Wheatzie

One Thanksgiving about 20 years ago, I made brownies. “They taste like….” my younger brother said, chewing around a piece carefully as he furrowed his brow in concentration, hoping to find just the right word, “…they taste like paint .” I snapped my fingers and nodded because he’d done it.   He’d found the right word.   Even though I had never actually tasted paint, not even one tiny lick of the wall when I was a little girl, they did.   Those brownies tasted like paint. There were a lot of excuses made for me that day from well-meaning members of my extended family:   the oil was probably bad; the butter might’ve been salted; maybe the chicken that had laid the particular egg that I’d used in the recipe had been feeling a little “off” that day… “Or maybe she just sucks at baking,” my older sister suggested as she floated through the kitchen to refill people’s drinks. Well, of course she would say that.   She was the one hosting Thanksgiving that year...

My boys once had a neighborhood friend we all grew to love. Notice how I said that:   grew to love.   It took a couple of years. When he was just a little guy, probably three years old, he would come toddling into our yard while my 1-year-old was playing with the big toy dump truck that one of his aunts had gotten him for his birthday.   He would swiftly grab it from my son, who was a pretty laid-back kid.   My son’s eyes would grow wide when he realized what was happening, and my son would snatch back the truck that he had been playing peacefully with for the last 30 minutes.   The neighbor kid would look up at me and say accusingly, “Jay won’t share!!!” I would do what any good mother trying to teach her children valuable life lessons in a somewhat- functioning society would do: shrug my shoulders and suggest the neighbor boy play with a different toy or go home and play with his own. It didn’t take long for the neighbor kid to realize that he wasn’t ...

Last Friday marked the conclusion of the first week of school.  It wasn’t a full week, but it was close since we started on Tuesday.  A few teachers wanted to complain about that— The first week of school usually starts on a Thursday to ease us all in! —until I reminded them that if we’d done it that way, we would have had to start the Thursday before to get in all the required days. Unpopular opinion that’s probably better left unspoken but I’m not too good at that: Teachers will always find something to complain about.   Always. Fridays are my favorite day of the week.   Even though it’s a school day, there’s such a festive feel in the air: fun music floats from classrooms as you walk down the hallway; the kids have an extra pep in their step; recesses are a little longer; a word search might take the place of pages in the grammar book. We have this deal at our school where teachers can pay $1 each Friday to wear jeans, and at the end of the year, we giv...

The summer before my first professional teaching job, I spent most of my nights going to bars with friends and most of my days struggling to wake up by 7:55 to hurriedly shower and, fingers crossed, make it to my job as a preschool teacher’s aide by 8 AM. I was subleasing an apartment situated right next to the preschool, so to get to work I just had to walk across the shared parking lot, but you’d be surprised at how little the benefit of that tiny commute did to help me actually make it to work on time. I had just graduated from college and quit working at Walmart, the job I’d known and loved the past five years, to focus more on my future career in education.   (Yes, you read that correctly.   It took me 5 years to graduate college with a teaching degree—and a minor in Spanish, let’s not forget—but only because I always go above and beyond and I just wanted to make sure I was really smart before I left.) [Side note:   Working at Walmart was so fun. Although I wasn...

A few weeks ago (probably the same week as the events in this post happened), my principal told another teacher and me that he was probably going to have to call school off for the next day since we were almost down to 86% of total school-wide attendance due to illness.  Apparently when 14% of the student population is out sick, you get a free day. “Why 86%?” I asked him.   “Isn’t that kind of a random number?” “What would you prefer to make it?” he asked me. “I don’t know.” I shrugged.   It was about 1 PM and I felt great. I never get sick. So the prospect of sipping a celebratory whiskey barrel-aged beer that evening in anticipation of an unexpected day off sounded pretty darn good.   “99%?” He rolled his eyes and walked away, the voices of the other teacher and me trailing behind him as we volunteered to keep our own kids—who attend the school in which we teach—home the next day in order to fudge the numbers a little bit and earn that reward day off. It remind...

Yesterday a student asked me if he could go to the bathroom.  Lately I’ve been moving away from my obnoxious “I don’t know, CAN YA?” response, which I use solely to make fun of those teachers who say it seriously to their students in order to turn an innocent word usage error into a barf-worthy “teachable moment.”   You know the type.   Anyway, I’m afraid if I do it too much, the irony will be lost and the kids will actually think I’m one of those teachers. Instead, I said to Bobby, “You’re in middle school. You’re too old to have to ask to go to the bathroom. Just let me know when you’re going so I don’t lose track of you.” Bobby nodded his head—kind of gravely, I thought at the time—and went on his way. About 5 minutes later, one of the girls lifted her head from the essay I had assigned them. She looked around the room.   “Where’s Bobby?” she asked. I shrugged my shoulders.   “Who knows,” I murmured, my attention focused on the thesis statement i...