In theory, I am an English teacher. In practice, the job market has not been kind to me. In the unfortunate lacuna between finishing my M.A. and starting my actual career, I am working at a convenience store (which will go unnamed) somewhere in Mississippi. These are my observations on the activity in this store.
The title of this blog comes from a comment a friend of mine made blaming "Southern brain spiders" for my customers' behavior.
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, Iām kind of back, just not on this blog, so I thought Iād give anyone still around an update on the last seven years of my life and where you can find me now. Oh, andĀ 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.
why the fuck do people always remind you that taco bell isnāt 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 itās because itās 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
My studentsā 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 isnāt real Mexican food. I have no idea why she thought that needed to be explained to anyone.
For a solid month, I had a standing rule in my class that anyone who saidĀ ādeeze nutsā or any variant thereof would get detention.
I was really, really sick of my students interrupting class with it.
"Were you also mad about the slaughter of children in the Hunger Games?" Yes. And, more importantly, the characters of the Hunger Games were also mad about it, which is the real difference here. When bad things happen, there is always a character in Hunger Games to point at it and think, "thatās a bad thing".
My first grade teacher said that it was problematic that I was reading ahead of the rest of the kids in my grade and asked my parents to stop letting me read Harry Potter.
My fourth grade teacher thought it was wrong for my dad to be teaching me complex math because it fascinated me.
My elementary school music teacher hated the way my piano teacher taught me, and how I was more advanced than many of her students, and so told me, in front of my peers and my mother, that I was not good enough to participate in the state solo festival. She would not give me the form. We had to procure it from the district instead. She also hated how I excelled at reading and playing music for the recorder, and so she refused to give me my ābeltsā (colored beads to signify our level) and humiliated me in front of the class repeatedly.
My eighth grade algebra teacher used to fail me on take home tests because I didnāt solve problems exactly the way she showed us in class; I used methods that we had learned for other types of problems that also applied to these. She took points off my tests because I didnāt bring a calculator even though I got 100% without it, because I was able to do it by hand. I had to call my father, who is an engineer, down to the school to shout her down and give me back my A in the class.
My 10th grade Spanish teacher yelled at me in front of the class numerous times because she didnāt like the way I took notes; she thought that since I didnāt write every word off the slide, I wasnāt getting it all down. I had to explain to her that people who have taken advanced courses, like AP or IB classes, know that in a fast-paced learning environment you need to take quick shorthand notes that contain the necessary information rather than wasting time writing every word. She almost gave me detention.
My 11th grade English teacher gave me a poor mark on my first short essay because she believed that I was looking up unnecessarily complex words in a thesaurus to try and get better marks. The phrases in question: ālaced with expletivesā and ābombardedā. She wouldnāt hear any defense from me.
My 11th grade history teacher failed me on an essay about the 1950s because I misread the prompt. Except the prompt wasnāt words; it was a political cartoon. One of the figures was clearly president Eisenhower, but the other I couldnāt place. My teacher would not tell us who it was. I labelled him as the governor of Little Rock Arkansas during the integration period, and wrote an essay about that subject. My teacher said that no, it was Joseph McCarthy, and that there was a small picture of the man in our textbook and therefore I should have recognized him instantly. Half the class, apparently, did not.
The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; itās here to keep us in line and silent. Itās here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Donāt let it win.
"The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; itās here to keep us in line and silent. Itās here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Donāt let it win."Ā
Fun story time. I loved to read. So much so, I was reading chapter books in kindergarden. I broke the record for reading points in elementary school. They actually had to start making up prizes for me. No one in the history of the school had ever read so many books in a year. Basically, my class liked me because I won those suckers pizza parties in my spare time.
In second grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Mobley who believed all children should be average. She flat out told my father that all children should make Cās, and should never strive for more than that.
Not only was she insane, she also would routinely spell things wrong for us to copy for our spelling tests. Later, when we spelled those words wrong on the test, she would mark us off. Yes, our own teacher was sabotaging us.
I should have been tested for gifted classes, but I was not. Why? Ms. Mobley didnāt believe in āgiftedā children.
This teacher had tenure and could not be fired.
Never forget.
"The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; itās here to keep us in line and silent. Itās here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Donāt let it win."Ā
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.)
A few things you need to know about this hot coffee case:
It wasnāt an issue of the coffee being because no fucking shit coffee is hot, but McDonaldās had over heated their water to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Thatās 121C. Not just hot, but really FUCKING hot. Your fancy Starbucks lattes are brewed to 150 degrees.
The 79 year old woman had this cup of 250F (121C) coffee between her legs when it spilled so 250F (121C) coffee spilled on her genitals
She got third degree burnsā¦on her genitals. THIRD DEGREE.
She had to have skin grafts to repair the damage
When she sued McDonaldās, it wasnāt for millions of dollars, it was for $20,000 to cover hospital costs and court fees. 20-fucking-thousand.
It was the courts that awarded her the amount of money she got. Again, she only wanted hospital bills and court costs
McDonaldās changed their heating policy, but not before making her sign a gag order keeping her from talking about this case
So she had to live on hearing little shits like you call her stupid and money-grubbing, and other horrendous stuff because she dared ask the company in the wrong to fix what they fucked up.
No bullshit here. Watch Hot Coffee for more info about what exactly went down. Itās pretty fucked up, and a great example of how common misconceptions spread.
UM OKAY BUT THE ONLY REASON NON WHITES ARE A PART OF CATHOLOCISM IS BEACUSE ROMANS WERE LIKE āWORSHIP OUR GOD OR BE KILLEDā CATHOLOCISM IS FROM ROME ROMANS ARE WHITE PLEASE STOP
Fun fact: Ā the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches are two of the oldest Christians churches in the world. Ā And someone please remind me what continent they started on again? Ā Oh, wait thatās right:
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.
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."
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 theyāre āfakeā. Like seriously what are girls actually allowed to enjoy without being made fun of?
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.
Iām taking fucking Calculus and I donāt get what the teacher is trying to do.
8+5=13. You canāt take 2 out of 5 and have 3 left over and just sitting in the side with nowhere to go. Math doesnāt work like that. AND, MR OR MRS TEACHER, YOU CERTAINLY CANāT ADD 3 TO 8+2 BECAUSE YOU STILL GET 13
YOU ALREADY DID 8+2=10 YOU GOT 10 WHY DO YOU ADD 3?! YOU WONāT HAVE 10 ANYMORE YOUāLL HAVE 13
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.)
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