Thursday, January 3, 2008

Top 10 Signs You're About To Go Back To Teaching

The top 10 signs it’s nearly time to return to school after the holidays.

10. You realize you’re going to have to have some kind of anticipation set for the first day, and a journal about New Year’s resolutions seems to fit the bill. Of course, you try to come up with an angle to make it unique. There are no unique angles to a journal about New Year’s resolutions. Some television show/Youtube/MySpace page somewhere has done them already.

9. You carefully re-examine all gifts received and begin parceling them out into things you will keep, and things which will be incorporated into later lessons. (Great-great-aunt Maddie’s knitted pot holders: an excellent example of the types of home-made crafts made necessary by the Great Depression?)

8. You carefully re-examine all gift-wrapping for useful bulletin board coverings/accents.

7. You carefully re-examine the imperative to have a brand-new bulletin board ready on the first day of the new semester.

6. You wonder if you couldn’t use the old bulletin board to teach some lesson about the past and the future.

5. You have seen “Juno” three times already, and you consider writing the film makers to 1) congratulate them on a very cute movie, and 2) offer your expertise for future film efforts regarding “real” teen dialogue.

4. Your pets/children no longer think it’s really neat for you to be home in the middle of the day.

3. You no longer think it’s neat to be home in the middle of the day with your pets/children.

2. Sleeping in (and being home before dark) has only made you more aware of what the house looks like in the daytime. What the hell is that thing under the bed, the size of a small rabbit, with the wispy bits and crunchy center? You don’t even eat in the bed. What IS it? And how did its offspring get under the couch?

1. You open up your school email for the first time in 2 weeks and find the district’s NEW and IMPROVED spam filters have failed to protect you from 72 or more pornographic spam emails sent under the heading “Staff Development.” At this point it still seems funny. Come March, not so much.

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