Troublesome times & behavioral defiance

At the end of last semester — just before winter break — a troublesome student of mine handed in his final assignment and told me, “I’d better pass this class. Otherwise, I’m coming for you.”

I didn’t feel particularly threatened by it. This student talks a lot, but they’ve never been violent, so I didn’t think there was any substance to what they’d said. However, you don’t get to threaten people.

So, I took the student into the hallway and explained it to them. “You can’t talk to teachers — or anybody, I guess — like you just did. Making threats like that is very serious.” I sent the student to his admin and wrote them up.

All of this happened literally 15 minutes before school got out for winter break.

I took some time before leaving for the day to speak to administration about it; I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for threats, so I wanted to cover my bases and make sure I’d informed everyone who needed to be informed. Admin told me not to worry — that particular student was being moved out of my class. So, I thought, problem solved. Hopefully the student will be put someplace where they can find success.

Except, of course, that wasn’t the end of it. That student simply got moved from one class of mine to another class of mine. So, I’m still teaching them, but at a different time of day.

(Thanks for the help, admin! Shuffling students around like troublesome Catholic priests is sure to solve this issue.)

Yesterday, this student got in some more trouble. They were late for class without a pass, lied about where they’d been, lied about talking to an admin when told to get a tardy slip, lied about having their phone, lied about using their phone while they were supposed to be reading, and refused to stop using their phone multiple times. All of this was within the first 10 minutes of class.

I called for security to get an escort to take this student to the administration office. The student said, “I don’t need an escort. I can walk to the admin office by myself.”

I said, “I’d like to believe you, but you’ve lied pretty consistently today and you have been caught walking the halls several times this week. We’ll just wait for an escort to make sure you get where you need to be.”

Only no escort showed up. We waited for over an hour, but … nothing. The student just sat at his desk. I carried on with the lesson and emailed admin to ask what to do in this situation but heard nothing in response before the end of class.

It is incredibly disheartening. I’m not mad at the student, just as I’m not mad at admin for keeping this student in my class, just as I’m not mad about no security escort showing up.

The cold, hard truth of it is that security was probably busy with other problems and didn’t have time to send an escort. Admin probably kept the student in my class because there was no other choice with scheduling — every student takes English and there are only so many English classes. And this student has problems of their own — I’m sure their propensity for lying is learned behavior that has helped the student in the past. They need more help; they need a classroom with fewer students and a different structure.

This is the kind of student who, if I asked them, “Please write your name on this piece of paper,” would fail the task. Not because they can’t write or anything; it’s more likely something along the lines of behavioral defiance. The student opposes anyone in authority “just because.”

I wish I could say I didn’t have other students with the same issue, but it’s actually pretty common.

Who would’ve thought a country like ours would produce so many people with behavioral disorders?

Side quests & butchering wizards

One benefit of having trouble sleeping is that I’ve got a lot more time for audio books. They help me drift off, and when I’m spending a few hours doing, well, not much, having a book to put on is helpful.

A few years ago, Sarah turned me on to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, the most recent entry of which (Twelve Months) came out about a week ago. The series, which follows a “wizard for hire” named Harry Dresden in and around the city of Chicago, started out as a cross between fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction. Now, though, it’s a lot more involved. (Jim Butcher is leaving the “detective” part behind in favor of more fantasy and action. In the last book, Dresden fought a god.)

We listened to the audio book versions of the series (narrated by John Marsters of Buffy fame; delightful) as we’ve travelled around — mostly in tents at campgrounds west of the Great Plains. Since then, it’s become a bit of a comfort series that we put on when we’re going to bed or whatever. Or, as has been the case recently, when we’re in bed but can’t sleep.

While I haven’t made much progress with A Court of Thorns and Roses, I’ve gotten through a lot more Twelve Months. It’s a fantastic book so far, but a lot more … listless than previous entries.

It’s to be expected, I suppose, since the last book in the series, Battlegrounds, was fairly climactic and left the main character with some trauma he’s had to work through. However, the plot seems driven by “this is what happened over the course of a year” rather than “Harry has a problem to solve.”

My side quest at work today is going to be to go back and finish the header drawing for yesterday’s post. It’s important to have side quests to focus on throughout your day.

I create all the “art” on this website by doodling on my Kindle Scribe, which is a fantastic e-reader with a quirkly stylus that is sow low-tech it is wonderful.

Because I left my Kindle on my desk at school yesterday, I wasn’t able to get the art done before posting last night. #scatterbrain

Dumb & dumber & grades

I swear I’m getting dumber and dumber as the days go on. It’s like my brain is turning into a dried up husk.

It’s not that I’m forgetting how to speak or do math (although I feel like I’m a lot slower at both of those things than I was, oh, five years ago) but that I’m feeling a lot more scatter-brained. I am all over the place.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and forget why you’re there? That’s called an event boundary, and it basically happens because your mind starts a new “instance” of itself when you are in a new context. When you’re in the kitchen, kitchen-you can be perfectly aware that kitchen-you needs kitchen-your airpods, but when kitchen-you goes into the bedroom to get them, a whole new you pops up! It’s Bedroom-you, who doesn’t run the same set of processes. Bedroom-you isn’t thinking about how kitchen-you’d like to listen to a podcast while kitchen-you’re cooking; bedroom-you wonders if bedroom-your sweatpants are in the dryer or in the hamper. 

Hence, it feels like you “forgot” why you went into the bedroom just because your mind switched modes. Go back to the kitchen and, odds are, you’ll remember what you were after.

It’s like a crappy magic trick! You’re the one with the saw and you’re the one getting cut in half!

I left my kindle at work so I can’t draw pictures

See? I can remember that stuff perfectly well, but I’ll still fall victim to this psychological treachery.

The worst part of it is the way my attention span has been impacted. It’s not that I’ll be sitting and reading a book and then go, “I’m bored. I should do something else.” But I will sit down to read and find myself suddenly standing up to go do something else when I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Only when I’m elbow deep in dirty dishes will I go, “Oh, yeah, I was reading.”

This is just evidence

Anywho. I’m guessing that the problem is related to my sleep, which makes sense, since I just got done blogging about how bad my sleep patterns are.

It’s tough to decide what to do about this. Except, of course, have a cup of tea.

Of my inevitable mental decline

In other news, after a second round of grades put in the gradebook, hey, look at that, the average grades in most classes are normalizing. There aren’t nearly as many failing grades as the administration was worried about. Why? Because a student’s overall performance is no longer tied to one or two data entries.

It’s almost as if freaking out about off-track data during the first few weeks of school was a total waste of time. 

Who knew?

News flashes & routine procedures

I’ve been trying to set a bit more of a morning routine since school started back up in January. It’s always been tough for me because I’m not the most consistent sleeper in the world. On some mornings (like today), I’m able to hop right up at 5:00 AM and start doing things. On other mornings, I’m completely dragging ass and hit the snooze until 5:45. The problem is that I wake up randomly in the night and often struggle to get back to sleep, so there’s no telling if/when I’ll be well-rested.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I’ve tried to improve my sleep hygiene, but I don’t think I did that correctly (I’m still not sure what “sleep hygiene” means, exactly). I’ve tried medicine, but I’m not a huge fan of feeling super groggy. I’ve tried drinking more water, exercising, meditation, and most recently a humidifier. I’m still wildly inconsistent with my sleep.

The other problem with my morning routine is the news. I enjoy turning on the news first thing in the morning so I can see what’s going on in the country and world — my parents used to do this and I’ve always thought it was a “normal” part of getting up, but all of the news sources I can fund just … suck. It’s all either 30-minutes of “What is Donald Trump talking about today?” and/or segments on the most divisive subjects using the worst “reporting” they can muster. ABC. CBS. NBC. BBC. Their reporting is all garbage.

Not only is it bad to start your day with such rampant negativity — these bozos can’t help but spin every little thing to preserve the status quo that earns them their bread, which means treating disturbing, murderous content like it’s “just another day!” — but it’s wildly inaccurate and full of nonsense that isn’t news.

(Hill I’ll die on: Reporting on polling data doesn’t qualify as “news.” It’s a major corporation telling us how to think.)

I know I often seem flippant about current events, what with my funny little pics like this one:

But everything happening in Minnesota is so horrible I’m not sure what else to do about it. There’s video — multiple videos — of a guy being held down and executed. The Trump administration openly lies about it while the news shows the videos, and all the news will say is, “Well, shucks, fellas, it looks like we’re getting conflicting reports of what happened!” when what they should say is, “Administration officials are lying to your face.”

The whole thing does make me want to share this George Orwell line from 1984:

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’ve tried watching some Al Jazeera news in the morning to get more of a world perspective, but that station’s reporting is like a who’s who of starving nations, which is important but not the sort of thing I want to ponder over my morning tea. So, maybe my problem is more that the world is awful and I don’t want to hear about it at 5:00 AM.

It’s still cold and a lot of the country is buried under ice. (That sentence is true both literally and figuratively.)

Tick tock on a clock dj blow up my speakers

I downloaded TikTok a while ago (I’m awfully late to the party; sue me) mostly because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve found it hard to interact with students on a personal level if I don’t spend some time checking out what they’re into. You’ve got to watch the shows, listen to the music, play the dumb phone games (and, yes, download what is possibly the most insidious app ever devised).

I’m not saying you’ve got to become all about those things — five minutes with Block Blast, I think, is more than enough — but you should spend enough time with them that, when you see little Timmy trying to sneakily make a little square jump over some spikes under his desk, you can know which particular culprit has stolen Timmy’s attention.

Of all the apps that students regularly use, TikTok is far and away the worst. Good lord it is addicting. The more I use it, the more I come to think that it is both reckless and stupid to allow teenagers unrestricted access to apps like TikTok. We’re creating an army of little dopamine mind-slaves. Australia has the right idea in banning that shit.

(Sure, that “mind-slave” bit is an exaggeration — I’m a writer, I exaggerate perpetually — but you’d be hard-pressed to find a single long-term benefit provided by TikTok.)

Sure, but what news is being delivered at laser-fast, fiberoptic speeds? What, exactly, is the content being bounced around satellites and into my little glass rectangle? That’s the problem I have with this whole thing. I ask myself the same question I ask when I watch cable news: “Who decided that I should see this?”

For cable news, the answer is easy: It’s decided by corporations who will show you whatever “news” they think will most benefit their bottom line. (As evidenced by cable news shows actually turning into the home shopping network.)

For TikTok (and YouTube and Instagram…), we’ve instead got something people are oddly okay with calling “The Algorithm.” (What the fuck kind of sideways-ass timeline are we in where our “information feeds” are controlled by “The Algorithm” and we’re all like, “Yeah, that’s fine, Imma go to Starbucks.”)

The scary part (well…one of the scary parts) is that nobody, not even the creators, can fully tell you how the goddamned algorithm works. It’s complicated as all hell and tracks so much of your information it is absolutely astounding.

So, basically, we don’t know how or why we’re being fed the stuff we see on these apps. We don’t know if we’re all seeing the same stuff, or if we’re all in little bubbles being spoon-fed what The Algorithm wants us to see. (In some cases we’re being shown different angles of the same event — actually spinning reality in real time, creating different “versions of the truth.”)

I mean. This all sounds a bit like I need to tighten my tin foil hat, but… How many more times this morning do I need to see a guy in Minnesota being murdered? How many more times do I need to zoom in on that shooting with super slo-mo?

And how many times does every teenager in the country need to rewatch it? No, really, what’s a healthy number? What do you think? They say you have to experience something 33 times for it to enter long term memory, which seems a little high to me, so maybe we can start there and work toward a reasonable number? /s

Shit’s bananas.

Tea Times & Cold Snaps

I quit drinking coffee a couple of months ago (in an attempt, I suppose, to suck out all the remaining bits of joy from life) and it has turned me into a tremendous tea drinker.

I’m not saying “tremendous” like “I’m getting larger” but “tremendous” like “jeez is that your sixth cup already? Take it easy big fella.” You know what I mean.

I’ve tried out a few different flavors and brands of tea since December, including this bad boy:

“Black Cask Bourbon!” I thought. “I bet that taste’s great!”

It tastes like someone stuck a cigar in some scotch and then threateningly waved it at a teabag.

It makes me wonder what sorts of things are going on in the avant-garde of the tea industry? I don’t mean bubble tea or any of those new-fangled gimmicky sorts of teas with thick straws and chunks, but avant-garde in the sense of tea at its purest form. Which is, I’m almost certain, “Hot water with plant-based flavoring.”

I’m planning a trip to the Asian market this weekend for some noodies and soybean paste, so I’ll just swing through the tea aisle and see if anything catches my eye. Any time there are cool new tea flavors, the usually come from Asia.

(Sorry, UK, you guys do tea pretty well, but Asia really gets out there with it. I’ve seen teas in Korea that are made of dried corn husks and grave dirt.)

In unrelated news, there was no school yesterday thanks to this storm that’s hitting a whole swath of the US. I stayed home and napped for most of the day while poor Sarah had to drive all the way across town in -25 degree temperatures to work her shift at the library. “It really wasn’t that bad,” Sarah told me. “There was hardly any traffic at all.”

We haven’t had much snow yet, but it is coooold. People are saying that trees are exploding in parts of the country, but I think that’s all just a bunch of hype.

Balance Beams & Playing the Heavy

I had to give out so many referrals yesterday. About an order of magnitude above the usual number (which is nothing overboard — maybe a handful a week). It was exhausting and just … terrible. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

We recently learned that a significant portion of the students at my high school are “off track,” or missing the credits they need to graduate because they have failed or are currently failing classes, and admin freaked out about it. They sent out a slew of emails, held lots of meetings, and then sent out more emails about the meetings, which required further administrative communication (in the form of emails about emails about meetings). They didn’t say it directly, but the essential message to teachers was: We’re panicking; we need to do something.

There’s a perfectly rational explanation for this perceived dip in student performance — it’s the start of a quarter and grade books only have one or two grades in them. My classes have only had around 2 graded assignments after these first few weeks, so the students’ entire grade is currently based off of a very small sample. I mean, if a student missed one single assignment so far, they’d technically be failing.

It’s the equivalent of a baseball coach yelling at a batter after missing the first pitch of the year because his batting average was too low.

The grades will normalise after we get a better sample of students’ performance. In two weeks, I’d say, things will be closer to normal, with final quarter grades being the truly accurate measurement.

However, in the meantime, I’ve decided to try to help the problem anyway because, A) What if I’m wrong? Maybe there’s another reason why on-track data has slipped, and B) Why not try some new approaches? iI there’s a chance they help, why not give it a whirl?

I decided to focus on a group of students that are often overlooked and brushed to the side: The Barely-Theres. The ones who are at school, but only barely. Those students who do zero work, who contribute about as much as a cardboard cut-out.

In most classes at our school, there are at least one or two students who, for whatever reason, do absolutely nothing. They sit in the back of the class with their head down, don’t respond to questions, don’t turn in assignments, will ignore nearly every instruction, and are perfectly fine with failing the class. You can ask them, “Hey, is everything okay? I notice you’re not doing this assignment. Would you mind telling me why?” And they will just stare blankly at you and/or maybe shrug. Even hit them with an office referral and there will be no change. Email home? No response.

It’s heartbreaking. But in a class of 35 students I can’t spend 10 minutes trying to get little Tommy to read Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address when all he’s barely willing to sit up (and even that only sometimes).

This week I decided to spend a little more time with those students. After all, if I can get a few of them to up their performance just a little bit, they’ll be passing, right? It’s good for them, good for admin, good for the school.

Not so “yay” for me, though. It sucks to have to “play the heavy” all day long. I had so many hallway conversations (“I want you to finish this assignment. What can we do to make that happen?”), sent so many emails to admin (“Tommy didn’t come back from lunch–have you seen him?”), wrote so many referrals (“Tommy, after repeated warnings, decided to make a TikTok dance videos in the back of the classroom while he was supposed to be writing a rough draft.”)

I was never mean about it. Just adamant. You will get this work done. I’m sorry, but putting your head down for 90 minutes is not acceptable.

I got a lot of nasty looks, got cussed at, threatened with the ol’, “My mom will hear about this!” gambit. (Which is not at all as frightening as students think it is. Oh, sweetie, I would LOVE to have a chat with your parents. Let’s call them right now!)

On top of having to be confrontational the whole day, I lost instructional time because I had to spend all those extra minutes having hallway convos; doing everything just took a lot longer and I wasn’t able to spend as much time with students who needed more academic help.

By the end of the day I was wiped. Utterly exhausted, both physically and emotionally.

You’ve got to find a balance, but I’m still not sure where that balance is for me. I’m certainly not sure if I can keep this up.

Teeth & Shit

I went to the dentist the other day to get a tooth extracted and it has not been pleasant. One of my wisdom teeth had an infected root and all dentists could do about it was pull the thing, because the easiest way to handle dental problems in America is to not have teeth, I guess.

Even getting to the dentist was a chore. The problem sprung up rather abruptly, and I couldn’t find a single dentist who did “emergency” procedures and took my insurance. Even my normal dentist told me they couldn’t do the procedure for a week, so, in the interest of saving thousands of dollars, I acted like a good mid-westerner, took some Advil, and suffered for a seven days.

Eventually I got in to have the tooth pulled, which was its own unique form of hell. (The tooth’s root was apparently shaped, in the dentist’s own words, “like a fish hook.”)

Anywho. They broke the tooth apart and yanked it and I had stitches in my mouth for a few weeks, chewing food on the other side the whole time. I got the stitches out the other day, at which time the dentist decided to tell me that I should probably get another root canal (on a different tooth) because, hey, life is horrible so we might as well drill around in your mouth a bunch, you fucking pleb.

The dentist makes me so … abjectly miserable I can’t stand it. There’s no mystery as to why: The dentist is a constant reminder that our bodies are falling apart. Minute by minute, day by day, year by year, we are breaking down like old cars. Brush and floss all you want, but your teeth are still going to be messed up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the dirt. Nothing beats entropy.

Should I feel bad about this? No. It’s natural and it happens to everybody. But the dentist doesn’t just make me sad. It’s beyond that, somehow.

One time in 2014 I had an emergency dental visit in Seoul. I’d broken a tooth at school and was able to get in to see a dentist the same day. (Crazy! And I didn’t even have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the “benefit.”)

I vividly remember sitting in the dentist’s chair with a bunch of gauze in my mouth thinking, “I suppose I could just go home and end it all.”

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t experiencing a “depressive episode” or being driven batty by pain. I’d gone beyond conventional emotions into an unusually pragmatic realm, a darkness so deep it was beyond anguish or fear. My body will fall apart, I thought. There’s no use in prolonging it. This is how everything ends.

I thought about it the way I thought about eating dinner, or tying your shoes, or blinking–it was just something that you did. As natural as breathing. There was nothing frightening or unusual about it.

Worse than that, worse than feeling such abject numbness, the part that drives me up the wall, is that these insurance asshats expect people to pay thousands of dollars for this? I’ve got to pay special insurance just for the privilege of A) Waiting a week to get any help, and B) sitting in a chair and feeling like dying while somebody sticks a needle in the roof of my mouth and tells me what a good job I’m doing?

This whole thing is a scam.

Feeling Fancy & Not Hooked

“A Court of Thorns and Roses” is coming along nicely. We had a three-day weekend, so I was able to read a bit more than usual, although a lot of time was taken up by Diablo IV. (One more character to go and I’ll have each class running Torment IV!)

I’m hoping that “Thorns and Roses” has some surprises in store, because I’m honestly reading through it thinking to myself, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Move the plot along,” which is what I find myself saying more and more when I read modern fantasy. It’s not bad by any stretch, but I don’t think it’s hooked me yet.

I’ve been missing Korea a lot recently. I used to be an expat, living in South Korea and other parts of Asia between 2008 and 2020. The pandemic kind of forced my wife and I to move back stateside, but I secretly (or maybe not-so-) wish we were living somewhere, anywhere other than the United States.

(To all those red-hat freaks who like to yell, “If you don’t like it here, then get out,” I would love to. You should get out too, if only to see that other countries are doing it way better than we are.)

There are oodles of practical reasons why living outside this country sounds appealing. Other countries have better infrastructure, better healthcare, better cost of living, better environment, nicer people, better public transportation, better education, and aren’t being run by rapist grifters who are perpetually apologised for by nearly every U.S. new source. (Seriously, at what point do news stations say, “Maybe it isn’t okay for us to report this brain-addled octogenarian’s plan to invade Greenland as if it’s anything other than the ramblings of a troll and a moron?”)

What’s got me feeling “homesick” for a foreign country today isn’t anything so grandiose. I just happened to find a brand of hand soap that’s scent reminds me of a hotel I used to stay at in Seoul.

Scent is a powerful reminder, and when I washed my hands this morning in lavender and bergamot, whoosh, I was brought right back to the J.W. Marriott above the Express Bus Terminal in Seoul. I didn’t stay there a lot, but any time I wanted to feel fancy in Korea, that was where I stayed.

And now the scent of their hotel soap makes me feel fancy.

Sigh. What a world.

My only wish to catch a fish so juicy sweeeet

Making lesson plans stresses me out. It always has and I see no reason to assume that it will stop — everyone says you need to spend 5 years at a teaching position before you’re “comfortable” there, so I figure I’ve got years of stress left. And, while I consider this kind of stress to be a “Good Stress” (a B.S. term for stress that produces better results from us working-class drones), I do think it is sometimes detrimental to my health.

It doesn’t help matters that I’m a perfectionist when it comes to planning. “Perfectionist” might not be the right word. I’m a planaheadionist. A person who believes that being well-prepared is one of the best things you can do to improve your classes.

In any classroom, there are a million things you can’t control. You can’t control whether or not Timothy is going to refuse to participate. You can’t control if or when Susan will throw a pencil at Timothy because he keeps whispering at her. You can’t control if you’ll get diarrhoea and you certainly can’t control whether or not 90% of your students haven’t ever heard of Mark Twain.

One of the only things you can control is how well you’ve planned that day’s lesson. Depending on all the other factors, your preparation can make or break the whole day. It’s not a silver bullet, but it is a bullet, and bullets are strong. Wait, what? (Maybe bullet metaphors might not be the best metaphors to fire off in this situation.)

Anywho. If I find myself ill-prepared, I get so anxious about it I’ll make myself physically sick. Not even joking — during my first 1-2 years of teaching at a public school, I’d call in for mental health reasons once or twice a semester. I used to feel guilty about it, but now I think fuck that. I’m going to take as many sick days as I see fit.

It does explain why I get so manic sometimes. I’ve known so many great teachers in my life that doing anything less than my best at this job makes feel like I’m letting everyone down.

That’s why you’ll find me so frequently on a school night mumbling over Amazon.com like some suburban Gollum whispering, “Why shouldn’t I have a PRINTER all my own. Yes, yes! A Brother printer for my desk and maybe one more for my classroom…!”

Not to make myself sound like God’s gift to anything. While I know that preparedness is a key to success, all that amounts to most days is I’m painfully aware of how ill-prepared I am.

And that stresses me right out.