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Congratulations you have won a copy of Womb Simulator 2.0

Contains:

- all new ways to mimic the sound of a mother's bloodstream rushing past foetal ears, including apps, kitchen taps, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines

- adaptable walk cycles that can approximate the gait of a heavily pregnant woman

- a wide selection of nipple emulators including, but not limited to, pacifiers, fingertips, key fobs, and your own non-functioning male pectoral nubs

- day 1 patch that overwrites your own nocturnal settings with the free Circadian Rhythms for Newbs.ini file tweak

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Looks like you made the thread title live up to its name! Congrats.

This is clever and I'm mad I didn't think of it first.

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80's bad guys are just misunderstood. And usually have terrible fathers.

Also, it feels weird to have a new username after 10 years. But sometimes you gotta flush the past and start over.

Is it wrong that my brain started constructing a narrative where most 80's Bad Guys' dads are 50's or 60's Bad Guys based on your second sentence?

I've been using this username since 1998...started using it the summer right before I started college if I remember correctly.

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Looks like you made the thread title live up to its name! Congrats.

 

Now I kind of wish that the thread title was actually "Life Finds a Way".

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Congratulations, Snake! 

 

As one of those teacher thumbs, I will say  on the subject of being super harsh at the beginning of the year that it's something I'm learning through experience. I tried really hard to be the laid back and nice person that I actually think of myself as in regular life with my first class, naively thinking that the kids would respond well to a teacher who is willing to just engage with them as humans and not worry about being super strict with them. That class walked all over me and by the time I tried to course correct it was too late and turned into one of the worst years of my life. I am starting with the 4th class of my career in three weeks and am still trying really hard to find the balance. I do want very much to be someone the kids feel that they can relate to (and as a 27 year old, I'm still young enough that a lot of them can) but I've resigned myself to being a total hard ass for most of September until the ground rules are being followed. It's honestly exhausting to be that way, but it's like Griddlelol said. You can either front load all the "mean teacher" stuff and then relax a lot once the basic routines are established or start the year as kind as you'd naturally be to an individual kid and then spend the next ten months paying for it by putting out several behavioural fires a day. Like Griddle, looking back I realize how many of my favourite teachers had done that. I think it's just something I'm going to need to learn to live with, at least until I'm old enough that my appearance itself is imposing enough to get them to quiet down.

 

That said, I teach middle school in a rough neighbourhood. First grade seems like a bit early to be hopping on that train.

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As one of those teacher thumbs, I will say  on the subject of being super harsh at the beginning of the year that it's something I'm learning through experience. I tried really hard to be the laid back and nice person that I actually think of myself as in regular life with my first class, naively thinking that the kids would respond well to a teacher who is willing to just engage with them as humans and not worry about being super strict with them. That class walked all over me and by the time I tried to course correct it was too late and turned into one of the worst years of my life. I am starting with the 4th class of my career in three weeks and am still trying really hard to find the balance. I do want very much to be someone the kids feel that they can relate to (and as a 27 year old, I'm still young enough that a lot of them can) but I've resigned myself to being a total hard ass for most of September until the ground rules are being followed. It's honestly exhausting to be that way, but it's like Griddlelol said. You can either front load all the "mean teacher" stuff and then relax a lot once the basic routines are established or start the year as kind as you'd naturally be to an individual kid and then spend the next ten months paying for it by putting out several behavioural fires a day. Like Griddle, looking back I realize how many of my favourite teachers had done that. I think it's just something I'm going to need to learn to live with, at least until I'm old enough that my appearance itself is imposing enough to get them to quiet down.

 

It's funny, because the first year that I taught a college class, I worked with the Caligulan mentality of "Let them hate, so long as they fear," mostly out of insecurities about my own potential for authority, and it didn't pay off at all. Later classes in later semesters benefited from being a lot more square with them and just letting them know how my process matched up with their process and the school's process. Actually, I imagine that years of "tough teachers" giving them the runaround left a lot of my incoming students with little patience for teachers who'd bust their balls to make a point, and being a lot softer (while never, ever giving an inch that I wouldn't give myself in their shoes) made my actual efforts at discipline a lot more effective, counterintuitively. 

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I don't have a ton of teaching experience, but I have worked with kids a lot at summer camp and I've never found the "hard ass" approach to work. I lean that way naturally, especially when I was younger, but it starts to lose its effectiveness quickly. Trying to get kids to toe the line precisely at all times just inures them to the reprimands that are actually important to you. I've always had more success trying to engage with them on a more personal level and only getting hard about the really important stuff. I get that such an approach may not be possible with a full classroom though.

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I figure there's also a pretty big difference in attitude between primary and secondary school students who have to attend classes, and college folk who are there voluntarily or are even paying dearly just for the privilege of showing up. Disruptive behaviour can seem like a welcome break from this stuff that's being forced on you during the former, but eventually people's own goals start to change and they notice that their teachers are helping them reach those, and you'll actually see students telling other students to be quiet because they want to focus. I feel like there's certainly not much of a point trying to establish authority once people are at that stage.

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I'm fine with teachers being strict, setting clear boundaries, and not putting up with shit as long as they are fair and consistent about it. But I have an issue with teachers who just can't keep their cool and resort to yelling or just being mean to students.

 

Growing up and going to tiny Seventh Day Adventist schools, we unfortunately had a few of those lunatic abusive teachers that would unexpectedly fly off the handle and start screaming at students for super minor shit. The worst of them all though was my 3rd through 5th grade teacher Ms. B. As punishment for one of the more disobedient kids, she enclosed his desk in a giant refrigerator box for 2 months to put him in "isolation" from the rest of the class. He wasn't allowed to talk to anyone and every recess he had to pace back and forth between two trees while the rest of us played. She saw another kid spit on the ground outside once during recess and made him fill up a cup with his own spit as punishment. Then, when The Simpsons was exploding in popularity, she would punish anyone she heard say "Doh!" by making them write "I will not say Doh!" 200 times. But sometimes we had the last laugh, like in 4th grade when she got light-headed, collapsed, and pulled a hot dog out of her purse and started eating it. (all of this stuff actually happened and I'm not exaggerating one bit here, this teacher was literally satan)

 

I have no idea where I'm going with this anymore. I guess I just really wanted to reminisce about horrible, fucked up childhood experiences with private education. Thinking about Ms. B, yeah, my daughter's gonna be fine and her teacher's probably not all that bad at all. I swear though, I could write a novel about Ms. B. So many fucked up stories with that teacher.

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Again, it's not about being a hard-ass all the time. I had to become that when I started out the year not wanting to be that, and it was exhausting. It's about being a hard-ass for September and, once the ground rules are established, loosening up considerably because the kids are now in a place where they will actually listen to you when you need them to. I'm still the weird teacher who re-wrote a Drake song with his class to be about long division and made a music video with them for the last-week-of-school math project, and no one is taking that from me.

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Then, when The Simpsons was exploding in popularity, she would punish anyone she heard say "Doh!" by making them write "I will not say Doh!" 200 times. 

 

Wow, I wonder if she did this as a joke. That's amazing. 

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I'm in a real shitty mood tonight. I was supposed to hear back about my job interview this week, but it looks like I won't hear back until Monday at least. Maybe I'm just overthinking it but I don't think I've got the job. And since my lease runs out this month and I'm unemployed, I'm going to have to move back in with my mum, and there are so many reasons I don't want to do that. For one thing I'm 25 and I can't stand living with other people. Now I'm going to have to move back to the countryside where there's nothing to do and I have no friends, and no local job opportunities. And I'm moving away from a girl I just met that for once I had a real connection with. But most of all I just feel like a fucking failure because after all this time I apparently can't exist on my own and I don't know how I'm going to crawl out of this hole.

 

Yo fuck all this I got the job, life owns

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Wow, I wonder if she did this as a joke. That's amazing. 

 

No, she just knew it was a popular thing and assumed it was bad because God or something.

 

Another random thing that was burned into my brain by Ms. B was this thing we had to chant during the last week of school to remind ourselves of what we needed to bring on the last day: "A rag and a bag, a bowl and a spoon and a sandwich... and toilet paper."

 

A rag to clean our desks

A bag to put all our shit in

A bowl to put ice cream in

A spoon to eat the ice cream

A sandwich... so we could eat a sandwich

And toilet paper so we could roll each other up in toilet paper to look like mummies

 

Students that didn't bring a bowl and a spoon got their ice cream dumped on a sheet of paper and had to eat it with a ruler.

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I'm fine with teachers being strict, setting clear boundaries, and not putting up with shit as long as they are fair and consistent about it. But I have an issue with teachers who just can't keep their cool and resort to yelling or just being mean to students.

True that.

I remember some teachers in my life that used to shit talk me and give me that look and feel that I would never make something of myself when I got older: proved them wrong.

 

The worst were the teacher nuns. When I misbehaved they used to whoop my ass with their rulers, hands, mean looks and words. But I got payback when I broke into their office and stole their money, but that got me expelled. Oh well, fuck 'em.

There were a few teachers I really liked growing up. The best was a gym teacher who stood up for me when racist shit was thrown at me.

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If she was a real fan she would have gotten you to write I will not annoyed grunt. She doesn't sound like a real Simpsons fan.

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Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

 

So I entered a gamejam/challenge thing in June ( http://itch.io/jam/wag-challenge ). It was one focused/judged on writing, so I felt comfortable entering with a Twine game. And being that Twine was always something I wanted to experiment with, I set aside my June to learn it and write a story/game. 

 

They got around 3x the entrants they were expecting, so a pre-selection process was decided on to help narrow the entrants that the judging panel would have to review.

Yesterday they announced who made the cut, and I did!

 

Riding pretty high on that, even though work is still stressing me the fuck out.

And I've only got about 2 weeks to try to adapt that game into a short story to submit to a lit mag.

 

But I definitely needed that little boost this week.

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No, she just knew it was a popular thing and assumed it was bad because God or something.

 

Another random thing that was burned into my brain by Ms. B was this thing we had to chant during the last week of school to remind ourselves of what we needed to bring on the last day: "A rag and a bag, a bowl and a spoon and a sandwich... and toilet paper."

 

A rag to clean our desks

A bag to put all our shit in

A bowl to put ice cream in

A spoon to eat the ice cream

A sandwich... so we could eat a sandwich

And toilet paper so we could roll each other up in toilet paper to look like mummies

 

Students that didn't bring a bowl and a spoon got their ice cream dumped on a sheet of paper and had to eat it with a ruler.

 

You're really endearing me to this teacher. She sounds incredibly eccentric. 

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I think she sounds pretty cool as well. Like a Roald Dahl character.

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The last almost-month at work has been... incredibly weird, and trying in a lot of ways.

 

Through a bunch of weird circumstances, I am the head of my department at work all of a sudden. So I've been having to spend most of my time doing a lot of clerical stuff and figuring out things for the first time. Which, hey, my bosses are fine with all that. I just wish I was faster innately because we're understaffed. Which is about to hit a point of critical mass. There's a guy at my job that sometimes swings into my department, and any time he does he's doing things incorrectly or breaking my equipment. For the most part the equipment breaking was on accident since he doesn't know it well, but he HAS been ignoring my entreaties about not doing something if he doesn't know, and to never guess how to do something, and all of that is absolutely okay. Even with the bosses. If not especially.

 

But today he was being an outright unprofessional tool. So I had to report him to the boss, because it was actually interfering with my department's flow of business. He got in trouble for it, and rather than take it to heart he spent the rest of the day trying to find ways to take his anger out on me. Which he did via breaking equipment in my lab on purpose. Now, that's not my personal equipment. I don't suffer financially for it. But it does interrupt me from doing my job. So, again as I was leaving, I had to report him. And he tried to confront me about it on my way out the door and I dismissed him with letting him know that what he's doing is not okay and that's that.

 

The problem is, he has the ear of the one person on my staff that is present at work most. And she's actually good at the job. There's the occasional "bleh I'm 20 years old I don't wanna work" fit but whatever, I can deal with that easily. And even rarer, she's actually eager to learn more than what's actually required of her. So hey, that's a valuable employee. Except... she got to work, and he immediately mouthed off to her. When I was leaving and doing our usual cross-shift communication, she was all of a sudden hostile and uncooperative. Now I have a bad person in my lab who, at this moment, could be pouring random chemicals all over the place for all I know.

 

So tomorrow is gonna be D-Day as far as me going to my employers about those two goes. I'm thirty years old and don't have time for this shit. I expect this crap from the guy because he's always been that way, so I don't care to see him go. But her, it sucks because she's useful to me, and also because she can actually set herself up with a long-term job. But she wants to give that up over a fuckface 'friend' like him. In all my years I've learned one thing to be 90% true; if someone isn't worth a damn on their job, they probably aren't worth a damn in other aspects of their life. He's already shown signs of the, "Hey I'll pay you back later I promise" routine so I feel confident about my assessment of him.

 

I got a job to make a living, not to make friends. I will gladly hang people out on their asses if they make my job needlessly difficult or impossible.

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I started my new position at my new pay rate today, hooray! I'm making more money than I ever have (or thought I would be in the near future!) now, so I'm excited by the idea of having a savings account that actually grows.

But also the guy I've been seeing for about 6 months suddenly broke things off on Saturday for nebulous reasons (but we can still be friends and still have sex and nothing has to change, I just don't want commitment! ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh vom barf ugh). And I got a call this morning that an old friend of mine down south finally lost her battle with cancer -- not an unexpected call, but still a hard one.

So things are good in some ways and bad in others! Life is a complicated thing and I am feeling pretty down about myself, but good about my situation. Trying to focus on and appreciate what I have but man is that hard to do sometimes.

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