1) Your hairstyle begins to
follow this continuum:
2) You buy things and have them
shipped to the school so you don’t have to lug them from your house.
3) You can easily spot the
difference between someone reading a book in their lap and texting.
Nobody smiles at their lap.
4) You find yourself going into
Teacher Mode outside of school. Or at least wanting to. For instance, I spoke
to quite possibly the rudest pharmacist in the history of rude pharmacists on
Tuesday morning, and I was very, very close to issuing her a lunch detention.
5) Your classroom becomes more and
more like a separate apartment. My students joke that I live at school, since I
have a microwave, mini fridge/freezer, Keurig, a couch, lamps, pillows,
blankets, and cleaning supplies. It’s one of those jokes that is both funny and
sad.
6) You are able to have extremely
enthusiastic conversations about microwaveable meals, discounts, and shoes with
no heels.
7) You do your grocery shopping
before school now at the grocery store near your school. And you run into other
teachers there.
8) People say you’re patient,
but you know that really you’re almost completely desensitized to the frustration of nobody
listening to you or doing anything you ask.
9) The people who work the cell
phone, skin care, and makeup kiosks at the mall don’t even bother approaching
you because you have perfected Teacher Walk, a gait whose velocity and solemnity
is exceeded only by military marching.
10) Being able to fix the copier
gives you a profound sense of purpose.
11) Not being able to fix the
copier makes you want to rear back and kick it, no matter who's watching.
12) You dread Valentine’s Day
and Halloween. And if either of them falls on a Friday, GOD HELP US ALL.
13) Stress makes you
hallucinate. Like when I saw a dumpster rising above the school rooftop to be
emptied and I thought it was a dinosaur, or when I saw this whatever-it-is in
the faculty parking lot and for weeks thought it was a dead baby squid.
14) You find yourself using bad
words outside of school way more than you normally would just because you can.
15) You don't realize until you get weird looks from strangers in public that you:
- Are still wearing a macaroni necklace/ tie-dye faculty t-shirt/binder clip in your hair that you were using in place of a hair tie
- Have stray pen marks covering your forearms, making you resemble an overzealous kindergartner
- Have one or more articles of clothing on backward
16) You’ve gone to more sports
games, concerts, competitions, and shows than anyone you know this year. FOR
FREE.
17) You can have an angry parent
eating out of the palm of your hand in less than fifteen minutes. Or you can
have an angry parent continue to hate you and be emotionally unaffected, both
of which are admirable.
18)You find texts on your phone
in the morning that people sent you at 9:14 PM. You were probably well into REM
by then.
19) You start wondering what the adults you know were like when they were the ages of your current students. And sometimes it scares you.
I drew the picture for number 1 on the back of a worksheet that I am returning to a student tomorrow.
I'm not crossing it out.
I feel fine about it.
Love,
Teach
