviews.  There has to be a game here somewhere.  Here’s what I did last night with Metal Gear Solid V:

      • I was immediately asked to wait fifteen minutes so that my PS4 could download an update, which, fuck that, no, I don’t care about your fucking update, and I don’t care about playing online, because I haven’t been able to play offline yet.  So I declined to wait, fuck the online features I’m missing.  Then something exciting happened!:
      • I held the up button.  For, like, fifteen minutes, following around a man in a hospital gown with no fucking underwear on, meaning I spent fifteen minutes following around bare man-ass-crack.  At no point was I allowed to do much of anything other than hold up; I couldn’t decide to go another way or anything like that, and since one of Snake’s arms is a prosthetic and the other spent most of the “game” broken I was basically just holding up and watching my character flop around like… well, like a guy trying to crawl with one broken arm and one prosthesis, which is not exactly thrilling gameplay.  Lots of other people around me were getting shot, but not me; in fact, I tried to get killed at one point and it didn’t work because the game wouldn’t let me turn around and go back toward the guard.
      • And, again, you’re doing this so that you can stare directly into another man’s asshole.  That’s not a joke.  That’s what you’re doing.  Mostly what you do is try and drag yourself up on shit and fall down.  Eventually he can stand up but then a second later they’re telling you to hit X to lay down again.  At one point there was a fire-dude, or maybe she was a fire-lady, or maybe both.  I didn’t get to fight him or anything.  I just laid there and did nothing and then I got to hold up some more.
      • And then I turned the game off, and now I’m fucking done.  Because this is not how you make a fucking game.

There will be no third chance.  Fuck Metal Gear Solid V.  Konami owes me $160, because I want a refund and I’m charging for my goddamn time.

In which I don’t know where they find these people

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized12 Comments

middle-finger-poster-flag-6185-pI am either the most arrogant sonofabitch on the planet, an utter wizard at doing large-room presentations, or both, because it never goddamn fails that I always think I can do a better job than the people presenting at these conferences.  It took precisely 45 minutes for me to walk out of my first breakout conference, and it was the first breakout conference of the convention, so I’m either at 1/1 or 0/1 so far depending on how you’re keeping track.

I wasn’t alone.  These sessions are a scant  hour and fifteen minutes long.  If I paid five hundred dollars of gubmint money to be able to attend this thing– and I did– then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the presenters to prepare an hour and fifteen minutes of actual material before they come to present, and to actually have something to say about the topic on which they are supposedly presenting.  If I attend a talk that references starting new magnet schools in the title of the talk, I assume based on that title that the people doing the talk have started a magnet school or perhaps started a series of magnet schools and that they feel like they have something useful to pass on to others about this process.

In other words, I want to go there to hear you talk about your subject, and not to have conversations with “elbow partners” about poorly-defined subjects that no one in the room really quite gets, and I sure as fuck don’t want you to spend seven minutes talking about how it’s important that we conclude our sixty-second elbow talks in sixty seconds because we have a schedule to keep to.

When you lead into your fourth “elbow talk” in 45 minutes, and you announce that this one will require all of us to change our seats based on a topic we supposedly chose a few minutes ago (no one chose a topic, because we didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about or why we were doing it) and then to “ideate” for four and a half minutes, and then you spend ten minutes talking about the difference between “ideating” and “brainstorming,” which boils down to “we want to use a fancier word for made-up differences between the terms,” you’re making it very fucking clear that you had no plan for this whatsoever and that you are deliberately and perniciously wasting my time, and I start doing the math and determining how much of a refund you personally owe all of the motherfuckers in the room who spent $500 for this conference before we paid for transportation, hotel rooms, or meals.

Hint: five figures.  Which had muhfuckin’ better well be bigger than your speaking fee, you waste of flesh.

A positive: I spent my “elbow sessions” talking with an elderly white man from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.  I initially began our conversation by carefully calibrating my expectations for Elderly White Man from Louisiana, only to accidentally trigger a truly delightful anti-Bobby Jindal rant a moment later.  His name was Elvis, which only made him more fun to talk to.  Unfortunately, he bailed at the same time I did, as we both realized at once that the presenters literally had nothing of value to say.  I like you, Elvis.  I hope the rest of your conference goes better.