Happy Halloween!

"Oh Ms. Teacher, only you could pull off those tights."
Rough Translation: "You're a witch."


Male Student: Ms. Teacher, I LOVE your legs.
Class: *cricket cricket*
Male Student: I meant your tights!

Finding notes on the floor is my favorite thing. (2)

"I know that you can't help it, (I can't either), but you're still so sexy, ;) and always will be!"

How I feel now that I don't have lunch duty (for at least a term):

I also do really luxurious things like walk to the drinking fountain on the other side of the school that is cold and doesn't taste like rust to fill up my water bottle. 

Career Day

We had a career day last week. Students could come to school "dressed for success" which means dressed in the clothes of whatever future career they wanted.  There were lots of interesting careers. Most students just wore their dad's oil field hat (because actually getting to wear hats is the best thing that can happen to a junior high student).

One of my very best honors students came dressed in her mom's shirt from Denny's. I asked her if she wanted to be a waitress when she grows up and she said "Maybe".  This girl is smart. She understands the math more quickly than most of my students. She needs to go to college and be an engineer. More than likely she'll get a job working at Denny's as soon as she's old enough and then never even consider going to college because no one she knows went to college and college is expensive so why would she?

How do you tell a student whose parents never went to college that they are too good to not go to college?

Finding notes on the floor is my favorite thing.

I pretend to not care about the random drama going on in this school, but the truth is that I love every bit of it. It's like a really pathetic soap opera.

"I didnt know what love was until I met u bae PLZ dont tell Kaylee were together shell ruin it."

Are strange gifts better than no gifts?

The student who drew me this picture said on his way in to class "I was bored in my last class so I drew you a picture of a guy with a cone head."

It doesn't count as propaganda if it's true, right?

Actual words that came out of my mouth yesterday: "People who oppose the common core only oppose it because they are uneducated about the common core."

That was after a whole-class discussion about why we take tests and one student said "I hate the common core."

It's a good thing no one reads this blog or else I might have haters.

Nobody listens to anything I say.

I explain the directions for the day. I write the directions on the board. I explain the directions again. I have them turn to their partners and answer questions about the directions (like "What do we do with our tests when we're done with them?" "What voice level is appropriate?" etc).  I ask individual students questions about the directions. I read the directions aloud one more time.

I still have 7 kids per class try to hand their test to me when they finish it instead of leaving it on their desks like I asked.

What test day feels like to me:

No teaching for the entire day? Yes please!

That Time I Swore in Class

*this blog contains language that may be inappropriate for children, unless those children go to a junior high, and then the language is actually pretty tame*

I would be lying if I said I don't have a bit of a potty mouth.  I feel like teaching junior high makes it so there is a constant chorus of "What the hell?!" ringing in my brain. I never know why the crazy shenanigans are happening at any given moment in my class, but for the most part I try to keep my swearing on the inside of my brain.

One day we had a lock down drill. It was actually super scary.  They always tell us when to expect fire drills but we hadn't heard anything about a lock down. My brain started thinking about how I was going to have to sacrifice myself to save these kids when some crazed gunman came barging into the room... It was not a good experience.

When the speakers came on and announced that we were in a lock down I rushed my kids to the back corner of the classroom and hushed them. I was trying really hard to look like I wasn't losing my cool.  After about 10 minutes of silence one of my students timidly asked "Ms. Teacher, where is Michael?" I blinked at that student for a second and then realized in a panic that Michael had taken the hall pass and was somewhere roaming the halls during the terrifying lock down. I wish I could say that I handled this situation with a calm and collected suaveness.  Here's how I actually handled the situation: by yelling "SHIT!"

It's a good thing that this  was just a lock down drill and not an actual lock down because my class lost it.  "DID YOU JUST SWEAR?!" "Oh my gosh, I am texting everyone I know immediately." "I didn't think you were the type of teacher that swears." "My mom makes me pay her a dollar when I say that word." "I have so much more respect for you now."

I didn't know what to do about Michael so I army-crawled my way over to my desk and typed a quick email to the administration explaining that I lost a student.  Don't worry, Michael came back after the lock down ended. He said he spent the lock down in another teacher's room and they ate candy and played on their phones.  Everyone told Michael that even though he got candy and played on his phone he missed out because they got to hear the teacher swear.

Eventually I just started pretending like the swearing incident never occurred. Anytime one of my students brought it up (which happened a lot) I would gasp, all horrified, and say "I would NEVER speak with that kind of language," I figure if it comes down to me or my students people are most likely going to choose to believe me, even if I am lying liar.

How I feel when you sleep in my class instead of taking notes and then ask me questions after you fail the test:

School pictures are today.

They're every bit as awful as a teacher as they were when I was in junior high. Of course I wake up this morning with a face that is zit central and frizzy hair. People tell junior high kids that these things get better when you get older, but it's all a lie.

9th grade boys talking about the pains of shaving:

I am pretty sure I have more hair on my face than you do.

Big black balls

was a topic of conversation in my class yesterday. Yeah.

We were talking about lines and how solutions are the same thing as points and how there are an infinite number of solutions (points) on any line.  I had a picture of a line up and we were naming points on the line and I was putting a black dot on each point a student named on the line. Suddenly one (very innocent) student understood what I was getting at and raised his hand and said "There are an infinite number of big black balls all over that line!" My class (and I) lost it.  For the rest of the day any time I asked how many solutions a linear equation has I would have a chorus of "infinite big black balls" shouted back at me. I guess at least they'll never forget.

I did really well on my evaluations.

It seems like that would be a good thing and honestly I am proud of myself because it took a lot of work, but I can feel some of the faculty members turning on me.  "Way to make the rest of us look bad" kinds of things.

One of the things that surprised me the most when I started teaching was how political everything is.  I wrote this huge long post about the politics at a public school but then I realized that someday someone might read this blog and connect it back to me and be offended by it and make my life awkward at school, so I deleted it.

See? Because of the politics in the school I can't say what I think about the politics in the school.