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.