Tag: winter

I can’t believe I don’t know this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.

I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.

Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?

I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.

I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.

(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)

Well, that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Fall’s over, apparently, after a delightful couple of weeks; there’s a winter storm scheduled to roll in tomorrow that in theory could deposit as much as a foot of snow. We got our annual “Here’s how we handle snow delays” email from the boy’s school– and, as he’s an 8th grader, had a moment of reflection as we realized we were never getting another one after eleven years. We’ve been parking both cars in the driveway since March as the garage has gotten filled with bullshit, so the big task today was to de-bullshitify said garage and make it able to harbor motor vehicles again. The snowblower and mower have switched positions for the season.

You may remember that we had a synchronous e-learning day recently so that we could basically rehearse for snow days; I am entertained that one looks at least distinctly possible if not likely (“Hazardous conditions could affect Monday morning commutes” is a danger sign in a winter storm alert) and absolutely no one was warned to bring devices home over the weekend. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

Tomorrow I am hanging the new curtains if it kills me. I will not go another day with the general public being able to see into my living room, God damn it. This may sound like it’s not much of a project, and it genuinely shouldn’t be, but I can’t believe I’ve been staring at these boxes on my dining room table for this long.

What the hell, Indiana

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

It has been hot and gross for a couple of weeks now, and the humidity has been grotesque enough that I have genuinely had some trouble breathing while outside recently. Yesterday was supposed to be in the low eighties; it didn’t really appear to make any difference and everything was still horrid. Today the high was supposed to be 77 degrees; I took a risk and wore my usual jeans.

I have not lived in Indiana for my entire damn-near-half-century life, but I have lived in the Midwest for all of that time, and I know what the Goddamn sky looks like in November. It looks exactly like that, which is what I was greeted with when I left work this afternoon, and stayed like that the whole way home. Even weirder? Maybe I’ve had the world’s strangest stroke, but I swear to everything you might find holy that I could smell snow.

Was there snow? No, of course not; that would be damn near unprecedented in late August, and it wasn’t remotely cold enough besides. I cannot describe the level of sensory discontinuity(*) this led to. My body was telling me slightly cool for August and my nose and eyes were telling me Mid-November; snow coming.

Stupid state.

(*) This is not exactly the word I want, but my brain is stuck on dysmorphia and dystopia, both of which are even wronger than discontinuity. If I happen to remember the word I want or someone volunteers it, maybe I’ll edit.

FFS are you KIDDING ME

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

So the amount of snow in this image is not necessarily a guaranteed close, but I’m hearing that some places are predicting up to ten inches of snow tomorrow? And I somehow(*) didn’t find out about it until getting to the comic shop after school? I haven’t been able to verify that number, but that dark blue blob is directly over both me and my commute. I walked out of work today telling everyone who would listen that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was coming in tomorrow, because not only can I still not breathe but I got to play Fun With Alternating Chills And Fever all day long, while administering ILEARN to every single student I have, making this an absolutely stellar day from start to finish.

My son– have I mentioned this around here? Maybe not– has been sick for most of the last two months, and has missed a shit ton of school, and we had a meeting with his advisory teacher and the school counselor at 5:00(**), which I masked up for. Then I got home and took a combined Covid/Influenza A/Influenza B test, which was negative for everything, and then after that my thermometer told me my temperature was 98.4, so I’m about to fight all the medical technology in the house.

The question now is whether I go through with the original plan and just call in sick tonight, which gives me a chance of having a sub tomorrow rather than just hoping for class coverage, but if we get a delay out of the weather I may tough it out and go in, and if we actually get cancelled that would be fantastic, because I could just put up an assignment and then sleep all Goddamn day without taking the day off monitor my email and attend my office hours in case my kids need help. But if I wait until tomorrow morning I’m almost guaranteed no sub, and now that I think about it, if we have a delay, that’ll cancel the ILEARN language arts test that we currently have planned, which will change the schedule, which means what I’m planning on right now won’t work, which means …

… shit, even if I do go to work (worth pointing out: tomorrow will be a shitty day to drop onto a sub if we’re testing) I’m not going to be able to do any planning until I know what the day’s schedule is going to be. So no matter what I’m getting up at regular time and making a decision. And I’d prefer not to call in and then have to cancel the absence. That feels unfair to the hypothetical sub that I may or may not get.

Maybe I’ll just die tonight and then I won’t have to worry about it. Here’s hoping.

(*) This is nonsense, because I know exactly why; administering ILEARN all day meant I wasn’t allowed to have my watch or my phone with me, and monitoring testing all day meant no extraneous web surfing on my computer; I was effectively cut off from any source of information that might have given me this information, especially since I spent my lunch break photocopying work for tomorrow that I may or may not need.

(**) It should be made clear that this was heroic on their parts, because the meeting was so late because his advisor already had an after school commitment, and then both of them decided staying even later was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We weren’t done until nearly six. I would not have agreed to this meeting!

In which I’ve read this book already

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’ll call it 50/50 whether we have a two-hour delay again tomorrow; Michigan schools have already called it due to the cold. We won’t cancel; it’s not going to be that cold, but subzero wind chills during the walking/waiting for the bus hours are dangerous regardless. On top of that, I have what feels like the beginnings of a sinus infection immediately after getting over whatever the hell I had last week, which feels unfair. I absolutely cannot miss any days of work between here and Friday for schedule reasons and I would really prefer to not miss any more days in February at all, so we’re gonna cross our fingers and hope this stays at a simmer until next weekend.

I have written, more or less, that exact post maybe fifteen times in 2025. I’m deliberately avoiding writing about creeping despair, political authoritarianism, or my own slow decline into supervillaindom, which pretty much leaves video games, books, and musing about the weather and being sick. My “Presidents’ Recess” went pretty well, I suppose, and now we enter into the longest stretch of the entire school year with no holidays, as Spring Break isn’t for seven weeks.

It’s entirely possible that I might die. We’ll see.

I don’t even know what I want any more

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I feel like I haven’t done anything at work all week except for talk about whether there was going to be school tomorrow or not. It’s supposed to snow all night and into tomorrow morning, with upper-end predictions being six inches of snow and a tenth of an inch of ice mixed into that, and that’s pretty ugly. The district has changed their mind– and sent out emails about said mind-changing– about what another closure would look like approximately nineteen thousand times this week. On Tuesday I was confidently told by a Downtown Person that we weren’t going to do e-learning at all if we had to cancel, and would just add a day to the end of the school year. By the end of that day we’d received five different emails about our procedure for synchronous e-learning, which are the Covid-style days where we’re in Google Meets all day. By today it was back to “traditional e-learning,” which caused widespread confusion because no one really knows what the word traditional means when it’s used in that sentence. Then they clarified that, without also clarifying that we aren’t allowed four asynchronous days during the school year and this would be the fourth, which was what set off all the speculation about what we were doing in the first place. Maybe we’ll lose the professional development day in March and just have school that day? Nobody fucking knows.

Incidentally, I recognize that this would require quite a roll of the dice, but if I go through the snow totals for each day for today through next Monday, I get the sum of eighteen inches of snow over the long weekend (Presidents’ Day is Monday, remember) which might cause fuckery with school being open on Tuesday.

I’m predicting a two-hour delay. I have moved into the I Have Shit to Do God Damn It point of the year, which means I don’t really want any more delays or closures, except I kind of do, because who wants to go to work if they don’t have to? Nobody. On top of that, it’s a Thursday before a four-day weekend when everyone has spent the entire week openly speculating that there will be no school on Thursday. What this means is that a lot of our kids will conclude that if there is school, it’s unfair, and they won’t show up anyway.

One way or another I am absolutely not making any Goddamn lesson plans for tomorrow until I know what’s going on. There’s no point.

Blech.

In which I have no idea how that happened

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I got the best kind of snow day today, the one that takes you by surprise; the area got blanketed in ice last night, so I was anticipating a two-hour delay but I really wasn’t thinking we were actually going to get the day off. And then … I blinked, and now it’s 8:45 somehow, and I came closer to just forgetting to put a post up than I have in a good long time? I took a nap today but it wasn’t the whole day. I have no explanation.

Sure, I can do that

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, TeachingLeave a comment

Spent the last half hour talking a high school sophomore off the ledge, which is what you expect to happen when you teach 8th grade. She’s in Algebra 2 right now, which technically I’m legally allowed to teach, and I can absolutely handle both the mathematics behind and the explanation of that second inequality up there, but she swears up and down they haven’t been working with quadratics at all. That’s the second question of the two she asked me about, and the first of the other pair of inequalities looks like this:

…which is a reasonably tricky PEMDAS problem (a parenthetical with an exponent and a multiplier on it is the stuff of 10,000-comment internet videos) even before you get to graphing quadratics by hand, which I’m capable of with intense concentration but may not be great about explaining very well at the moment. Both pairs of inequalities have a simple linear inequality and a quadrilateral, and long story short, I’m not convinced her teacher gave her the assignment that he meant to. On an e-learning day, no less? You serious, man?

This isn’t a kid who’s going to forget that they just spent a month on quadratics or something like that, by the way. She’s bright. And she took a picture of one of her assignments from last week, which was graphing absolute values. The leap in difficulty from graphing absolute values on a number line to graphing systems of inequalities where one inequality is linear and the other is a PEMDAS nightmare that turns into a quadratic is … stark. There’s gotta be something else going on here.

Anyway, we’ve got the day off tomorrow again, which was the right decision. It’s been 20 below or worse all day, and it’s supposed to warm up significantly tomorrow, but at 8:00 in the morning it’s still going to be 20 below, and even after a two-hour delay it’s still going to be fifteen below– the temperature isn’t going to be conducive to human life until after noon, and you don’t make kids walk to school in subzero wind chills, especially when a lot of them don’t have coats. We will not lose Thursday or Friday, as it will be regular Midwest January cold and not the kind that has you cursing God.

The kids will, of course, find a way to make Thursday and Friday feel like a long week.