Classroom Brew

The cold open never changes. Everyone else is talking state standards; this show is on a barstool making fun of them. Ryan teaches high school social science in Chicago and runs the podcast solo, and the first thing most episodes establish is how tired he is. He announces it directly. He jokes about being 87 years old, then 88, then 84, and decides that dying decrepitly is redundant, which becomes an episode title. The drinks are improvised. Lemon juice, rum, no simple syrup, extra water because he could not handle it otherwise. A Corona, not sponsored, never has been, probably never will be. The complaints start small and stay specific. He has ruined his ability to go to the gym after a full teaching day and suspects he would be too tired even if he skipped after-school makeups and remediation. He is tired walking the dog. His wife has had the flu for a week and a half and he is somehow fighting it off. His watch died and the dates have blurred into each other. The classroom material arrives the same way. A scheduled fire drill, then an unplanned second one mid-week, an alarm that switched off mid-evacuation, and conflicting information about whether anyone should still be leaving the building. AP exams, ACT and SAT practice all landing at once in the middle of April. Then the register shifts without warning. Charter and contract schools inside the district actually closed, and hundreds of students were dispersed into receiving schools mid-year — a detail he sits with rather than joking past. There is a new interim CEO whose last name he thinks is King, half-recalled from an email blast. Interview episodes fold in without changing the tone. Shannon joins for one on teaching Spanish, and the conversation lands on a fully asynchronous online course, a student who submitted video of himself topless, and parent conferences where the parent's attire made the screen a problem with no mask available to hide a facial expression. Patreon shout-outs are read out by name, paid tier and free tier both, and they run long enough to become their own running bit — he suggests making a song out of the list. He notes, unprompted, that a sigh was about the week and not about the Patreon members. Nothing resolves into a takeaway. Episodes stop where the energy stops, on a stray line about staying hydrated, and then: class dismissed.