Post Category → School

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

Three dollars times five days a week times four weeks a month is sixty dollars times twelve months a year is seven hundred and twenty which it turns out is too much

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be “Put Together.” (As in, “Let me put myself together,” or, “That’s a guy who really has it all together.“) It’s a feeling that I like and I assume everyone else likes it, too. Otherwise, why would we all have dress shoes?

Anywho. When I think of being “Put Together,” I always think of Haruki Murakami.

Author of books like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has become a bit of a literary staple. I had a furious love affair with Haruki Murakami’s books in the 2010s, when I was in Korea and shopping at What the Book, which carried all his Vintage International Editions with covers by John Gall. (I read them all, collected all the different editions. I even had a few written in Japanese, which I couldn’t read but admired.)

I’m a Murakami nut.

Murakami has a few tropes that appear in his works, and one of them is the (usually male) character who loses his current life for one reason or another and is forced to rebuild his life from the ground up in a whole new setting.

Like, a guy has an existential crisis, gets dumped by his wife, leaves his house and job, and then moves out to the countryside where he works at a small-town library. Once placed in his new surroundings, Murakami describes how the character wakes up, how he cooks breakfast, how he gets to work, etc., etc. Murakami might describe the steps involved his getting dressed, how he unwinds after a long day, the restaurant he goes to for dinner, or the turn-by-turn route he takes in going home from work in the evening. All of it is so meticulous and minute and it just scratches some kind of itch that I have. I can’t get enough of it.

I think that itch I feel is the desire to be “Put Together.”

A few years ago, when I first started teaching at my current school, I was trying to set up a routine that would work for me. Sarah and I had just moved into the house we rent and things were … tough. We’d been overseas for so long, we didn’t have any furniture, knew hardly anybody in town, the pandemic had just happened, and both of us weren’t making very much money.

Things were decidedly not “Put Together.“

Back then, I thought I’d stop in the mornings at a gas station for a quick cup of coffee like I did back when I was student teaching, which was the last time I’d been a teacher in a U.S. classroom. It was a silly thing, but I liked stopping at a little place before the sun came up for a quick cuppa. I liked the silly little interactions I had with the gas station attendant. I liked walking into the school building with a warm paper cup in one hand and my entry badge in the other. I liked to take a little sip, smack my lips real loud, and go, “Aaahhh!” so it echoed down the hallways. Frivolous? Sure, but you’ve got to take pleasure in tiny, pointless, everyday activities. Otherwise what’s the point?

After a few days, though, I did the math, and I realized that I wasn’t making enough money to buy gas station coffee before work. With rent, utilities, gasoline, insurance, groceries … I just couldn’t afford to stop at a f*cking Casey’s for a bullshit cup of coffee every morning. And while having a gas station coffee isn’t necessarily a big part of being “Put Together,” it felt like I was trying to build for myself one of those minuscule Murakami habits only to be told, “Sorry, the coffee from our gas station is for better people than you.”

I’m still bitter about it. Dark and bitter. And aromatic!

They always had chicken tenders and they weren’t great but they were hot and ready when a lot of other things weren’t

When someone you love is slowly dying, one thing no one really tells you about is just how much goddamned sitting around you have to do. Something like 75% of the whole shebang is time spent just sitting in a chair in a little room with the people you care about waiting for something bad to happen.

The other 25% of it is, based on my experience, forgetting to eat and then running down to the hostpital cafeteria before it closes to see if there are any chicken tenders left.

Anywho, there were a bunch of times in that room when I’d look up as if suddenly coming awake and see that, of the six or seven people squeezed in to be at Dad’s bedside, all of us were looking at our phones. Everyone except Dad, of course, who was busy with other matters.

It was surreal and … kind of horrifying. A definite, “My God, what have we become?” sort of moment.

I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or blaming anybody or any of that jazz. It’s just that I’m a teacher and I spend a lot of my day fighting to keep people off their phones so they can get some work done. These days, I have a sort-of conditioned response to seeing a room full of lowered heads and a bunch of tiny, glowing rectangles. I see how f*ing insidious our cellular masters are. I get angry about it.

In that room with Dad, I’d purposefully put my phone away and just sit. Not the whole time, but every now and again, when the urge hit me. It wasn’t meditation, but something akin to it, when I’d pick a sound or something and try to focus on it and just … exist in that room. Sometimes I counted seconds, sometimes I counted breaths, sometimes I counted the number of times the IV Dad was hooked up to made its little pumping noise. (It had to pump 4,000 times to go through one bag of IV fluid.)

Was it worth doing? Trying to “be in the moment” rather than scrolling? F*ck, I don’t know. It was hard not to be nihilistic or fatalistic when Dad was dying right there, to say to myself, “What is the point of anything?” and then mindlessly swipe through TikTok or Reddit. Take comfort where you can find it, right?

There have definitely been times when I’ve thought that the sort of distractions phones can give was a comfort. A blessing, even.

But we all know better.

Like a lighthouse keeper with a broken bulb sitting on the rocks and weeping at the tide

Yesterday was ACT day at my school district and it was just…depressing.

It had snowed the night before (in April?!) and there was talk of a snow day, but we really only had about an inch, it wasn’t super icy, and all of it melted by early afternoon. Still, it was chilly and there was a bit of traffic. As we left the house, I felt bad for students who had to wait for a bus to come pick them up, which is (unfortunately) a lot of my students.

I was a proctor in the “Late Start” room, which meant I would be monitoring everybody who didn’t get to school by test time. My room would wait 2 hours and start normally so all the students who weren’t here on time would have a place to get their ACTs done. I was worried there’d be a bunch of late arrivals (more than last year) because of the weather, but there were only a handful.

On ACT day, only juniors come to school (because it somehow makes sense to give people an important test when they’re not yet finished learning English, Math, or Science). The juniors who were late that day weren’t just students whose cars wouldn’t start — they were the chronic absentees, students who are almost never on time. There are a lot of kids with this issue; Absenteeism is a big problem in American education.

It’s such a problem that I feel bad about speaking ill of these students. I know some of them and know that they don’t have easy lives, so disparaging them doesn’t feel all that cool.

Still. They are simply and frankly so dim-witted that I cannot fathom it. Literally. I cannot wrap my head around their lack of common sense or the complete absence of basic academic skills. I try to find reasons; I try to understand, to make sense of it. But, ultimately, I have no idea how or why they came to be this way. It has to be something systemic. A fundamental and (series of) major malfunction(s) in the way these children are raised and educated. Not just parents, not just teachers, not just friends — some combination of everything that can possibly go wrong going wrong.

I’ll just tell you about one student’s actions on ACT day so as not to over-pick all this low-hanging fruit.

One student, call him “Steve,” was having some trouble with the non-cognitive portion of the test. (That’s basically the part at the start of the test where you write down your name, address, and email. It’s not even really “part of the test.”) At the top of his question booklet, there was a spot for his “Name” and “Signature.”

As we read instructions, we made it explicitly clear that everyone had to write their name and add their signature. We announced it. We went around to tell everyone one-to-one that they needed to both write and sign their name.

“Steve” left this part of his question booklet blank.

As I was making my rounds, going desk to desk and helping each student in turn, I stopped by his desk and gently reminded him, “You write your name right here and then, right here, under that, add your signature.” Then I continued making my rounds to help the others. (“Steve” was, unfortunately, not alone in struggling to add his name and signature to a piece of paper.)

When I returned to “Steve”s desk, I was pleased to see that he’d written something.

Only…it wasn’t quite right.

The “Name” section he’d decided to keep blank. Where it said “Signature,” he’d written “STEVE” in big, elementary school block block lettering. That’s right–just his first name. He saw “Name” and “Signature” and thought to himself, “I can just write ‘Steve.’ Those ACT people will be able to sort it out.”

“Almost,” I said to him. “See here? You need to sign this. Do you have a signature?”

“Steve” didn’t respond.

“Just…uh, write your first name and last name here. And then, uh, write your name in cursive here.”

“Steve” didn’t respond. He almost never does. In my Creative Writing class, he’s one of the students who puts his head down and will not participate at all. I’ve tried to reach out to guardians, I’ve got admin involved, I’ve spoken to counselors. He doesn’t work, doesn’t respond, doesn’t seem to talk to anybody. I try to approach him with grace because…well, shit, what else is there?

At this point in our ACT journey, I figured it was a typical “lead a horse to water” scenario. If this kid doesn’t know what a signature is, then he’s got bigger problems than his ACT composite score. Besides, there was no time to teach him how to sign his name on test day. There were other students waiting, and the ACTs are very rigid on protocol — we have to start and stop at certain times, so we had to keep going.

“Just write your name twice,” I said.

“Steve” looked at his paper. Then he put his head down.

After that, I had to look up “Steve”s address because he didn’t know it. Same with his school email. While explaining that to him (“No, you need the ‘at’ symbol. It’s right there. No, there. This one.”), I had to explain how bubble tests work, because he’d apparently forgotten the PreACTs (and all the other Scantron tests he’s had to take over the years). Then I had to show him how to turn his answer booklet to page 3, which was beyond him. (“The pages are numbered — just like a book!”) In a lot of ways, it was like trying to get a cat to take a test.

The only difference was that cats don’t ask questions. Throughout the whole day, “Steve” had two things he wanted to ask about.

First (and this was before the test started) was, “When is lunch?”

The other question (that he asked 6 times over the course of 4 hours) was, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

As I write this, I feel like I’m not accurately showing you what the whole thing was like. It is so depressing that “blogging it up” with any sort of humor feels like I’m not treating it as seriously as I should.

It was like watching a car wreck.

No.

It was like sitting on the shore of a rocky beach somewhere, watching people struggle for breath beneath the crashing of tremendous waves, hearing their shouts, seeing their arms flail out beyond the breakers. I try to throw flotation devices their way, but they don’t know what a flotation device is, so they slap it away. The cry and wail and holler toward the shore, “Are we going to get some kind of snack at least? It seems unfair that we can’t eat!”

“Of course you can have a snack!” I shout back at them, “but could you focus on not drowning for a bit!?”

I’m met with a chorus of barely-audible gurgles that rise above the sound of the surf and all seem to moan, “I need to go to the bathroom!”

(Yes, I know the kid who went to the bathroom 6 times was probably vaping in there. But guess what? I am not the goddamned bathroom police. I refuse to be. Short of following him in there and standing right outside his stall, there’s not much I can do to curb that kind of shitty behavior. Plus, you never know. Maybe he had the rumble tums and legitimately needed to poo.)

Blogging about diseases is boring and sad but I need to remember these things so here we are

I haven’t been reading much. Well, I’m still reading a little, but I’m so preoccupied that in my off time I just veg out and either watch YouTube or TikTok. Still, I’ve gotten through Dungeon Crawler Carl and am currently working through the second book in the series, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. I’m doing the print version and the audiobook (which is interestingly done).

The series is fine. I like the relative mindlessness of it. Blowing up goblins and punching monsters so hard they explode. There are some unique aspects to the plot structure that are worth examining on a serious level — I feel like the arc of the story is built to be understood from a macroscopic lens; characters will make more sense the more books you get into the story. It’s as if the author planned on writing hundreds of thousands of words and just thought, “We’ll get to it eventually.”

As a writer, I’m used to doing this stuff quickly — I’m borderline minimalist. “Get to it!” that’s my motto. Or, as Vonnegut puts it, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Don’t waste words; your readers’ time is valuable and you should use it well. Reading Carl reminds me how flexible these rules are, because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t get or simply wouldn’t do.

It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have more information about Carl’s ex-girlfriend yet, even though you know she’s going to make an appearance (or be brought back up somehow.)

I’m also not a fan of giving readers actual numbers for strength and intelligence. This book will give each character a level and stats, all of which are explicitly told to readers. Is this why they’re calling it “LitRPG?” (Horrible, horrible name IMO. And maybe, overall, just a bad idea.)

Increases in ability should be shown through action not spreadsheets. The spreadsheets were only ever created for RPGs like D&D where you couldn’t easily show strength or intelligence through action. In a narrative, though, all we have is time to show how characters act. That’s the whole point of a story.

I will never read a sentence like, “My strength was at 30 so I was confident I could win the fight,” and think, “That’s some good writing!”

I know, I know, not everything needs to be literary. Besides my gripes at the LitRPG genre in general, Dungeon Crawler Carl has been fun so far.

Anywho.

My dad has a feeding tube installed in his stomach and is out of the hospital, but his condition doesn’t seem to be…improving, or at least not improving rapidly. While he’s glad to be home, he really doesn’t have a lot of energy. I don’t know if that’s from the cancer or if it’s from weeks of not being able to swallow due to the tumor in his esophagus (which is growing rapidly), but it isn’t a good sign.

Sarah, my brother, and I went down to visit yesterday. Dad was able to get up and move around, but not much. He can’t swallow anything at all and chews on ice like they have you do in the hospital. His headaches are getting bad. He has a big red bottle of hydrocodone you can inject in his feeding tube.

Radiation treatments start this Thursday and will continue for most of April. Chemo will start after that, depending on how the radiation goes.

A “home run” at this point isn’t a cure; a home run is shrinking the tumor in dad’s throat enough that he can swallow food. Not only will that make his quality of life much better, but being able to get more nutrition will be an added bonus. Dad loves eating and I hate thought of him missing out on food he enjoys in favor of the flavorless goop that goes right into his belly.

Time marches forward.

School continues. The ACTs are tomorrow and I get to proctor.

Sarcastic yay.

Thanks I hope so too

My dad is sick and I am a mess.

He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a few weeks ago after a hurried trip to the ER when he started having difficulty swallowing. Scans revealed a tumor in his esophagus that prevented food from going down; more scans revealed that the cancer had spread. The prognosis is bad. Stage 4, likely inoperable.

I hate hate hate talking about it. Thinking about it is hard enough — I try to dumb myself down with substances in my off time specifically so I don’t have to dwell on it. Is this healthy? Not one bit. But I’m doing what I can to get through the day. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself.

I’m at a point where I’ve started letting people at work know about what’s going on. Students are asking me about it; I missed school yesterday so I could go sit with dad while he waits to get a feeding tube put in, and today, first thing, I was met by a bunch of, “Where were you yesterday, teach?” (Students don’t really call me “teach,” but I’m hesitant to put my real name on here. I’d hate for my solitary reader to know who I am.)

This is what I assume you look like.

I don’t lie to students about stuff like this. It might be easier if I did, but this sort of thing is a part of life and there’s no use hiding from it. Plus, it isn’t as if people won’t notice something bad is happening. I probably look awful. Still, I won’t go advertising it because, again, I hate hate hate discussing it. When I have to talk about it, I try to sound as positive as I can to keep classes from turning into some kind of morose pity party.

So I smile and say, “Oh, my dad’s in the hospital and I wanted to drive down to be with him.” The conversation continues for a bit and, invariably, students say to me something like, “I hope your dad gets better soon!”

As much as I want to be truthful, I can’t exactly tell them that this isn’t the sort of cancer that gets cured. I pretend to be positive and, while it’s not technically the truth, I just tell students, “Thanks. I hope so, too!” in the most upbeat tone I can muster. It’s better than saying, “I don’t feel hope anymore,” which (unfortunately) is where my head is currently at.

Putting on this act is exhausting and It. Never. Stops. It’s so tiring that there are days when I don’t know if I can actually handle it. My body, like a house consumed by flames, will crumble in on itself in a pile of ash and smoke. “That was a nice old building,” couples will say as the amble by.

How do people do this? I have come remarkably close to losing it this week, and it’s only exacerbated by knowing that worse things are yet to come. Every time my phone rings or I get a text notification I immediately think, “This is it.” A memory will randomly make me feel like crying. I have to excuse myself from class every now and then just to get a moment alone to breathe.

Snowless snow

“There’s no way we’ll have a snow day tomorrow,” I believe were my exact words to students yesterday.

We have the day off.

I knew there was snow in the forecast, but it looked like a small amount and our district is notoriously stingy with “snow days” to begin with, so I figured there was a snowstorm’s chance in hell that we’d actually have a snow day.

While I’m not going to complain — it’s always nice to have a break in the middle of the week — I am confused by the decision. It’s noon now and it hasn’t yet snowed a single flake. It’s cold and it’s gray and it’s windy, but “cold, gray, and windy” describes Nebraska 50% of the year.

I’ve started reading a book called “The Atrocity Archives” by Charles Stross. It’s the first book in a series called “The Laundry Files,” which seems to be about a British IT guy who’s employed by a government agency (“The Laundry”) that fights against extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horrors.

Sounds like a hoot!

I picked up “The Atrocity Archives” because I was hankering a little Brian Lumley, who used to write books with covers like this before he died a few years ago:

“Necroscope” is a series about a guy who can talk to dead people and fights against an intense body-horrorish breed of vampire (Wamphyri!) from an alternate universe. There are about 16 books in the Necroscope series, and I was really into them when I was in college.

The Laundry Files should scratch that particular itch, but I know very little about these books. (Which is pretty fun, actually. I feel like I usually know a lot about books I read before I read them, which helps me appreciate the writing but leaves little room for surprises.) I’m excited to see what The Laundry Files is all about.

Perfect fodder for a snowless snow day.

A vice so nice I did it twice

Over the last few years, I’ve gone to great lengths to rid myself of vices. I’ve given up smoking, alcohol, soda, and coffee. I’ve started trying to eat healthier, to drink more water, and to exercise more.

If I’m being honest, it’s been horrible. More than horrible. Boring.

When I lived and taught in Korea (between 2008 and 2019), drinking and smoking were practically required. It’s a pretty big cultural difference — I went out with coworkers much more frequently than you do in the U.S. People drank, smoked, and generally had a rip-roaring good time about once a week. It made you feel cool.

(In Korea I’ve been stumbling around drunk at 2 AM on a weeknight with the principal of the elementary school I worked at. There wasn’t anything strange about it. Everyone thought it was normal. Good even. In contrast, at my current school, we go out to dinner or something about once or twice each year.)

I feel decidedly uncool. In fact, I’m as square as a set of dice.

I’m pretty sure what I’m describing is called “growing up,” but it hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been trying to get myself to take pleasure in small things — the little daily rituals you do without thinking about it. Basically, I’ve been trying to think of myself as a character in a Haruki Murakami novel.

In case you’ve never read any of Murakami’s work, there are very frequently characters who embrace simplicity and routine as if it were their entire identity.

Tengo washed the rice, put it in the cooker, and turned on the switch. He used the time until the rice was ready to make miso soup with wakame seaweed and green onions, grill a sun-dried mackerel, take some tofu out of the refrigerator and flavor it with ginger, grate a chunk of daikon radish, and reheat some leftover boiled vegetables. To go with the rice, he set out some pickled turnip slices and a few pickled plums.

Besides being fantastic about food writing, you can see in this excerpt from 1Q84 that Murakami’s characters have a certain kind of presence (as in present in the moment) that I wish wish wish I possessed. I want to be the sort of person who can not only put together a healthy meal, but also enjoy the process.

I’m not there yet, but I’ve been trying for so long that I’ve started to wonder if it’s even possible.

That was my plan all along

The school where I work has what’s called a plan center, which is slightly different that a teacher’s lounge (in that it’s not meant for “lounging”). We have this plan center because my school has more teachers than it has classrooms. The school simply isn’t big enough for each teacher to have their own room; we’re packed in like sardines, teachers and students alike.

It’s incredibly annoying. If I want to, say, grade papers during my plan time, which is a daily thing, I have to carry the papers from my files in a classroom (where, you know, the students are) down the hall to the plan center and carry them back when I’m done. It gets even trickier when I have to bring any sort of supplies, like colors or rulers or construction paper, from one place to the other. (A lot of our teachers use little wheelie-carts to haul these supplies around.)

Another annoying aspect of having to use a plan center is that the plan center can get a little noisy.

It’s usually just teacher chit-chat, but it’s bothersome at 7:30 in the morning when I’m trying to get lesson ready for the day.

This morning, a bunch of teachers were talking about negotiations between the teacher’s union and our school district. Apparently, our union is pushing for smaller class sizes, which is something of which we are in dire need. (My biggest class has 36 students, which is incredibly difficult to manage.)

The district, in its infinite wisdom and remembering that education is a top priority for 90% of voters in this country, is pushing for pay cuts and maintaining that a student/teacher ratio of 36/1 is just fine.

Who, in good conscience, can possibly argue for bigger classes and less pay? I cannot fathom these fucking clowns. You could pack them into a car.

It makes me want to say thanks for the support, guys! I can really see why American schools are considered “the best in the world.”

Does this bell work

There are a lot of things that happen in an educational setting today that didn’t happen when I was in high school. No surprise there — I’m a solidly middle-aged guy, so you’d expect that things would have changed in some way, shape, or form.

One change that has become an everyday buzzword in schools is a thing called “Bell Work.”

Practically, there’s nothing really new or groundbreaking about the idea of Bell Work; it’s just an activity or assignment that students are supposed to work on right as the bell is ringing at the start of class. The goal is to more efficiently utilize class time by having students do something immediately when they enter the room. (Because, presumably, students were doing nothing before.)

I’m guessing Bell Work became a thing because some administrator somewhere wanted to make it look like they were “improving” student and teacher performance at their school or district by shaving off those wasted minutes of class during which those same teachers and students were saying hello to each other and/or making small talk.

Anywho. There are a variety of bell work activities that I have students do throughout the year, but right now we’re doing a new kind of bell work that I’m calling “The Fight Bracket.”

Basically, I created a tournament bracket of 16 fictional characters that are going to square off in battle to discover who, ultimately, is the strongest fictional character of all. At the end of class, I give students a QR code to a Google Form that asks, “Who would win in a fight, X or Y?” and has the day’s two contestants as options. Whoever gets the most votes is crowned victorious and moves on to the next round.

The next day, I share the results and give out the next “Battle.”

ChatGPT made this. Sue me.

What does all of this have to do with English? Not a damned thing! It’s just entertaining to talk about.

No offense to the admin who thought up “Bell Work” as a way to show their boss that they were making schools better by cutting out all that “wasted class time,” but I’m going to spend a little bit of each day just doing fun stuff.

As Kurt Vonnegut said,

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”