Tag: wtf

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

How did that happen?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.

(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)

A real thing I was asked at work today

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

“Mr. Siler, can you help me find vagina?”

I declined.

I will not be providing any further explanation.

I need an intervention

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

Three Billy bookcases from Ikea showed up on my front porch today.(*) I’m not sure at the moment where the third is going. My wife said she had “bookshelf fatigue” a bit ago when I called her into the bedroom to ask for opinions. I don’t blame her; I have Me Fatigue, which is a close variant. I have Entirely Too Much Shit, and I keep acquiring more shit, and I looked at those filled bookshelves (which won’t look like that forever, as they’re going to be organized better sooner or later) and started musing about how my house burning down might solve some of my problems.

Not all of the books in the picture are mine, for the record. But enough of them are, and when you widen the scope to the whole house, I’m not exactly a hoarder, because I’m too organized for that, but Jesus, I have a damn problem.

Also, I need a second Spring Break where all I do is read. Like, 24/7, without breaking for food, bathroom, or sleep. Either that or I need All the Writers to take, like, a year off. I understand that writing is how they feed themselves but if everybody could just take a little hit on behalf of my mental health and the success of my marriage I’d appreciate it.

(*) Initial review is that at their price point they are excellent bookcases, which is basically what everyone I’ve ever heard mention them has said. We’ll see how well they hold up; that shelf on the far left is effectively made of cardboard and probably ought to go as soon as possible, so what might happen is I get rid of it, slide the other tall one down and stick the third Billy in between it and the two that are already on the wall. We’ll see.

Oh what the hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Got a spiffy new laptop.

Was gonna use the spiffy new laptop to write a post.

New post wasn’t going to be about the spiffy new laptop, it was going to be about getting sick twice in two different ways at work today.

Spiffy new laptop won’t load the WordPress new post screen. Everything else works fine!

Guess why I bought the spiffy new laptop?

Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone and it is possible that there will be a ragesplosion soon, so y’all can look forward to that, because this makes no sense at all.

On memory lane

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

My son will be attending the same high school that both my wife and I graduated from, and he had an appointment with his counselor tonight to get his freshman schedule set up. I wasn’t really sure if all three of us needed to go, but we all went anyway, and we spent a little bit of time after the meeting wandering around the building.

My head is still kind of swimming. There has been an immense amount of renovation in the — God — thirty-two years since I graduated, which means that fully half of what I remember literally isn’t there anymore and if it’s still there everything around it is different. There were occasional flashes of “Yes, I remember this hallway” or “Yes, I remember this stairwell,” but nothing seemed to connect to anything else the way I remember any more. I’m not even completely sure I went there any longer.

Also, my son is about to be in high school and I graduated from high school thirty-two years ago, and I’ll be over here, in the corner, crumbling into dust for the rest of the night.

Apocalypse soon

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It hasn’t started yet, but apparently the thunderstorms currently headed my way are going to bring flash floods, hail measured in inches, and several dozen tornadoes. So, great! We were all surprised by the two fog delays we got last week; apparently I get to look forward to flood delays tomorrow morning, because if 2026 has shown me anything at all, it’s that when it is possible for there to be fuckery, it is an absolute certainty that fuckery there will be.

The trend of rough-as-fuck days continues; I had to do an office referral today for a kid who wouldn’t stop using the word “jigaboo” in class, and amended the referral a bit later when I discovered he’d also written “KKK” on his desk. It was also one of those days where everyone is having the same comprehension issue and I absolutely cannot figure out what is causing it. We are working on simple volume and surface area formulas; today, specifically, volume and surface area of spheres. The relevant formulas:

I generally will teach them how to calculate both formulas (not especially tricky) and then point out that since 4π and 4/3 π are always going to be the same number, you can actually shortcut the formula and use 12.56r2 for surface area and 4.19r3 for volume. The volume formula is a little bit of an estimate, but they’re both perfectly cromulent for what we’re doing.

For the first time since I’ve been doing this, this year’s kids showed a marked preference for the fuller version of the formula, and a lot of them simply could not wrap their heads around the shortcut formula. I was getting a ton of them who were multiplying 4.19 by the radius cubed and then insisting that they needed to divide by 3 afterwards. I would point at the formula they were using and ask them where that formula told them to divide and it wasn’t helping.

“Literally just multiply 4.19 by the radius three times. So if the radius is 7, you’ll calculate 4.19x7x7x7.”

“Okay. So when do I divide?”

“You don’t have to divide. Dividing by three is already worked into the 4.19.” And then I’d demonstrate how I got that number, for, like, the fourteenth time. And then they’d do a sample problem and still divide by three.

I had one of them write the volume formula as (1πr3)/3– so the whole thing as a big fraction, but replacing the four with a one for some reason. I pointed out that they had that wrong and told them that they needed to use four and not one, and then walked them through a problem.

“Okay. So when do you multiply by one?”

<head explodes>

“You don’t. First, it’s not in the formula. Second, multiplying by one would give you the same answer anyway, remember? So there would be no reason to put that in there.”

“Oh, okay.” <Does a problem.> “So, now I multiply by one?”

I change tactics. “Point to the one in the formula.”

They point at the one in the formula that they wrote down and still haven’t fixed.

“Have you noticed that you’re pointing at the one that only exists in your formula, the one I told you was wrong? Look at the formula at the board. Is there a 1 in there anywhere?”

“No. So where does it go?”

…

For six straight hours. I’m going back to selling furniture, God damn it.

The most exciting thing that happened today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have made this observation in three different places so far, which is almost certainly more than it deserves: the most impressive thing about the Big Arch I had for lunch today is that it looks exactly like every picture of the Big Arch that McDonald’s has been using to advertise it. If you eat at restaurants at all you know how ridiculously uncommon that is. The review: pretty damn tasty, almost too big, although I could still taste it three hours later and I suspect my breath may still slightly smell of onions.

This week was utter madness.

Two different two-hour fog delays, which led to me talking for five hours straight on Thursday, as everything I had planned for that day had to be compressed into two hours less class time, meaning I did nothing but lecture the entire day. This is not a thing I do. I was so tired when I got home I forgot to take my Mounjaro shot, which has been a regular Thursday thing for at least a year now. Today they took the test I was doing the guided notes for yesterday; I still have two classes to grade, but early indications are that the bed appears to not have been shit in. Monday and Tuesday were it’s getting warm and there’s a full moon behaviors and Wednesday was an e-learning day and tons of meetings.

Y’all, I am exhausted. And all of this is before we get to the bit where the fucking world set itself on fire more than once in the last couple of weeks– have I even used the word “Iran” on this blog yet? How long ago was the first attack? It could have been anything from yesterday to a month ago at this point; I’m so fried I can’t even tell. The second-dumbest guy in the Senate is apparently getting promoted? Gas prices have shot up by a dollar a gallon since I filled the tank on Monday.

Oh, and while I’ve generally tried not to talk too much about some of the medical issues my son has been having, for probably-obvious reasons, I cannot pass up mentioning that he was prescribed a nasal spray this week for migraines that are somehow in his abdomen, and no part of me is capable of dealing with the fact that that sentence represents something real and is not word salad.

So naturally tomorrow we’re going to tear down a wall in the bedroom. Wish me luck.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.