snapshots: another school year begins.

I'm back! I was gone a lot longer than what I thought I'd be. Like, two weekends ago I said: I'll be visiting everybody this weekend! But now it is 2 weekends later and I am just now able to breathe. This is because Real Teaching started for my department this week, and the week before that we had to do a bunch of stuff to get ready for Real Teaching. And it was 100 degrees fahrenheit every day. And all I could do when I got home was take off my shoes from my swollen feet, and then make me a big bowl of ice cream, and then lay on my sofa in a heat/ice cream-induced semi-coma.

But I think I survived. We'll see what happens after I hit publish post on this. In the meantime, look! I come bearing gifts! In the form of strange people under the age of 12. I do have stories about strange people over the age of 12 also, but I'm not psychologically ready to write them down yet.

I. Kindergarten is scary.

Part 1: The Noodle Kid.

Monday-Wednesday at car rider duty the first week of school, a little Kindergarten boy was pulled screaming and crying from the car by his mom. "I don't want to go! I don't want to go!" And then he'd fall to the ground. He's one of those kids who's discovered that turning yourself into a limp noodle and refusing to walk is usually a good way to drain adults and get them to do what you want. I bet this has worked with his mom a bajillion times.

But ha! He wasn't dealing with his mom! He's at SCHOOL, where we have professionally trained Noodle Kid Handlers. So every morning the first week of school, the Noodle Handlers were ready and waiting for him to arrive, at which point they'd grab him by the arms and legs and carry him, helpless and screaming, to his classroom. And every morning all the car rider duty teachers told the mom: "Go! Go! Drive away, as fast as you can! It's the only way you'll survive the entire school year!"

And every morning, the mom would wring her hands and reluctantly--sloooowly--drive away.

But by that Thursday, the Noodle Kid mysteriously disappeared into the mist. Our professional guess was that the Noodle Kid's mom probably tricked him into the car for the first 3 days of school and just ran out of ideas ("Hey, guess where WE'RE going today! DISNEYLAND!! Hurry up! Get in the car!") (and of course, every morning, she'd haul up to the school (NOT Disneyland, and those people are NOT Mickey Mouse)…he must have finally figured out he needed to morph into Noodle Kid BEFORE arriving at school. Noodle Kids are totally calculating like that.

Currently, we're all trying to decide if the Noodle Kid is the same person as the Runner Kid. I hear you really have to watch the Runner Kid. Runner Kid is just as calculating and slippery. He waits for the perfect moment and then...POW! POOF! Gone. And the only way you realize Runner Kid has left the room is when one of the other 5 year olds goes: "Hey, um, teacher. That boy just ran away again." And then the whole school of 1100 kids and teachers has to go on lock down for reconnaissance.

Part 2: Anxiety can cause spewage.

At the beginning of every school year, we have to test 200+ new Kindergarteners to find out if they need English as a Second Language services. One day, I got Anxious Child. Anxious Child cried and cried as I took him from his class to mine, and when we sat down with our little test, Anxious Child began to wail "Quiero vomitar! Quiero vomitar!" Except I could not understand Anxious Child because he was crying, so I thought he was saying, "I want to go to sleep! I want to go to sleep!" This made me get very serious with Anxious Child and I let him know very, very firmly: "No. This is school. We don't do that in school."

Finally, I figured out Anxious Child was actually screaming, "I want to vomit! I want to vomit!" and so I'd actually been letting Anxious Child know that we don't vomit at school ("Vomiting!! Are you vomiting?! There's no vomiting here! There's no vomiting in SCHOOL!!"). I quietly closed Anxious Child's test book and took him back to class for the day, telling him: "Look, if you want to vomit in school, fine. But we don't vomit in ESOL classrooms. There is noooo vomiting allowed in ESOL, ever."

See? They really don't pay teachers enough.

II. Kids = Weird.

Part 1: Kids are bad liars.

Heard through the grapevine: a 4^th grade girl, upset with her mom for going back to work after taking 4 years off to raise her children, tearfully told this story: "My mom is going back to work and now I have to go home alone and she's going to just leave the door open for me and some 4-legged boy is going to watch me but I'm really scared of that 4-legged boy because I don't know him."

And when the 4^th grade girl was asked, "Well, how about your neighbors? Can you go to your neighbor's house until your mom gets home?" The 4^th grade girl cried, "No! Because the neighbors are American and they don't like us." So the 4^th grade girl was told that someone would call her mom and talk to her about this situation. And this made the 4^th grade girl very, very anxious: "Nobody can talk to my mom because she only speaks Spanish."

And so we found someone who speaks Spanish to call the mom, who—upon receiving the phone call—said (in perfect English): "Yes, I'm going back to work, no, the door will not just be left open—I'll be home by the time she gets home—and we're actually good friends with Americans next door to us, they come over for dinner all the time. And I don't know WHO this 4-legged boy is."

I hear that, later? When they told the 4^th grade girl they'd found someone who spoke Spanish to call her mom ("Ummm…you called my mom???" she said nervously), she cracked under pressure and admitted she'd made it all up because she didn't want her mom to go back to work.

Part 2: Polish your carrots before or after class, please:

According to some upper grade level teachers, there are at least one or two 5th grade boys this year who sometimes get far-away looks in their eyes during class. At first, it was assumed they were daydreaming. But then, one day, a teacher discovered--to her horror--this was NOT what the far-away look was from. No. What the far-away look was being caused by was something that the teacher described as "polishing his carrot."

Further proof men should actually NOT be running the world. At any level.

III. Home & Garden TV is addictive.

Inspired by my addiction to HGTV over the summer, I did a total! room! makeover! in my classroom. In fact, I'm seriously considering writing to HGTV and telling them they should do a half-hour show for classroom makeovers. Except if they use my idea, they have to come to my house and makeover my bathroom and kitchen.

Those stackable cubes in the right hand corner? Lots of cussing involved when putting together. They don't tell you that in their directions, but they should. And they're still not together right--when I realized I'd forgotten to click on the backs of the cubes, I just said some nasty words that started with the letters g, f, and sh and shoved that motherf%$&*#(@!*$%# in a corner.

Note the PEACE sign on top of the storage cabinet. It's what I'm channeling this year. Our official ESOL class theme, if you will. After a week of teaching, it appears we'll need PEACE along with RESOLVE, PATIENCE, and PSYCHOTHERAPY as well.

Blurry because I was drunk when I took this. Kidding! I jest. I had actually just digested 15 Tums. They make me mellow. In a blurry way.

My work area. The memo board has pictures of my niece and nephew. I'm still thinking hard about the nephew picture, because he's on his stomach, naked. You can see his butt. Who doesn't love baby butts?? But 6 year olds find them hysterically funny, and I'm not sure my nephew would appreciate 6 year olds staring and laughing at his butt. It's too late--all my students have been exposed to his butt and they laughed, sorry T. But they did agree: it's a cute baby butt.

The gifted students used to come around and do cute little interviews with all the teachers about their favorite things, and then do write ups on them. And then the 5th graders would use the pictures to create special, avante garde portraits. And then everybody's pictures/interviews were hung in the main hallway.

Until, that is, the angry, vicious, drunk-on-power fire marshall decided to make rules (and enforce them) about what things you can and can't have in classrooms and school. Like, only 20% of your walls can be covered. And no fabrics. And no chairs with fabric. And no paper, anywhere. And no colors. No colors, no singing, no laughing, and CERTAINLY no happy feelings in schools. They all cause fires. And fires are bad.

If you scroll back up and take a look, you'll notice I violate Arbitrary Fire Marshall School Codes 1.1-54.5. I will take most of these down before the next fire marshall visit. Or not--sometimes I do like to flaunt my rebellion. It just depends on my mood.