You Know You're a Teacher When...

You know you're a teacher when:

"You can hear 25 voices behind you and know exactly
which one belongs to the child out of line.

You have 25 people that accidentally call you mom/dad at one time or another.

You walk into a store and hear the words "It's
Miss/Mr. _________" and know you have been spotted.

You can eat a multi-course meal in under twenty-five minutes.

You've trained yourself to go to the bathroom at two distinct times of the day: lunch and recess.

You start saving other people's trash, because most likely, you can use that toilet paper tube or plastic butter tub for something in the classroom.

You want to slap the next person who says "Must be nice to work 7:15 to 3:15 and have summers off".

You can tell if it's a full moon, [or a storm's coming] without ever looking outside.

You know that unspeakable evils will befall you
if anyone says "Boy, the kids sure are mellow today."

You can't pass the school supply aisle without
getting at least five items!

You ask your friends if the left hand turn he just
made was a "good choice or a bad choice."

You find true beauty in a can full of perfectly
sharpened pencils.

You understand instantaneously why a child behaves
a certain way after meeting his or her parents."

A person can probably never know how true this is until they are actually a teacher... but wow. So true. :)

From the Mouth's of Fourth Graders

A letter to a pen pal: "and yep my grandma fell down again but she is ok i think they shood put bars on the side of her bed."

Responding to a prompt regarding why our national flower is a rose, and if they'd choose a different flower:

"I could not pick a different flower because it is my mom's favorite flower and color. I think it was a good choice for the country because the state bird won't eat it."

"Because it is like everyone's favorite flower and my moms and my aunts favorite flower too and they smell good and I like it too.

And like mostly everyones mom likes them so thats why they picked it."

Answering the test question: What kind of evidence has been found that Native Americans lived here so long ago?

"Plimith Rock."

apologies

If you haven't noticed, I more or less suck at keeping on top of the whole blogging thing. Really, someday I have plans of totally rocking it, but until life allows me the occasion to do so, please know that my life is anything but boring... or at least anything but uneventful. BUT, while I'm here, I might as well compose some kind of genius right? :)

Lately:

I checked out ten juvenile fiction books from the library the other day and have been working on nibbling my way through them. So far, I've finished "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, "The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" by E.L. Konigsburg, and "The Matchlock Gun" by Walter C. Edmonds. My favorite of the the three was probably the Giver just because it presents some ideas that were completely new to my mind such as not knowing what a hill, or snow, or birthday is... but it definitely left something to be desired at the end. I've discovered the Newbery book shelves in the children's section and am going to continue working my way through those. I'm currently partially through "The View From Saturday" by E.L. Konigsburg, "The Tale of Despereaux" by Kate DiCamillo, and "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh" by Robert C. O'Brien. Some of them I've read, some I haven't, but can't remember the gist of most of them, so a reread is definitely in order :)

I plan to hike the "Y" tonight with Hillary and perhaps some other people if they can stop whining and think about how cool it will be to watch a movie on my laptop once we reach the top.

I got a new cell phone: A black Sanyo Katana II.

My fourth graders will be taking their CRT's next week (pray for them. they need all the intellectual, spiritual and any other kind of help they can get.)

For the first time since school started I have all of next week planned to a "T". This is due to the fact that I had less to plan because of all our testing, but nevertheless it feels great to not have the guilt hanging over my head of "you should probably finish planning or you're going to hate yourself next week when you have to stay four hours after school to finish planning because you didn't on the weekend and you are already exhausted because your kids were off the wall today because you didn't plan and they didn't get it." All I have to worry about is that stack of probably 200 papers on my desk that I have to grade. Ah teaching.