Chapter 288

I woke up at 6:30 and walked the dog. Then I rode my bicycle to work. Same old.

My day rolled along normally, I taught classes and did some exam practice with the twelfth-graders. I also started getting requests for recommendation letters, through a university application website called Cialfo. They ask you to upload a letter in PDF form, but also have a bunch of boxes to fill with information that is given in the goddamn letter. Same thing with all those job application forms. I’m a cynical bastard at the best of times but when I look at shit like that, in which technology is a step back and makes our lives harder and more annoying rather than making it smoother and easier, I can’t help but shake my head. We’re supposed to go forwards, not backwards.

Last period was with Crazy Class, and they were restless. I truly feel bad for them, millions of years of evolution led them to be energetic upright monkeys of a certain intelligence, in their prime of their youth, and now instead of fulfilling their potential elsewhere they are stuck in my English-language advanced chemistry class like a square peg hammered in a round hole. Think about how we look at things from the past and see it as an inhuman aberration, like slavery or hardcore racial segregation or a state of constant raiding and pillaging warfare, and it’s not a stretch to imagine people from the year 3000 looking back at us as barbarians for putting teenagers in what are essentially minimum-security prisons.

I’m complicit in such a system, because it pays my bills and finances my hedonistic lifestyle, and if someone’s gotta do it, might as well be me. So I tried my best at teaching them the exceptions to the periodical trends in ionisation energy and how they can be explained by looking at the electron configuration of atoms, and also how it can explain several chemical properties. Some students were zoning out, some were racking their brains, some were copying everything on the board without trying to understand what any of this means, to memorize it later. Those Friday 4 PM classes are hard on everyone, and though I like their outbursts of energy and (at-times very vulgar) humor more than the catatonia of their next-door fellow eleventh-graders, it’s a bit of an art to turn it into something productive. With the strong class, a well-timed and well-crafted joke catches their attention and can help them remember something mnemotechnically or metaphorically. With Catatonic Class, it falls dead flat and feels like an awkward waste of time. But with Crazy Class, they tend to burst out in insane hollering laughter and it can take a while to reel them back in. Working on it. No group of students is like another, and that’s a somewhat enjoyable part of the challenge.

I got home and cracked open a beer called Hemperor, and watched mindless TV. I wanted to watch a wrassling event and it was behind a paywall, so I forked out the $10 monthly subscription. I watched the opening promos and one match, but it really, really got annoying, as they would just dub a generic track everytime there’s music playing, like when a wrestler does his entrance. It ruined itand I couldn’t bring myself to sit through the whole thing. Ah well.

Though I treated myself to a beer, I had a small dinner, as I need to keep my caloric intake a bit low to maintain my weight for Sunday’s tournament. I walked the dog, did a bit of writing and reading, and got to bed early enough.