southernbrainspiders

[southernbrainspiders]

Seven Years Later

Hey, y'all. So here's a final post for anyone who's still following this blog -- I expect that, over the past seven years, nearly everyone who used to follow it has left, but there might be a few still around, so I just wanted to put this here.

If you're trying to remember who this is, I used to blog about my experiences working the graveyard shift at a gas station in Mississippi. I was an angry 20-something misanthrope who had left my grad-school program due to various conflicts and was working at a gas station while I tried to figure out what to do next. I had a lot of complaints about the customers (because, you know, it was retail, and customers really are pretty terrible even when you're not bitter and misanthropic already). The blog kind of trailed off when I got a secondary-school teaching certification and landed a job teaching 11th/12th-grade English at a school in the next county over -- because, of course, it just wouldn't be right to talk about my students in a public forum.

Anyway, I’m kind of back, just not on this blog, so I thought I’d give anyone still around an update on the last seven years of my life and where you can find me now. Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but I will deny all knowledge of this blog. I look back on my younger self and cringe, as I think we all do, and would prefer to leave that here -- I've matured, I like to think, and all that angry misanthropy is much more contained now, rather than just flailing around undirected.

So I wasn't at the high school long before I left that too. The turnaround was actually extremely quick -- by October, I was filling out applications to return to grad school. There were a few reasons for this, which I'll enumerate, but it all really boils down to the fact that I wasn't a cultural fit. (This was originally basically an essay in itself, but I'm trimming it down to a bulleted list.)

This was a school that did not believe in education except as it pertained to test scores. My job was 50% babysitter, 40% prison guard, and 10% ACT Prep. There was a weird current of anti-intellectualism among the faculty, and that carried over to the students.

The prison guard thing isn't as much of an exaggeration as I would like -- my morning duty was helping keep the students kettled in the auditorium until the first bell rang, because the administration didn't trust them to be out in the halls. I had to accompany my class to the cafeteria to make sure they sat in their assigned seats and didn't make too much noise.

On a related note, several members of the faculty frequently bemoaned the fact that corporal punishment had been recently banned from the school system. (Our student rosters still had a column on them indicating which parents had given permission for the school to hit their kids.) They pretty casually talked about the fact that the parents still did that part at home, though, describing things that, where I grew up, would have been called child abuse.

One of my duties was to teach students to write for basically the first time ever -- a writing section had been added to one of the tests, so it had to be incorporated into the curriculum now. Because, of course, since it hadn't been on the tests before, the school had been just not teaching writing at all. Students were very against the concept of writing assignments.

This was a very conservative and very religious area. I'm neither of those things. A standard "getting to know you" question was "what church do you go to?" Faculty meetings started with a prayer session. I didn't try to hide my lack of religion, and even tried to use it as a teaching moment when students asked about it, breaking down the word "agnosticism" to its roots and affixes. A number of students decided I needed to be Saved and started trying to witness to me or whatever you call it.

Between the backlash to the writing assignments (seriously, the students hated those to a degree that shocked me) and my general status as a cultural outsider, a number of the students developed a severe dislike of me. And it was a small town, so they quickly found out where I lived. Within the first month, my home was egged thrice and my tires slashed once. This was when I started filling out grad-school applications.

It was an intensely stressful experience, is what I'm saying. I should have picked up on the red flag when I noticed I was one of... I think half a dozen? new teachers that year. (There were at least four, but I can't quite remember the number.) It was a small school; the turnover rate was just insane. Most of the others left before the year even ended -- in fact, one of my students told me that I was the first high school English teacher they'd had that lasted the whole year. The new math teacher just packed up her classroom and left one day, no notice or anything. The only new hire that stayed for the next year was actually an alumnus of the high school in question and thus was already part of the community & didn't have much adapting to do.

I stayed for the whole year because I needed the money; if I'd had a spouse's income to fall back on like most of the other new teachers did, I probably would have left mid-year too. It was hellish and I was basically in a constant state of mental breakdown. I'm not ashamed to admit I cried in school multiple times -- never in front of the students, thankfully, but once in front of the principal. I decided that even if I didn't get into another graduate program, I had to leave this place because it was turning me into a person I didn't like -- I was starting to yell at students for acting up, which is just intolerable.

Luckily, I did get accepted into a couple programs. One of them offered funding and a TA position, so I took it without a second thought even though it meant starting over as an MA student. (So now I have two Master's degrees, one in English Literature and one in English Language, which is extremely redundant.) I moved across the country to Indiana.

Turns out I'm actually a pretty good teacher at the college level. When I can focus on education rather than babysitting, I can genuinely thrive. Most of my students still weren't that interested in learning English -- I was teaching a freshman-year writing class -- because it's a STEM-focused university and the humanities are barely tolerated, but just the fact that they actually want to be at the school and have some motivation to learn makes all the difference. I got multiple awards from the department based on student evaluations.

My TA position expired at the end of last year, because I was supposed to finish my PhD and graduate, but my dissertation is still in progress. (My mental health is still pretty shaky, but that's just the baseline of who I am as a person, not the result of the environment I'm in this time... it leads to me not being as productive as I probably should be.) I was able to get a position working for the university library instead, though, so that's where I am now.

As a side project, I do a podcast, The Maniculum, where a friend and I read, discuss, and joke about medieval literature, then try to adapt it to TTRPG games. We have a small audience of a few hundred, but I think it's going quite well. I've been managing our Twitter presence, and as Twitter started looking like it might go down, I saw a lot of jokes about people fleeing back to Tumblr. This struck a chord of nostalgia within me, and yesterday I went & made us a Tumblr account. I haven't posted anything there yet -- I'm planning to do an introduction post later today -- but if anyone reading this wants to go follow it and see what happens, it's @maniculum.

And, for anyone who does go there to check it out, remember: if you knew me as Southern Brain Spiders, no you didn't.

[southernbrainspiders]

My students’ end-of-semester assignment was to write an argumentative research essay on anything they felt strongly about. One girl wrote hers on why Taco Bell isn’t real Mexican food. I have no idea why she thought that needed to be explained to anyone.

why the fuck do people always remind you that taco bell isn’t real mexican food like do you not think that i know that like do you think i go to taco bell because i think the 16 year old white guy behind the window just made me authentic mexican cuisine two minutes before i pulled to the second window no do you know why i go to taco bell it’s because it’s 1:30am and my life is terrible so i order a coke and five dorito loco tacos and shove them down my face in the parking lot

[southernbrainspiders]

For a solid month, I had a standing rule in my class that anyone who said “deeze nuts” or any variant thereof would get detention. I was really, really sick of my students interrupting class with it.

the whole “deez nuts” things is the dumbest thing i have heard of in a long time.

[southernbrainspiders]

I'm mad about that apostrophe.

IM SORRY WHAT

[southernbrainspiders]

RON Stoppable, I think you'll find.

 pussy game unstoppable

[southernbrainspiders]

I wrote "2010" earlier this week. I have no explanation for that.

[southernbrainspiders]

We have now developed superior education technology -- omnipresent state tests will ensure a persistent state of hampered, impaired, and suppressed learning even if you manage to get a teacher who cares. IS NOT THIS A GLORIOUS TIME TO BE AMERICAN? (P.S. All of my teachers had high expectations and encouraged critical thinking. So, you know, it's not all bad.)

My 7 year old son was shot down by his 1st grade teacher

[southernbrainspiders]

[missing-the-point] Ahem. That should be "If this WERE another country". [/missing-the-point]

[southernbrainspiders]

Though it should be noted that some of those high-Catholic-population areas ARE the result of forced conversion. The Philippines, for example.

Catholicism IS a white mans religion

You know where this giant ass statue is from?

In short shut your bitch ass up

[southernbrainspiders]

in class

me: *eatin chips* people next 2 me: *trying to get an education*

[southernbrainspiders]

The gray in the second image is probably just upset because the blue is putting the spaces on the wrong side... from her point of view, he just sent her a vertical line of hearts with progressively larger blank spaces after them.

[southernbrainspiders]

Kirby: Origins

Omg I can’t stop laughing

[southernbrainspiders]

Explanation of the current state of the world: God has spent the last few millennia exclusively watching the inside of a Bulgarian cave. When asked for comment, God replied, "screw the rest of y'all. Check out this glorious cave fauna."

"The Eyes of God" -Prohodna Cave, Bulgaria (Source, I believe)

This is the full moon from inside a cave. It looks like two eyes staring down at you; beautiful.

[southernbrainspiders]

Murderin'.

Why are people making fun of girls for liking Lush Bath bombs? so now girls get mocked for liking cute and fun things like bath bombs or Starbucks and if they like comic books or video games then they’re ‘fake’. Like seriously what are girls actually allowed to enjoy without being made fun of?

[southernbrainspiders]

While this is fucking amazing, keep in mind that students can and will write exactly the same shit with exactly the same attitude about ANYTHING they're punished for. I've gotten nigh-identical forms like this from students who got detention for talking to their friends through the entire class, spending half an hour doing their makeup/hair in the back of the classroom, or cheating on a test.

So the author may not be as enlightened as you think -- broken clock, twice a day, etc.

[southernbrainspiders]

While the Common Core English standards are 95% fantastic, I hear nothing but shit about the Math standards... not sure what happened there.

#CommonCore This is how the Government gets the unemployment rate.

[southernbrainspiders]

Goddamn I wish we could actually tell our students this. And have them do it. Every class I teach has at least a few jackasses who don't want to be there, don't care about their education, and are really just ruining it for everyone else. (Actually, one of my classes is almost entirely composed of those students.)