I used to be one of those people that things just happened for. It was part of the innocent charm I was born with: without even realizing I was doing it, I simply believed good things would happen for me, and they did. I’ve mentioned before that I was a person who ambled through life wearing rose-colored glasses, stopping to smell every flower. I didn’t think about failure. I didn’t really think about anything. I walked blissfully through life, letting good things befall me because I didn’t question that they would. And they always did. My friends both marveled at it and hated me for it. Senior year of high school, I had no doubt that I would be voted homecoming queen. So when the assistant principal’s voice crackled through the intercom and she started announcing the ten girls who had been chosen by their peers to be on homecoming court, I sat back in my chair and waited patiently. I knew I would hear my name. I wasn’t even s...
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...
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...
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