Loving/Hating Halloween

The Narwhal Whale (Monodon monoceros)

 I was never really a huge fan of Halloween  (my costumes growing up were usually limited to my favorite book characters, whom I pretended I was all year round anyway), but teaching has really really reduced my enthusiasm for the holiday.  Let's make it into a list since I'm a Virgo.

Why I love Halloween:

• October is nearly over.

• This YouTube video:

Why I Hate Halloween:

• Sugar + children = doom. In fact, I looked down for 30 seconds today to take attendance, and when I looked up, one of my boys had created a long baton by connecting markers and was using it to move the ceiling tiles.  When I asked him what he thought he was doing, he said, "Checking for bats," and started laughing maniacally.

• The "Miss, I like your ____ costume!" joke gets old after about 40 times (nerd, librarian, white lady)

•  I'm too tired from wrangling up sugar-fueled crazies after the end of the day for any kind of elaborate costume party/happy hour/adult celebration.

• I go around seeing posters that say "HALOWEN" or "HOLLOWEEN" and it makes my eye twitch. Although one of my ESL students wrote "JAPI JALOGUIN" on my board and it made me put my head down on my desk and chuckle defeatedly.

• Students are constantly asking me, "Miss, where your Halloween decorations at?" and I say, "Same place you left your grammar." 

• I feel obligated to give my students Halloween candy, and also feel obligated to eat about 5-7 pieces of it.  By the end of the day I feel like a beached narwhal.

• It happens every year.  And I can't be absent or people will think I missed because I was hung over.

How do you feel about Halloween?

Love,

Teach

The Past 24 Hours

The past 24 hours haven't necessarily been bad, but they've been weird.  I just needed to document this.

• All my students were insane yesterday because of the full moon, and I’m insane for believing the phases of the moon affects their behavior.

• I put a hot water bottle in my bed last night to warm my feet and it leaked, creating a large, cold, wet spot that woke me up at about midnight

• I got up and put my boots on so that the leaky spot wouldn’t make my feet cold or wet.  Slept with boots on until 1:15.

• At 1:15 I wake up to our neighbor pounding on the door hysterically, only to find that she believed her husband was trying to out her to the government, and that he’d joined the FBI to start a rumor that she’s a Nazi so he could destroy her birth certificate.  Police came.  I was still wearing my boots.

• I finally fell back asleep around 4:00 (in my boots), spending most of that time lying in bed wondering why I am a magnet for CRAZY THINGS

• I decided to reward myself for the events of the night by buying two orders of hash browns.  In the drive-thru, I pulled up too far away from the cashier’s window and had to get out of my car and hand my money to her. 

• I read my students a story about a dog who chokes on the fingers of a prison escapee who breaks into the dog’s owners house. 

• I am not entirely sure that I'm not asleep right now.

Love,

Teach

Whisper Turtleneck

This story is just more proof that I'm insane.

I bought a thin, black turtleneck this weekend to go under several warmer-weather dresses that I have because a) I’m a Puritan and adore anything concealing,  b) layering is much cheaper than buying new clothes, and c) if I wear thick turtlenecks I will drown in my own sweat.  J. Crew has these turtlenecks they’ve named whisper turtlenecks because they’re thin, and J. Crew can’t just call them thin turtlenecks because… well,  it’s  J. Crew.  Also, I was able to use my teacher discount which made me raise the roof to my cashier.

Anyway, I’m wearing the whisper turtleneck today, and was walking around the back of the school after manning my station for morning duty.  I walk around the back of the school instead of going through the middle for two reasons: a) I’m about to spend 8 hours in a room with roughly 30 people and I need all the alone time I can get, b) the back of the school looks out over the football field, and in the early morning it’s easy for me to pretend that the football field is actually an English meadow. (Believe it or not, I haven’t made it to the part where I prove that I’m insane.)

As I’m walking around the back of the school, looking out over the meadow behind my imaginary English cottage with a brown cow named Horace, I started thinking about my new whisper turtleneck. 

What a funny name, I thought. Whisper turtleneck.  Sounds like a command.  Whisper turtleneck or I’ll kill you.

“Turtleneck,” I whispered out loud.

“What’d you say?”

 I looked up, startled. A colleague of mine was about fifteen feet to my right, by the side of the building, grinning.

“Uh,” I laughed nervously.  “Nothing.  I didn’t see you there.”

“No,” he insisted. “You said something.  What did you say?”

You asked for it, I thought.

“I whispered ‘turtleneck’ because I bought this turtleneck this weekend and it’s called a whisper turtleneck,” I said.  I laughed, hoping he’d join in.  He tipped his head to the side like a confused animal.

“Wait… what?” He’s a math teacher, and looked as if he was actually trying to figure out my situation as a word problem in his head.  A teacher walks around the back of the school by herself whispering articles of clothing  for entertainment.  If she’s in her 20s, unmarried, and wearing a turtleneck, about how long will it take for her to acquire 40 cats and be on Hoarders at her current rate of crazy?

“Turtleneck,” I confirmed. “Welp, have a good one!”

I cackled all the way to my room.

Love,

Teach

Tarsiers, Bitches, and a Little Bit Not Fatter

Here I am!

So sorry to have kept you waiting.  I got a third prep two weeks ago and have been racking my brain trying to figure out what to do with them.  I now teach:

English/Language Arts
Reading Support
and ELL Support (a class made up two weeks ago by my school).

I have many of the same kids in each class, so that means I pretty much have to create 3 separate curriculums/lesson plans that don't use the same resources.  YAY!  Good thing I'm a champion and can do anything. 

Anyway, here are some random thoughts to keep you occupied while I actually write a post of meaning.

1)  October is winding down. Three and a half weeks til Thanksgiving. (If you get a week off for Thanksgiving, please go away.) We are almost out of DEVOLSON, people!!

2) I've lost a tiny bit of weight since the beginning of the school year, and one of my sweet, quiet students who is still learning English came up to me in the morning and said quietly, "Ah, miss... you are a little bit not fatter!"  HAHA.  I thanked her and then immediately wrote it down.

3) I read in a book that a good fluency strategy for ELL students is to have them do choral readings (where everyone reads out loud at the same time).  Please don't try this in secondary schools. It was super creepy and freaked everyone out, especially me.  I made them stop after about 20 seconds.  They were reading something from Maniac Magee, but it sounded more like "WE. ARE. GOING. INTO. THE. FOREST. TO. DRINK. THE. KOOL. AID."

4) I've almost come up with names for my classes.  Still trying to tease out their personalities, but here's some preliminaries for a few of them:

1st period: Lambs. Quiet, sweet, adorable. Need some extra support to keep them from falling off cliffs.
2nd period: Squirrels.  Cute and funny, but can't stay seated or on-task to save their lives
5th period: Tarsiers.  Some of the strangest and craziest people I've met in my life, but I love them.  Also, I wouldn't be surprised if they eat crickets in their spare time.  This is a tarsier:

So far I don't have any predator classes like my Weranhas last year (Werewolf/Piranha hybrids), but it's also only October.

5) This was lovingly scrawled on one of my ESL dictionaries:

I may be a bitch, but YOU, my friend, spelled all your English words correctly.  I win.


Hope you have a lovely weekend. I'm treating myself to new boots, snuggling my nephew, eating cookie butter from Trader Joe's, and a pumpkin patch.

Love,

Teach

DEVOLSON

Hello.  Sorry it's been so long.  I seem to have fallen into DEVOLSON.

DEVOLSON is an acronym I invented that stands for the Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November.  It's kind of a homophone for "devil's son," which is intentional.  I discovered that it's the time of the school year where teachers are the busiest, craziest, and, usually the saddest.

Whoever invented the school year (and whoever continues to create academic calendars) is responsible for DEVOLSON.  There is no greater period of transition and stress in a school year than the beginning, and, conveniently, this period of transition is an 11-week track completely free of any significant breaks.

I'm doing fine morale-wise, but let me show you the kind of crazy that manifests itself in my head and life as a result of how busy I am during DEVOLSON.

1) I almost decided to teach in England next year.  Less than two weeks later, I completely changed my mind.

2) My vehicle started shaking uncontrollably one day because I was under the impression that oil changes were a "once a year" event.  (When I reported this to my father, I could hear his palm smack his forehead over the phone.)  Don't worry.  It's fixed now.

3) I had a dream that I had lunch with my old American Girl doll who encouraged me to bring all my cats to a hotel in San Diego that she now owned.  (I don't have any cats.)

4) I tried to punish a student for snatching a paper out of his neighbor's hand by repeatedly attempting to give him a paper cut to show the danger of his actions. For the sake of my job, I'm glad I was unsuccessful.

5) I awoke at 2:45 AM one Saturday night to knocking on my back door and let in a complete stranger, thinking it was my roommate's friend.  We both realized he had the wrong address very quickly.

6) I have almost no money (still) because I keep buying things like this:

(The hat, not the baby.)

7) While speaking to my appraiser a few weeks ago, a huge flaky booger floated out of my nose like an autumn leaf and rested on my chest.  I was wearing a navy shirt.  He noticed.  I died a little.

8) I might buy a house.

9) I just blamed my booger in #7 on an acronym I made up.

That's all.

Hoping your DEVOLSON leaves you less crazy than mine already has.

Love,

Teach