An Open Letter To The Three Parents With Whom I Had Discipline Conversations Today While Wearing a Polka Dot Bow Tie

Dear The Three Parents With Whom I Had Discipline Conversations Today While Wearing a Polka Dot Bow Tie,

First, I'd like to thank you. All three of you came in without me even asking to discuss behavior issues that your children have been having in school. You took the time to not just return a phone call, but to physically come into the school and prove to your child how seriously you take their education and anything that might threaten their education, such as, at times, their own choices. You joined me in sending your child a consistent message about what we expect of them and what they are capable of. Although I've know some of you, in the past, to question the fairness of consequences in front of your children, today you kept the conversation productively focused on their behavior and clearly communicated to your child that their parents and teachers are a united front and that we know they can do better.

Now I'd like to explain why I was wearing a polka dot bow tie. See, today our middle school decided to participate in the informal holiday Bow Tie Monday, or #bowtiemonday, if you will. It is, as my colleague and the architect of this occasion referred to it, "the only thing we do for no reason." And I would definitely say it contributed to building a positive culture in our middle school. The thing about wearing a bow tie, though, is that it is very easy to forget you are wearing a bow tie, even if said bow tie makes you look like Winston Churchill. So when you came in to discuss your child's suspension/ detention/ double-detention, respectively, I did not realize I was wearing one. The apparent silliness of me wearing a bow tie might have been mitigated had your own child, or a critical mass of other students, also been wearing bow ties... but of course, Bow Tie Monday, being a Monday, was forgotten about by 95% of our students -- the classic folly of anything on a Monday. And so, when you came to find me, and I shook your hand, and we gravely discussed your child's recent challenges... I looked like Pee-Wee Herman, or a 19th century aristocrat, or a zany teacher who explodes things a lot. And yet you didn't react in any way, and we carried on our serious conversation like two adults, not like one adult and one male toddler dressed for a wedding.

So I guess my point, again, is thanks.

Respectfully,
Your Child's Teacher

Damn you, Roald Dahl.

I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened at school the other day, but first I have to tell you this:

I have a phobia of stinging insects.

I'm pretty sure it's a real phobia. I have several pieces of evidence, which I will now publish here because I don't think I'm currently doing enough to contribute to my generation's reputation for over-sharing on the internet.

• I think about bees all the time. Any time I walk outside, I am thinking about bees. In any area that I walk around often, I can tell you all the places where bees are prone to be. Whenever possible I walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk because there are fewer bushes and flowers, and therefore fewer bees.
• I cannot look at pictures of bees or wasps.
• When I go to a beach or a lake or a pool, I take towels that are muted colors because bees like brights colors.
• Once there was a bee in my house and I left my house and refused to come back until my roommates promised they had physically seen it fly out the window, though I still suspect they were lying.
• I once refused to go on a date to a botanical garden.
• Once in college I was conducting interviews for new members of a program that I was in charge of, and the only space we had available was at these picnic tables outside, and I kept having to get up to run away in the middle of conducting interviews because there were bees. We still had a remarkably successful recruiting season.
• I have had more than three dreams where I am being forced to eat a bee. Stinging insects are probably my third most nightmared-about topic, the first obviously being my classroom. (The second is that I'm in the musical Rent and don't know any of the lyrics.)
• Typing this much about bees and wasps is making me antsy.

Legitimate phobia. Case rested. Whenever I am with some people and a bee or wasp is nearby and I become unable to behave like a normal human, people inevitably give me a judgmental glare, or, on a good day, a pitying glare, and remind me that "it's more afraid of you than you are of it." Nope. Definitely not. It is an insect with a stinger on its butt and a brain too primitive to process the emotion of fear. I am a human with a phobia.

I share this with you so you can understand the significance of the events that occurred in my classroom on the afternoon of Thursday, September 19, 2013.

My sixth graders and I were reading a passage from James and the Giant Peach and discussing the elements that make it fantastical. We were in the section where James first finds his way into the Peach and meets all the gigantic anthropomorphic insects. So there we are, discussing the fantastical nature of over-sized insects that behave like people, when who should join our reading lesson but a WASP THE SIZE OF MY HEAD. Roughly. And not just that, but this was not your typical hang-out-by-the-window-and-look-for-a-way-out wasp. This wasp had some sort of agenda. Like, to get really close to my students' faces while they are trying to read, and move in a rapid and unpredictable way, and be really scary.

Guys, it was all my nightmares at once! (Except Rent, thank god.) It was literally my nightmares. But guys, I was so good. The wasp was trying to assume control of my classroom; what the wasp didn't know is that you cannot manage a classroom through fear tactics. The wasp hadn't read Teach Like a Champion. I maintained my authority and most of my composure. The kids lined up in a calm fashion to continue our reading in the cafeteria. I assured them that as long as they didn't flip out, the wasp would not sting them. I told them it was more afraid of them than they were of it.

While we were in the cafeteria, one of my amazing colleagues trapped the wasp and sent it out the window, which is actually for the best because dead wasps can release a chemical that tell other wasps to come defend it's legacy by launching a coordinated attack, which is either a fact that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would know, or a myth that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would believe.

It turns out we had a wasps' nest in the heating unit outside our window. It's times like these that I am so so thankful that we have an amazing responsive building manager who gets wasps' nests destroyed as soon as they are discovered. Don't tell the kids, though. Now when they leave trash on the floor after snack, I tell them, "This is why we have wasps."

This poster is going in my classroom tomorrow.

This is to complement my "Don't Mess With Texas" trashcan signs.* Anyone want to print me 30 of these on actual t-shirts? Hey thanks.


*For my non-Texan friends: If you didn't know, DMWT is not just a cool slogan. It originated as an anti-littering campaign. Which means I can legitimately tell students who leave graham cracker crumbs and little bits of paper on the floor that they are Messing With Texas.

I am allergic to my school.

I am literally allergic to my school building.

Or maybe I am allergic to the entire concept of work.

I don't know which is better.

I've had an issue with getting eczema on my eyelids (jealous?) for a while. I keep getting prescription topical steroid creams from the doctor, and the topical steroid creams keep coming in packages that say "DO NOT USE IN OR NEAR EYES," and I keep using them for a while anyway, and they keep not really working, and then I invariably end up googling "side-effects of topical steroid creams," and realizing that besides eczema I am also going to get cataracts and  this weird disease that makes your face fat but only certain regions of your face, and then I stop taking the topical steroid creams.

The eczema got considerably worse this past winter. Then I got a sample of  an over-the-counter eczema cream, and what do you know: It worked! And I did not go blind. And my face did not get fat -- and if it were to get fat, I am confident the fat would be evenly distributed.

This was toward the end of the school year. So all summer I walked around just feeling so fly with my eczema-free face.

Then work started. Quick digression: A great way to make a teacher not want to talk to you is to tell them how lucky they are to have "such a long summer." Our summer is exactly six weeks long, and during the school year we don't go to the doctor for face-eczema. Back to the story: So six weeks after the school year ended, it started again, and guess what came back with it. Dry eyelids! My friends call it dry-lid.

Is it the building? Is the stress? Is it the child-germs? Is it the fact that my New Year's Resolution for the past five years has been to drink more water and yet I still never do? Can I file worker's comp?

***

Enough about my eyelids. Let's talk about Homeroom Texas. We name our classrooms after our alma maters. I never did the school spirit thing in college, but now that I'm faking-it-till-I'm-making it, it's pretty fun to say "Good morning, Longhorns!" Any ideas on how to convert "It's 8:51 and OU still sucks!" into a sixth-grade-appropriate motto with an overall theme of teamwork and perseverance? Me neither.

We've had the kids back for just four days and I'm already inspired to make a poster that says Keep Homeroom Texas Weird. Here are my favorite absurdities so far:

A list of my students' suggestions for what to name the two houseplants in our classroom: Sally, Billy, Potty, Planty, Jazzy, [Student Name], Hose, [Student Name], Prosper, [Student Name], Snowflake, Joe, Charlotte, Amy, Texas, Longhorns, Avery, Peanut, Jasmine, Jessica, Genivieve, Hugh, Jay-Z, Chicken Nugget, [Student's Brother's Name], [Last Name of Student Who Already Submitted First Name], McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Daziah, LuLu.

(Actually, let's crowd-source this plant-naming: Vote in the comments section!)

Favorite student responses in writing class: In a quick writing exercise, literally every one of my students answered "family" or "education" in response to "What is the most important thing in life?" Except for this one:

"The most important thing in life is a pet bird. Birds will keep you company. It is a bird that will have you watch them. And also parakeets are the best."

Here's a different student, in response to "Is consuming too much sugar dangerous for humans?":

"Consuming too much sugar is a real danger to humans because it can make you produce less offspring." I guess that's true?

Doing my part to keep it weird:

We eat lunch with our students in the classroom. By "eat lunch" I mean watch the kids eat lunch while trying to do 200 other things. During lunch I am supposed to:
1) "Culture-build" (hang out with kids).
2) Follow up on assignments, answer questions, etc.
3) Eat my own lunch.

Today during  lunch I ate a beet salad while trying to win a balancing contest by standing on one foot (tree pose) and simultaneously grading a homework assignment. Good thing I'm a killer at tree pose.

Favorite thing a 12-year-old boy has said about my beet salad: "That looks mad good."

Even if we had our ups and downs, we still had our downs.

Well, it's summer time. School has been out less than two weeks but already school-year life feels so distant.  My entire sleep schedule has shifted four hours later, as if I'm in a different time zone. I have been both making and showing up for doctor's appointments. Meanwhile, the faces of my students are receding into the abyss... of course, I'm looping with the same kids next year, so their faces will come right back out of the abyss in mid-August, as will their pre-teen angst and their need for deodorant.

There's been too much going on in the world for me to bother you all with the goings-on of this little old teacher, but so I thought I better hop in right now while the Senate is on recess.

If this is technically my last post of school year 2012-2013, then I should cap it off in my typical style: totally avoiding the work of actually writing anything by simply quoting things my kids say. 

So, here's the premise. Since I was an associate teacher and floated between different 5th grade classrooms, the teachers on my team were incredibly thoughtful and ended the year by giving me an awesome teacher bag and having every kid write me a card. On the last day of school I got 60 construction paper cards -- about half of which made me put my hand to my chest in the international symbol for feeling sentimental, and about half of which made me laugh out loud. I'm sharing with you the most hilarious, obviously. (I've blocked out kids' names, the name of my school, and my full name because the NSA is reading my blog.)

1) 

It's so hard to pick a favorite part of this card. "Fun and sad sometimes"? Acknowledgement of being "a pain"? "You bend but you don't break us"?! While we ponder that, let's turn to the back as this student has directed us to do with capital letters and exclamatory punctuation.

Bam, favorite part.

2) The best part of this next card is that the weird details this student lists aren't even accurate, and makes it sound like I was a substitute. The brackets are mine but the parentheses are his, and the best.

Front of card: Thank you for helping us!

Inside of card: "You were always there when [their regular homeroom teacher] was out sick, at the doctor's, or had to take care of family (mostly it was the first two). But you get the point. YOU ALWAYS WERE FOR US.

3) This student, on the other hand, fully understands that I am not a substitute teacher but an associate teacher:

4) And now for overachiever (and over-familiar) edition. This would be amazing even without context, but please note that at my school a Community Violation is a red form that students have to fill out when they have made an egregious choice and earned detention. There is no such thing as a Community Congratulation, but now I think there should be.

Well, let's see the back! I sure hope it contains my first and last name. 

5) This one might be my favorite of all. Is this child struggling to communicate a complicated thought using conjunctions, or is she a master of passive aggression?

Front of card: Picture of a flower and a rain cloud

Inside of card: You are a good associate teacher, and even if we had our ups and downs we still had our downs which we learned from. Sincerely, [Name].

Opposite side: A giant red heart

The underlining is hers.

Ah, you kids. You get me every time. You bend but do not break me. I have liked the way I have associated you. It has been fun and sad sometimes. Just remember, my dears: Even if we had our ups and down, we still had our downs.

I directed a musical. Or, where I've been for the past month.

I directed a musical. I do not know how to direct a musical. I was in a lot of musicals as a kid. But that doesn't mean I know how to direct a musical. I've been in a lot of cars, and yet I cannot manufacture a car. Some things don't transfer.

Luckily, my actors did not know how to act in a musical, so we were all on equal footing. They were mostly nine-year-olds.

I chose Disney Cinderella Kids, a 30-minute one-act adaptation of the Disney movie (not to be confused with Disney Cinderella Jr., a 45-minute one-act adaptation of the Disney movie) for the following reasons:

1) It has no set changes.
2) All the songs are basically the same, and therefore easy to learn.
3) It is not a good musical. I didn't want to ruin a good musical.

The downside I didn't anticipate was:
1) I WILL HAVE THE SHOW TUNES FROM DISNEY CINDERELLA KIDS STUCK IN MY HEAD FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

The reason that going into this musical-directing experience was stressful and scary was I just had no idea what to expect. It was an unknown-unknowns (do people still make fun of that Rumsfeld quote? I feel that it not only makes sense but explains my own mental state in many instances) situation. So the good news is, if/ when I direct next year's annual musical, I'll be much further along on the learning curve.* And if I cast some of the same kids, maybe they will be too. If the kids learned nothing else from this experience, I hope they now realize:

- You must speak loud enough for the audience to hear you. If you don't speak loud enough for the audience to hear you, the audience will not hear you.

- You must face the audience. The audience cannot see you when you are not facing them. This was SO much more difficult for my actors to put into practice than I would have anticipated.

- You can't stand in front of other cast members. The audience cannot see other cast members when you stand in front of them. Come to think of it, most of these lessons are less about stage acting and more about the nature of physical space.

- You have to be in character the entire time you're on stage. If you are on stage, you are a mouse. You don't revert back into a second grader just because you're not currently saying lines. I realized how explicitly I needed to teach this a week or so into rehearsal when I reminded The King (a second grader) to stand like The King in the middle of a scene (he was doing head-rolls and flapping his arms around at the time, which seemed distinctly not king-like) and he said, "but it's not my line!"

And what did I learn from directing a children's musical?

- If you want to direct a musical, you should make sure your school has budgeted for a musical.

- My coworkers are amazing, and have lots of weird stuff in their homes like decorative pumpkins and real trumpets, which they will lend out as props to make up for the fact that the musical has no budget.

- If you lend kids your own personal dresses to wear as costumes, you will never get those dresses back.

- In the weeks leading up to a show, the director is WAY more nervous than the actors. The director has frequent stress dreams in which it's the day of the show and no one has costumes or knows their lines. The daily experience of rehearsal will only make these stress dream scenarios seem more likely and plausible. (The director will also have a stress dream the week after the show in which she forgets to order pizza for the cast party. The director has a lot of stress dreams).

- But when it's time for the show the director knows that they are going to be perfect. And the actors want to pee their pants.

- But THEN when they actually get on stage in the combined gym-auditorium and the curtain rises to reveal several rows of folding chairs containing their parents and teachers... THEN the actors will absolutely bring it and be just as perfect as their director knew they would be.

- The #1 gimmick every show needs is a first grader holding a trumpet that is larger than her torso. This is what America wants.

Since I think it would be weird and illegal to post pictures of my kids on a public blog, I will leave you with a photo of the mouse ears I made out of cardboard (remember the thing about the budget?) and you can just try to picture what they would look like on some children singing Bibbidy-Bobbidy-Boo.

*Puns on the title of this blog never intentional.

Some quotes

I forgot I had a blog. .

Since I forgot I had a blog, I haven't been writing. But my students have still been saying the most hilarious things every day, and sometimes they cause me to unwittingly say hilarious things back. Here are a few examples.

Things I have said to children recently that I never thought I'd have the occasion to say:

"You're not reading. You're using your book as a guitar."

"I've been sneezing since before you were born."

"You left your shoes in the bathroom? Oh, you left only one shoe in the bathroom."


A thing I regularly say to children in school that I wish someone would regularly say to me, just in life:

"You need to take a few minutes to think about your choices."


Best thing I've shouted into the boy's bathroom:

"If you want to play basketball, put on your clothes and get out here."

Best description of how a first grader spent their spring break:

"What I did over break is go to a place called Cracker Barrel a lot of times."

Five of the best attempts by fifth graders to earnestly explain that dogs are not born wearing clothes:*

"It is not acquired because maybe not all of the dogs in the poodle's family wear clothes and paint their nails."
"The poodle parents didn't have a bow on their head."
"The dress is acquired because the poodle didn't just pop out of its mother's stomach with a dress on."
"A baby pup is not born with a barrette nor clothing so you know it is acquired." (This is from one of the toughest boys in the grade and I just love it.)
"It didn't come from the puddle [sic.] parents."

Best explanation of why scars are an acquired trait that sounds like something your grandfather would whisper to you in an epic speech from his death bed:

"The scars is going to come up later in life."


Best verbal summary of the Wizard of Oz by an eleven-year-old:

"The girl had her puppet fish thing and I think they were in California and they got lost because there was a storm."

* If you want context... I gave some science homework where the assignment was to identify inherited and acquired traits in pictures of animals. One of the pictures was of a poodle, and the poodle has wearing clothes. Grading this homework made me realize that I needed to clarify to my students that the clothes you wear are not considered a physical trait, and also made me realize that my students are ridiculous. I read 60 explanations of why a poodle is not born wearing clothes.

Fire and Ice

Or: Thoughts for a Non-Snow Day

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

This week in PD, which is an acronym I always expect people to know but is apparently just teacher jargon, so this week in Professional Development, we have been focusing on emotional constancy. It means keeping a sense of calm no matter what happens in your classroom. This morning in our weekly meeting, we talked about how you can create emotional constancy by establishing consistent routines and by planning your lessons and procedures in a way that anticipates the unexpected.

Then I almost burned the school down.

Let's back-track. Today was a school day in name only. Our fine city got a good 4-6 inches of snow last night. It would have been alright if they didn't cancel school but did plow the roads. It would have been sort of alright if they didn't plow the roads but did cancel school. You can probably figure out what combination of road-plowing and school-cancelling occurred. We ended up with less than half our students in the building at any point today, with most coming late, leaving early, or both.

Since I couldn't teach the lesson I'd prepared to only half the kids, I decided science class should just be crazy experiment day. I was so excited about having 15-child classes (Montessori School! Summer Camp! A dream!) that I decided to be ambitious. The two projects I thought of that I could scrounge up materials for during the morning were: 1) wood-and-spork catapults, to tie into our simple machines unit, and 2) boiling down soda to see how much sugar is in it, to tie into our phase change unit and my own agenda about making my kids not get diabetes. NB that I came up with all of this in about an hour and did not pre-test anything. (Also NB that the soda I used was Orange Sunkist, which I feel like makes the rest of this story that much worse.)  In retrospect, my reasoning seems to have gone along the lines of: What should I have the kids do while I monitor this boiling liquid on a hot plate? I should let them -- no, require them to propel things around the room. I should also give them push pins!!

I teach two science classes in a row. In the first group, we set up our soda and watched it start to boil, and then had a nice time with our catapults and my friend Bill Nye (who most of the children had not heard of, but would probably now equate with Einstein based on the shock I expressed at their ignorance). I checked on the soda every few minutes and it didn't seem to be evaporating noticeably. Anticipating their disappointment at the failure of our experiment, I redoubled my efforts with the catapult activity. I built my own catapult and challenged them to a contest. Erasers flew. Children laughed. Everyone learned about levers. It was a great day in my 15-child Montessori class.

And then we saw the smoke.

It went from normal steam to crazy billowing sugar-smoke in about three seconds. The room filled with the smell of roasted marshmallows and emergencies, and the smoke seemed to be moving deliberately toward the smoke detector, as if out of defiance. I rushed over to unplug the hot plate, move the pot, and open all the windows, while my little fifth grade volunteer fire fighters started using the plastic bins on their tables to disperse the smoke. I prayed that I would not be the one responsible for sending the entire school (well, half the school, but still) out onto the un-shoveled sidewalks without their snow boots.

By some miracle, the alarm did not go off. I lined the kids up and let them look at the burnt corn syrup sludge as they filed out the smoke-filled room. They may or may not be less apt to drink soda now. They may or may not have a better understanding of evaporation. I may or may not have maintained emotional constancy. In my second class, I had to release all the kids with asthma, and we did not boil any soda.

My hair still smells like burning Sunkist.



Post Script: This does not fit anywhere in the above narrative, but I just have to document that we ended our day with a school-wide dance party, and I saw an 8th grader who is approximately seven feet tall dancing with a kindergartner who is approximately seven inches tall, and now I can only experience positive emotions for the rest of my life.

Thoughts for a Snow Day

It's an age old question: Who gets more excited about snow days... kids, or their teachers? I would like to revise this question to: Who feels more like they need this particular snow day to physically live* after a particularly insane week of 14 hour days?**

Me!

Snow Day!!!!

Yesterday evening a gaggle of us were reveling in the excitement of Snow Day Eve at a pub and the server was just like, "you're teachers, aren't you?"

This is the best kind of snow day because the blizzard is not starting until this afternoon, meaning I got to use this morning for rare, sanctified snow day activities like grocery shopping and visiting the bank. The bank!

Here are some odds and ends that I wanted to share on this special occasion:

1. On Wednesday, my favorite first-grader, a.k.a Mitzie, a.k.a. The Robot, plopped herself down at breakfast and demanded: "Do you want to see my new dance?" Obviously, yes. She stood up and proceeded to do... THE ROBOT. She kept up the routine for the entire half hour of breakfast ("May. I. Put. This. In. The. Trash. Can. Please.") and she was good at it, too. I'm a little bit scared.

2. In science I'm teaching the 5th graders about "engineering and design features." We did a project where they try to keep raw spaghetti from breaking by wrapping it in soft things and putting it in an envelope. The deal was that if their spaghetti didn't break after we dropped it on the ground and slammed it with a heavy book, I would mail the package to myself and bring it back in to see if it could withstand the U.S. Postal Service.

Maybe I let them use too many soft things, or maybe I didn't slam the book down hard enough, or maybe my kids are young engineering geniuses but... none of the spaghetti broke.

I will be mailing 16 envelopes (8x11") of spaghetti home to myself.

3. One of the 5th grade boys has started -- earnestly and unprompted -- bringing me apples. He gets me one from the cafeteria and brings it up to me while I'm setting up the science room. I tried to explain to him why it's funny but he didn't get it.

4. My favorite thing about working in a school is the time we got an email from HR requesting that our time-sheets not be filled out in crayon.

Happy Snow Day/ Regular Day, probably, for the majority of the you reading this.

*Next week in our figurative language unit, we're teaching about hyperbole. I am going to be the best hyperbole teacher in the entire universe.

**Earlier this week I had a dream that I was driving a car without brakes. When I woke up I was just angry about how unsubtle the symbolism was. I thought we were more creative than that, subconscious. 

Fifth Graders Discuss Taxes

I have never been so excited to talk about taxes.

That is the focus of the new social studies unit we just started. As an intro to the unit, I gave the kids a pre-quiz to see what they already know about taxes.  I want to give the kids pre-quizzes for everything now.

Below I have transcribed the questions and the most interesting/ amusing of the answers, plus occasional editor's commentary.

Who has to pay taxes?

• The people who pay taxes are your parents and older sisters.
• A person who lives by themselves and if you buy a bed. 
• People who work or for instances moms and dads. Maybe someone who lives alone and has a job. [I think the word you are looking for here is "adults."]
• The common people who work and have houses. Rich people also have to pay taxes but they get less money to pay.
• Our parents pay taxes when they buy us things.

What are taxes used for?

• Taxes are used for the government to fix problems about so and so. 

Are taxes good or bad?

• I think that taxes are bad because nobody would want to pay an extra $2.83 for a $10 skirt. [This came from a boy/ aspiring football player who as far as I can tell has never bought a skirt, sales tax or no, but hey, way to reject heteronormativity, kid!]
• They can be bad if you don't pay them. The ISS can hunt you down. When you don't pay you get threatening messages to pay the governor. It is not optional.

What have you heard adults you know say about taxes?

• "You are too young to know about taxes."
• I have heard my dad say that when he has to pay for taxes they are too much. Also "OMG somebody help me."
• I've heard them say that Deval Patrick is going to raise I think it was income tax. [ For you non-Massachusettsans (wow, lord, is that the word for people who live in Massachusetts?), that is 100% correct. I just put this here so you could be duly impressed with this fifth grader.)
• "Oh, we have to pay taxes."
• Adults around me say that "geese my taxes are due." [I cannot stop laughing out loud at this. Is anyone else picturing a menacing human-size goose IRS agent knocking on the door? Or maybe a man in a park talking to some geese about his financial troubles? "Geese, you just don't understand."]

What questions do you have about taxes?

• Why doesn't upper class pay more?
• Can kids do taxes? [Remember, kids, stay safe and don't do taxes.]

Then of course, there's the not funny part. Several kids wrote things like "why do you lose your house if you don't pay taxes?" A few kids said:

• My mom says it is good because that money people pay the government gives her money or coupons I think and it's helpful.
• [Adults I know know say] That taxes goes to them because they don't work.
• Taxes are good because it helps adults pay for what they don't have the money to buy.

I'm both intrigued and a little nervous about the conversations we are going to have, given that many kids wrote things in the vein of "taxes are bad, why do we have to give away our money?" while other kids, like those above, clearly know themselves to be the recipients of welfare. 

... Or maybe my fifth graders can solve the fundamental and seemingly intractable disagreements from which our nation's current political polarization stems. 

I will keep you updated.

Scenes They Don't Show in the Teacher Recruitment Videos

Today I had to be an authority figure in the midst of the worst vomit situation I've ever witnessed. That's all I can say about that. That's all I can say.

For real. It's invisible.

Sometimes I have trouble telling whether I’m awake or not. This is an actual problem that I have.

Since I was a kid I’ve had weird sleep/ dream issues: lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and something that I don’t know the name for but it goes like this: I am asleep, having a dream. I am doing normal real-life stuff, and then this thought occurs to me, either prompted by some strange event or just the subtle sensation that something is off–the thought “is this a dream?” So I pinch myself, and then I say “no, not a dream, definitely felt that,” except I didn’t actually feel the pinch, I just dream-felt it. This self-deception is airtight. I’ve heard every trick in western culture for determining whether you’re dreaming or not... And then I’ve internalized these tricks into my subconscious. It may be impossible to focus on text if you’re in a dream, but it is eminently possible to tell yourself “hey, I just focused on that text!” in a dream. 


My breakfast duty this morning was just absurd enough to raise some questions about my state of consciousness. As loyal readers will remember, I monitor first grade breakfast, which is an adorable way to start the day. Jaiden* always shows up first. Jaiden eats breakfast at home every morning and it’s always Cheerios. He and I have this running joke where I ask what he ate, and then I guess two things that aren’t Cheerios, and then I guess Cheerios. January 8 and this has not gotten old. This morning Jaiden came in walking like a Sherpa, buckling under the weight of his backpack. “What's in your backpack?” I asked (a rare departure from routine). I had to ask him to speak up twice before I understood his answer. “Sausages!” he shouted. “Your backpack is heavy because it’s full of sausages?” I asked. He said yes.

The next child to arrive was Angela. She told me it was her birthday. Then she asked if she could go give her teacher something from her backpack. “What's in your backpack?” I asked. “A penny and a raisin” she said. “You have a penny and a raisin in your backpack?” I asked. She said yes. She said it was a project and pulled out what looked like a thermos wrapped in a shopping bag. "The penny didn't do anything," she said. I asked Jaiden if his sausages were also part of an experiment but he laughed at me like I was the absurd one. Background investigation reveals that the first graders have not been assigned science projects.

Since I'm not actually the protagonist in a picture book, there was not a third child with a strange object in their backpack to complete the rule of three. But we’re not done yet. Soon after I told Angela to put away her penny and her raisin, Dalani came in. Before she even put her backpack down, she marched up to me. It was urgent. “Have you ever tried sausage muffins?” she demanded. I told her I hadn’t. She informed me that they’re great. I told her to talk to Jaiden.

The moment when I actually did have to pinch myself was when Lionel started delivering the following monologue to his classmate, which I copied down verbatim,** you’re welcome. Lionel is a seven-year-old boy, and in about two minutes he said everything a seven-year-old boy says. None of these comments on their own is at all remarkable, but smashed together like this… I want to award him The Most Seven-Year-Old Boy in America:

“One time my brother opened my brain and put trash inside and closed it back up. And my brain was full of trash. It was so gross. Today I’m going to make a whole machine. For real. It’s invisible. Frederick and me are going to make it. And I’m going to change my name to his name. Can you keep a secret? One time I saw a dog talk.”

Verbatim, people, except for a part that I missed somewhere in the middle that involved him angrily repeating “five thousand dollars! Five thousand dollars! No, real five thousand dollars!” I think that is the price to see his whole machine.

I had a really good day after that where I made fifth graders understand "The Most Dangerous Game" and then I got to show Planet Earth to third graders. The only thing better than watching a pack of 500 dolphins*** is watching a classroom of third graders watch a pack of 500 dolphins.

Whatever all that was, I never did wake up.

*Of course I always change names, but this one is a cop out. One third of the boys at my school are named some form of Jaden.

**This is the real reason I carry a clipboard.

***Actually the collective noun for dolphins is school or team. My friends recently turned me on to the best page on Wikipedia. An array of hedgehogs. A zeal of zebras. A business of ferrets. I think the collective noun for third graders is the same as for gorillas: A whoop of third graders/ gorillas.