I don’t even know what I want any more

On February 12, 2025 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 February 6, 2025 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 January 21, 2025 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.

In which it got brought

On December 5, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

We ended up with a two-hour delay this morning, which didn’t get me any extra sleep but did mean I could sit in my comfy chair and drink a leisurely cup of coffee before leaving for work, and then buy a second cup of coffee on the way to work. It took about twice as long to get there as usual, but the drive itself wasn’t scary, just slow.

Then somehow it spent all day snowing like hell but without any significant accumulation at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how that happened. It snowed hard today, and the two inches or so that was on my driveway when I got home was the deepest snow I saw all day. I feel like at least four or five inches of snow fell. I’m just not sure what the hell happened to it once it hit the ground.

There’s a slight chance of a second delay tomorrow– the storm is supposed to end late tonight, but it’s still going to be cold as hell in the morning– but I think I’d prefer to just have a regular day. Either way, we’re about to hit the two-weeks-until-winter-break point, and so far, so good.

Bring it, bitches

On December 4, 2024December 4, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.

So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.

The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.

Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.

There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.

It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.

For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.

What do you think? Should I do it?

Terrible pictures of beautiful pictures

On June 16, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn art, PhotographyLeave a comment

The Leeper Park Art Fair was this weekend, and I’ve been waiting a literal year to go buy something printed on metal from Josh Merrill, and we went and did that this morning. And, damn it, this looks gorgeous in person, and I was excited enough about it that I got it hung the same day we bought it, which qualifies as a minor miracle. So naturally now, because I’m a schmuck, looking at my picture of it all I can see is that damn smoke alarm and that it looks too small over the couch.

In person, not the case. That’s a 20″ x 40″ print, and in person it doesn’t look that small. Also, and in general, prints on metal don’t seem to photograph well; the colors glow in a way that I find completely entrancing in person, and I love this piece. That said, instead of fighting with glare and such to take another picture from my phone, here’s the piece, entitled “New Day,” taken from his website:

In case you didn’t click on the link, that picture is taken inside of an ice cave somewhere in northern Minnesota and it was seventeen below zero outside at the time. Josh is a lunatic, y’all.

Staring out the window

On January 22, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

…no, I’m not giving you a picture, as it’s dark outside, but the district sent us all home today with an email darkly suggesting we “prepare for a delay or cancellation” tomorrow, as the entire region is expected to be blanketed in ice tonight, and given that fact, I have absolutely no intention of doing any lesson planning tonight, so I’d prefer if they would just get it over with and cancel something. The smaller and more rural districts are already starting to pull triggers, so … let’s just do it now, okay? I want to know when to set my alarm for tomorrow, dammit.