Tag: whining

On school supplies and other annoying arguments

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.

This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.

Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:

  1. Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
  2. You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
  3. If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
  4. Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
  5. There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
  6. That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
  7. In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.

Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.

Nothing tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Still working through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, not really vibing all that much with the book I’m reading, and hoping to see Superman sometime in the next 48 hours. I’m tired and weirdly feel like none of my clothes fit right and I’m jimmylegging for no clear reason. On the plus side, I had a blood draw yesterday and my A1C is the lowest it’s ever been since I’ve been measuring, so I’ve got that going for me.

Which is nice.

I gotta get my shit together

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

As you might expect, I follow a lot of teachers on my social media accounts, especially on TikTok. And one thing I see a lot of this time of year is teachers who are being really defensive and insisting that we Don’t Really Get Summers Off, because of … I dunno, planning and continuing education and a bunch of other stuff.

I have been teaching for over twenty years, and large portions of my job are muscle memory by now. I very much have my summers off and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you think that’s unfair you are absolutely welcome to become a teacher, and if you’re not running to do that, well, you must not be that upset about my summers.

I’m a week into summer break now, and y’all, I am seriously in need of a routine or a project or some shit like that. I cannot just stare at my phone and take naps all summer long, and I am dying over here.

This has got to be Find a Project week. I’m going to a Counting Crows concert next Saturday, so that can be my reward for having a productive week, right?

Sure.

Summertime, I guess

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

A BRAND-NEW complaint about young people!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

We are all familiar with the common Old gripe about how Kids These Days can’t read analog clocks. This is a true thing about young people, but I genuinely have a hard time caring about it too much. Reading analog clocks is a skill that is easy to pick up when it becomes necessary and it is kind of hard to imagine how one’s life might genuinely be impacted by an inability to read one. Also, if you really want to make these people sputter, ask them if they can use a slide rule or an abacus, because Kids These Days can’t read clocks for exactly the same reason that most old people can’t use slide rules or abaci any longer.

That said, I have a complaint about young people and telling time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone else griping about it anywhere, so I demand credit when this becomes the new big complaint about The Yoots. Who are an entirely distinct group of humans from The Roots, despite what my autocorrect might think.

Kids these days have an almost frightening inability to deal with chronal inconsistency.

Perhaps I should explain.

Anyone who grew up in a world with analog clocks and analog watches and VCRs and anything that had to have its time set manually got used to the idea that we were never 100% sure what time it was, and it didn’t really matter. You might have ten different clocks or watches in your house and even assuming your VCR or your microwave wasn’t flashing 12:00 all the time, those ten clocks were probably displaying at least three or four different times. Even worse, sometimes we set clocks a few minutes fast on purpose! I only recently broke myself of the habit of setting the clock in my car ahead a few minutes, because never once did it actually help me get somewhere on time, which was supposed to be the whole point of doing such a thing.

Maybe it was 10:02. Maybe it was 10:03 or 10:01, or maybe it was 10:05! It really didn’t matter. Unless you were trying to catch a TV show at a specific time, being off by a minute or two was just never a big deal. Remember how sometimes in movies or TV shows they’d have a moment where they made a big deal about synchronizing watches? When was the last time you saw someone do that?

My son will occasionally ask me what time it is. I will look at my watch and, in the manner of an Old, I will probably round a little bit rather than provide him the precise time. Woe betide me if he happens to glance at a clock and notice I was wrong. It’s the same thing if I’m telling him how long he has to do something. “You’ve got ten minutes.” If I approach him again at minute nine, we have a problem.

Now, you might think that’s just my kid? Nah. I put up a new digital clock in my classroom this year, which previously, in the manner of most school classrooms, only had an analog clock above the door, which, remember, a lot of them can’t read. If that clock is one minute off from the time their iPads tell them it is– which is the same time their watches tell them, which is the same time their phones tell them, and there’s not even an iPhone/Android divide here because they all pull the Actual Time from the same place– I start hearing about it. And they cannot comprehend why I am not constantly adjusting the clock in my classroom to precisely synchronize with the bell schedule or the Real Time on their devices. I, an Old, don’t give a shit about a clock being a minute off. My students, Youngs one and all, absolutely cannot handle the ambiguity. It’s not just one kid and it’s not just one class. It happens all the time. I’m at the point where I’m going to set the thing an hour off just to see if any of them die from it.

These kids have Known the Time for their entire lives. They have always had constant access to a device that hooks up to the One True Time, a molecular clock in, I dunno, I assume Switzerland or some shit like that, and every device they have agrees on what time it is, always. And they cannot find a way to live like we lived. And it’s hilarious.

Someone solved the math question I posted yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised with the percentage of my students who noticed on their own that I’d put the answers to today’s assignment on the board. I did end up working a couple of them out for students, just to prove that I was asking them something that they knew how to do, even if it was a pain in the ass. Here, with only a couple of shortcuts that I assume any adult mathematician can handle, is the full solution to the equation. Please forgive my crappy handwriting, especially the way all the Vs look like check marks and that really sloppy 5 in the first line:

Well that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Jesus Christ, look at all the white people.

This is, technically, the last day of my Spring Break, as I’m not supposed to go to work on Saturday or Sunday anyway. So of course I have shit I need to do in the next couple of days to get ready for next week. I said before the week started that I didn’t want to do anything over my break, and holy shit did I succeed at that, as I didn’t even really succeed in doing the bits of nothing I wanted to do.

Which, whatever. It is quite obviously the height of privilege to get a week off and complain about it, so I’m at least going to have the dignity to not do it much. I did finish Hild last night, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that I didn’t say already– you want to read it if you have enough ability to concentrate to be able to read it, and I don’t, and as a result I can say that I appreciated the book but I didn’t enjoy it. I will not be bothering with the sequel, I think. I have a handful of other books I want to finish in the next couple of days before we go back to work; we’ll see how that goes. And since my wife is going to be back tomorrow I should probably spend some time cleaning.

(This is not to say that we lived like animals while she was gone; we didn’t, but still. I don’t want her to come home from a two-day drive and look around and think she needs to clean something.)

I was going to do all that today, but today was the Day of Unintentional Naps. My caffeine immunity is starting to become an actual joke; most people after two large cups of coffee in the morning are wide awake if not actively jittery; I woke up at 8, drank two large cups of coffee, and went back to bed. Then, after getting out of bed, I took a shower and fell asleep on the couch. I dunno what the hell my deal is lately.

Tomorrow, I will try to have something interesting to talk about.

Still raining!

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

We’re in the midst of Round Two of apocalyptic hellstorms, although as far as I know there haven’t been any trees knocked down nearby, but we did have to go into the basement for half an hour or so because of a tornado warning. One way or another, I’m half-expecting the power to go out again any minute now (we were out from about 1:00 in the morning Sunday night to yesterday afternoon, and spent Monday night in a hotel room) so I’m going to cut this short so I can turn my computer off. I do owe you a review of Galileo’s Daughter; the short version is that I’m starting to really enjoy reading biographies of geniuses.

Today has been garbage

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video games2 Comments

One of those lingering bad mood, stressed out, all for no particular reason sorts of days. I feel like I left work on Friday feeling like I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do this weekend, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. Making things worse, I finally got around to starting Tails of Iron 2 on the PS5 after really enjoying the original game and so far I am not having any fun. I remember the first one being difficult as hell but I don’t remember losing every single fight three or four times before I got through it, so either I’ve gotten worse at video games, this game is a lot harder, or shit’s gotten wildly unfair, which might be what I’m leaning towards.

Anyway, arglebargle whine complain whine cry. Tell me about something fun you did recently.