Winners and Losers of the 2018-2019 School Year

When I catch up with family or friends, often people ask me, “How’s teaching going?” I usually say things are going well, and we move on to other topics like the weather, or my new book idea, Rachel’s Art of the Deal, which is of course based on Donald Trump’s book and includes lots of tips and tricks about deals including pinky swears, crossing your fingers under the table, and obscure but totally legal deal tips. (So far no publisher has been willing, but when I get this printed, it will be HUUUGE.) I don’t avoid the topic of teaching because I’m not willing to share my thoughts, it’s more like I rarely can find the words to adequately explain it. How do you simply put into words what spending eight hours every day with a classroom full of eleven year olds is like? Of course, like many things, there are both joyful and difficult times. So, without further ado, I present to you the winners and losers of the 2018-2019 school year. 

Winner: My Students

After a few of my students consistently came to class tardy because they were talking to their friends in the hall, I had a chat with them about being on time. Unfortunately, the chat happened no more than half an hour before I was stopped on the way to class by one of my friends who wanted to catch up for a minute. By the time I made it to my hallway, the students I had talked to were standing in front of the line right outside my classroom with gigantic grins as they watched me speed down the hall as the bell rang. Luckily they were kind enough to leave a note on my computer, and neither of us was late after that. (That’s a lie. We were both late some days, but who’s counting?) 

Loser: Toll House

While we were reading a book in which a girl is dared to drink a raw egg, I felt the need to take a serious adult moment and let the kids know that they shouldn’t go around drinking raw eggs. I explained they could get salmonella poisoning, but also admitted to the fact that I certainly enjoy a good batch of cookie dough. (Excellent teachers contradict themselves, right?) I expected for the kids to also chime in about how they like cookie dough, but instead I saw a bunch of disgusted faces staring at me. Eventually a kid raised his hand and said, “Mrs. Neeley, you eat cookie dough? Someday we’re going to be looking in the newspaper and see you DIED because you ate COOKIE DOUGH?!” The unimpressed looks on their faces was almost enough for me to give up cookie dough for good. Good luck Toll House, but these kids will never be enjoying your finest product. 

Winner: Science Youtubers

After showing my students a video on Youtube of a guy doing a science experiment to start off our lesson, one of my students raised his hand and asked if he could see how many subscribers the Youtuber had. After checking, the boy burst out, enraged, “Seven thousand! WHAT?!? I post ACTUAL content! This guy is just posting science!!” My reply that maybe the student could start posting about science was quickly filed into the “boring adult comment” section and quickly ignored.   

Loser: Me

In the spring, a few giant trees were cut down on the field where my students go out to recess, and large branches were scattered everywhere. It was no concern to me at all, which was my first mistake. The students ran outside and began play colonists/American Indians which is apparently impossible without holding five feet long branches as walking sticks. Ah! My heart! They actually were paying attention in social studies! It took no longer than 7 minutes for the students to start arguing about who got to use the BEST sticks and who would be destined to the short, broken ones.  Sadly, my favorite management strategy of “let the students figure this one out” failed miserably as one day I noticed my students getting their lunches from the kitchen, walking straight to the garbage can to dump the entire tray, and sprinting outside to be one of the elite stick holders. I realized this was a time for me to step in. I followed the students outside, but regrettably I didn’t realize Usain Bolt was in my class, because once they were out the door they were already on the other side of the field, waving the sticks above their head like the Tusken Raiders from Star Wars. I called them over, along with the rest of the class who had just dumped their freshly made lunches into the dumpster and heartbreakingly realized they were too late to enjoy a blissful half hour of playing with branches, and let them all know that they were going to need to find a way to cooperate and share or the sticks would be banned. After a few minutes of healthy communication (yelling at each other and calling names) they came up with an agreement, and they were happy campers. I went inside feeling pleased as punch we worked that one out as a class, and there were no more problems with sticks after that. (Sidenote: there were MANY more problems with the sticks. After approximately 683 fights, 5 trillion tears, and three weeks of having discussions of  WHEN students could retrieve the sticks, WHO could use which stick, WHERE the students could hide the sticks, WHAT games they could play with the sticks, HOW they were going to locate the sticks after the pesky 4th graders had hidden them, etc. etc. etc., the sticks were banned and I made them play really boring and terrible things at recess like kickball and four square.)

Winner: Me

Teaching is the most difficult thing I have ever done. (This is a lie. After day 13 of the stick fiasco, I came home, discouraged and exhausted to find a PILE of snakes sitting on my porch steps. Going back outside was the most difficult thing any human being has accomplished to date.) But teaching is a lot easier when you’re surrounded by teammates who will go along with your Emperor’s New Groove Halloween costume, a room mom who thinks of the exact perfect way to decorate the classroom door, and a parent of a student who constantly brought me sodas after long days. I’m lucky to be surrounded by amazing people and an incredible class of students who were patient with me and taught me something new every day. The students I teach will always have a special place in my heart.   

HAGS!

2018 Christmas Card

Dear Friends and Family,

The annual argument continues in the Hardy household: who will get the most facetime in the family Christmas card? With my siblings having kids, applying for grad schools, baking mouth-watering treats for every family event, and my brother actually playing the clarinet that my parents bought for me after I abandoned it after only one year of use, it became clear to me that I would need to write my own card if I wanted to have my turn in the spotlight.

We began the year by moving into our new home. There are many perks of this wonderful apartment:  plenty of space, nice neighbors, homemade cinnamon rolls every Saturday morning, a seemingly never ending pantry, and a free trash service. I know what you’re thinking…. “Rachel, where did you find such a wonderful place? Can I put my name on a waiting list (because with a place that grand, how could there not be hundreds, if not thousands, of people wanting to live there) so I can live there, too? The simple answer would be no, because we live in my parents basement. (But a more complicated answer would be maybe, because technically there is a second bedroom we don’t use, and if my parents don’t read this letter then maybe we could lease out the bedroom for $3000 per month without them knowing, and I could quit my teaching job and become a retail tycoon) Anyway, we really did move into the basement, and whenever I mention it to my fifth grade class they all laugh because they imagine me as the stereotypical old person living in their parents basement, playing video games, and stealing their parents food. (I do go upstairs for random ingredients quite frequently, so they’re not too far off base) I know that living with your parents/in-laws gets a bad rap, but I was not joking about the cinnamon rolls. My dad makes them every Saturday and they are divine. Needless to say, things are going swimmingly.

The rest of the year brought some great things. In the beginning of February, my sister tried to get us tickets to see Hamilton, but was unsuccessful. Later that night I told Tyler that I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see Hamilton until I was very old. Little did I know that he and his family had tried getting tickets for us that morning and had actually gotten some! For the next three months, there was an unspoken agreement with me and everyone else in the world that Hamilton would be the only thing I would have conversations about unless there was a dire emergency. Being able to see it was a dream and the perfect surprise.

2018 included some fun trips for Tyler and me. We visited Denver in the spring, and Arizona in the fall. While in Arizona we went to the BYU game, which we expected them to lose but they did not, which gave us false hope for the rest of the season. We visited Washington D.C. in October, where I was dismayed to find that President Trump does not wander around the National Mall as he tweets. I had some things to chat with him about, and now my only hope is that the people with camp chairs and  sound systems outside the White House will yell my ideas to him with their microphones.

Fall also brought Thanksgiving, which Tyler and I have both agreed is truly the best holiday of the year. I spent the day before making pies, and when everyone was devouring them my mother-in-law told me they were so good that I could open my own bakery, so I was feeling pretty good about myself, to say the least. It was somewhere around the time I was debating what I should call my new bakery (I believe I was deciding between the names “Pies...because that’s the only thing I can bake” and “Mediocre Meals”) that my sweet nephew, who is allergic to eggs,  threw up all over the couch. He was having an allergic reaction. To the pies. An allergic reaction to the pies that had egg in them. An allergic reaction to the pies that when I was asked if they had egg in them, I said no. EVEN THOUGH THE FIRST STEP IN PUMPKIN PIE IS “BEAT EGGS LIGHTLY.” Yes, I had totally forgotten they had eggs in them, and if I had a time machine I would use it to go speak with past Rachel, who at 9 years old gave a church talk that discussed how President Gordon B. Hinkley once said that “Now is the time for revolution!!” instead of “revelation”, and inform 9 year old me that a moment a LOT more embarrassing than that would be coming. Actually, I guess I would probably just use the time machine to go back an hour and remind myself there certainly IS egg in the pie, but whatever. Luckily, I married into one of the greatest families of all time, and they were all very nice about the whole thing. If I had a time machine, I’d go back to when I was worried about my dating life and tell myself, “Don’t worry! Eventually you’ll find the greatest person ever and he has the kindest family ever!” I think the moral of this little tale is that we need to let whoever is in charge of inventing time machines know that I need one ASAP.

Merry Christmas! May you all get plenty of coverage in your family’s Christmas card.

Love,

The Neeleys

The New Karate Kid

When I was in college, at the beginning of each school year I would always joke with my friends that then would be the perfect time to “rebrand.” Most people moving into the apartment complex we had never met, so if we wanted to change something about our personality then would be the time. We would always joke about becoming the person in the complex who throws all the parties, or the person who has a very loud, controversial opinion on everything. The emphasis, of course, is on the word “joke” since every year of college my brand was almost always “only attend social gatherings that have plenty of food, leave early, and spend the rest of your time in sweats watching TV with your roommates and perfecting the lifelong quest of making a non-burnt quesadilla.” Now that another school year is almost upon us, I have been thinking about rebranding. There are a few different ways I’ve thought I could rebrand myself:

Karate Kid: Emmie’s awesome room mom had given her free passes for a karate class for teacher appreciation week, so this summer we went. This would be an excellent time to let you know that I know NOTHING about karate, except people break wooden boards and make loud “Hi-YA!” noises. I wondered on the drive over if anyone had every actually broken their hand trying to break the wooden board, or if I would be the first, and if they would put my picture up on their wall. (Hopefully the picture would be taken before the resident karate master got word of it and was jealous that somebody was finally getting their picture on the wall and challenged me to a karate duel) After one class I’m not quite sure if I can truly rebrand myself as “the karate kid,” and instead might be rebranded as the “please don’t make me stand in front of the class” person, but I do know some self-defense moves, and during meditation time while everyone had their eyes closed I made sure to peek around and check out who all the black belts were in case I ever find myself needing a sensei to aid me in an Ocean’s 11 scenario. I also learned that at the end of the class, everyone bows to each other and says, “Courtesy”, so sometimes I like to bow randomly to people and when they give me a confused look roll my eyes and say under my breath “Oh...must be a white belt.” (Hopefully the fact that I had to google the lowest karate belt while writing this doesn’t hurt my karate street cred)

The Movie Person: After this summer, it’s hard to imagine not rebranding myself as cinematic expert. Tyler and I love to go to the movies, and we always get popcorn. As we all know, concessions at the movie theater are astronomically priced. The popcorn is so expensive that I have often wondered if Cinemark is coating my popcorn with extra butter, or liquid gold. We found a new movie theater in Pleasant Grove called Water Gardens. We were first interested because the price of the tickets was cheaper, but as we got in line to get our popcorn I felt as excited as my 9 year old self when my dad told me he would show my how to use dial up internet if I cleaned my room. This movie theater lets you bring in any bowl you want from home and FILLS THE ENTIRE THING FOR ONE DOLLAR. I wasn’t quite sure if I was supposed to hug the manager or let him know that they could charge at least 6 dollars more for the purchase, but chose to instead say, “Thank you!”, but not the kind of “thank you!” that you say after getting your oil changed or your groceries bagged, but instead the kind of “thank you” which really means “This is the best day of my life and I will be returning every day to buy myself popcorn for dinner.” I was so excited about this theater that within the next 24 hours I had contacted almost all of my closest family and friends to share our exciting news. (Sure, when we said we had “exciting news” some people thought we had bought a house or were pregnant, but I keep insisting that this piece of news is just as life changing.)

A Tech Guru: I’ve never thought I’m really ahead of the curve with technology. I know how make spreadsheets and documents, and I know how to work my phone well enough to send my sister 30 different Snapchats of me singing “Talk less, floss more,” as I was creating a Hamilton parody while waiting for my dentist appointment. However, I always have to google how to take a screenshot on my computer, and whenever I see the rainbow wheel of death on my mac I usually take a nap or scroll through Instagram in the hopes that “it will figure this out on it’s own.” It was not until I was at the gym that I realized I might be a tech genius without even knowing it. I was biking on one of the stationary bikes with my earbuds in and my phone sitting on the handlebars. As an older woman sat down next to me, she looked at my earbuds and said, “Wow! I need to figure out how to connect those two.” She showed me her iPad and said, “I think headphones connect somehow.” She shrugged, and the conversation was over, but for the next little bit I kept thinking, “Am I a tech goddess?? Am I the only one who knows the hack of plugging the earbuds INTO the phone to hear the music? Am I about to become a BILLIONAIRE by sharing my skills with the world?!?!” But then I looked around the gym and saw that 99% of them were already listening to music through their headphones, so that pretty much ruined my plan to success.

While my knowledge seems to be subpar in each of these areas, luckily I’m pretty good at googling something and acting like it was something I knew all along, which will probably always be my true brand.

Courtesy.

2017's Best Google Searches

The end of the year is the perfect time to reflect on the previous 365 days: your favorite moments, times when you grew, and the buckets of movie theater popcorn you consumed. Some families look through pictures of the past year, others look through their journals, but I look through my Google searches. While pictures are usually posed for and filtered, Google searches show the true me: the me that knows Google can solve all of my problems.

When I was in 6th grade, my teacher put each student in a reading group. Mine read The Chessman of Doom. Another group read The Westing Game. 12 year old me was VERY miffed at this because I had a suspicion that my teacher had not placed me in the highest reading group. Now that I’m a teacher and put students in reading groups with different levels of text, I remembered back to that moment and decided to check if I was right. Although it turns out I was just a mediocre reader, at least I have an A+ in holding grudges.

Sometimes my Google searches are very lengthy and detailed, like this one:

What to do if you went to church for 3 hours and you accidentally put your roast on “low” in your crock pot instead of “high” but you want to eat as soon as you get home?

Often I forget that Google is not an actual person and you can’t ask incredibly specific questions. But in case you were wondering, the day I forgot to turn my crockpot on “high” was fast Sunday, and yes, there were tears.

Something I should have Googled, but I didn't:

This summer, Tyler and I attended a family reunion in Yellowstone. Although I love using Google to look up things, for unknown reasons I never look up the weather. Now this is not because I don’t believe the weather forecast or I’m taking some odd stance against global warming, but mainly I just forget that checking the weather is a thing people can do. Before our trip to Yellowstone, we didn’t look up the forecast. The first day we were there, the weather was nice, and we went on a long hike. During the last mile, it started to pour rain. No, it was not drizzling. It was not a trickle of rain. It was POURING. An ocean-worth of rain was being dumped from the sky and probably all the bison in the park could hear me yelling as we ran towards our car, “No one told me to bring a rain jacket! I am never doing this again!!” The next morning, it was sunny. We went on a few hikes, and in the afternoon we started walking around the boardwalk (people who are familiar with Yellowstone ask me which part of the park we went to see, and I am informed enough that I can tell you that this section of boardwalk is one of the parts of Yellowstone that does NOT have the lodge with the ice cream shop in it) and it started to HAIL. So just like the day before, we sprinted back to our car while everyone else with rain jackets walked around. Although we weren’t prepared for the rain, I am pleased to say I hardly noticed the puddles of water sloshing around in my shoes when we finally made it to the section of boardwalk in Yellowstone that DOES feature an ice cream shop.   

This year, Tyler and I were happy to have season tickets to BYU football. Unfortunately, they were absolutely terrible this year. At the beginning of the season they looked bad, but we would say, “At least they should be able to win some of those other games” and “Their schedule will get easier.” Then they played a few more games and we said, “They’re pretty bad, but at least they can win some of the easy ones.” Spoiler Alert: They did NOT win the easy ones. But we went to the games, and it was hilarious and fun in a kind of “this is the worst BYU football team that has existed in my lifetime” sort of way.  

This year for Halloween the staff at my school decided to dress up as food. Emmie and I went as bacon and eggs, but when my egg costume arrived in the mail it had been folded, so there were lots of deep creases in it. The next two weeks were spent trying to figure out how to unwrinkle my costume that specifically said “Do not iron” on it. (Solution: Iron it.) I don’t think Tyler knew when he agreed to marry me that he would come home one day and I’d jump out from around the corner wearing my egg costume yelling, “THE IRON WORKED!”, but I suppose marriage is full of surprises.

When Tyler and I were first dating, I introduced him to one of my many well thought out  theories: an athlete is better because of their name. Do we really think that Usain Bolt’s parents thought “Hmm...let’s name him Usain Bolt. The name has a nice ring to it...the “nice, average, never win any gold medals” kind of ring.” Of course not! His parents knew EXACTLY what they were doing. Coco Crisp. Metta World Peace. Tiger Woods. Andrew Luck. How could you possibly go wrong when you’re literally wearing the word ‘Luck’ on your jersey?! These names were no accident. Tyler didn’t believe me. Luckily this year a VERY scholarly article by Bill Simmons came out this year, suggesting that perhaps Blake Bortles, the quarterback for the Jaguars, doesn’t perform as well because of his name. This has been the first time one of my bizarre theories have ever been backed up, so it was definitely a highlight of 2017.   

May your Google searches of 2018 be even more bizarre than 2017’s. Happy New Year!   

1 Year, 2555 Oreos

Last week Tyler and I celebrated one year of being married. One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of my married friends is that they move a lot. They’re young, their jobs take them different places, and they’re not quite settled yet. Frequently I’ve seen couples posting about their anniversary on Instagram with a cute picture of them and a caption breaking their first year into numbers like “4 apartments, 3 states, 2 dogs, and 1 year of bliss!” Unfortunately, I am neither cutesy enough to write a caption like that nor do we have enough events in our lives going on. If I were to make a caption like this, it would read “1 state, 1 apartment, 1 year of marriage, and 2,555 Oreos.” (Yes, Tyler eats 7 double stuf Oreos every night. I had a friend once say, “Tyler..that’s the guy who eats the Oreos, right?” So yeah, he’s the Oreo guy. I know what you’re thinking: How did Nabisco choose Shaq to advertise Oreos over Tyler? Does Shaq even eat Oreos? When will this injustice be corrected? All are obviously questions that keep me up at night.) I decided this caption didn’t really include some of my favorite memories from our first year, so I’ve broken it up into a few more numbers:

50 fake Donald Trump tweets: My favorite website I discovered in this past year is a place where I can generate my own Donald Trump tweets. I send them to Tyler regularly and pretend they’re the real deal. This one I sent during my summer break in attempt to get Tyler to stay home with me: 

Luckily President Trump helps us settle some debates as well:

10 trips to Cafe Rio: There’s no secret that this is one of my favorite restaurants. What most people don’t know is that when we bring our leftovers home, I insist on labeling them if there’s a chance anyone else will eat them. 

3 trips to Rexburg: In the past year we’ve been able to take a few trips to Rexburg to see my family, one being the weekend before the 4th of July. I thought it would be perfect, because Rexburg was going to be having their big fireworks show while we were there. I use the word ‘big’ loosely, because the fireworks show is shorter and not as grand in comparison to other shows we’ve seen, but we still thought it would be a fun night out. My family spent the whole day trying to get Tyler to lower his expectations, since he hadn’t seen the Rexburg firework show before. “The firework show is much longer in Utah,” they warned him. “But it’s still fun to go.” My family and I went out to the park that evening and set out our blankets with the rest of the town, waiting for the show to start. We waited as the sky got dark. The fireworks never came. Some of the families with younger children gave up and went home. The fireworks never came. Some of the older families and teenagers packed up their things. THE FIREWORKS NEVER CAME. So yes, after a day of telling Tyler to lower his expectations, it was only fitting that we waited for hours in the dark until realizing they were canceled.   

8 Utah Jazz Giveaways: One thing we love doing together is watching the Utah Jazz. We always try to attend a couple games during the season, but something that is on our bucket list is to sit front row at one of the games. Luckily, the Jazz sometimes host Facebook giveaways for front row tickets, so we enter them. ALL of them. Not only do we both enter them, but after entering them we always pretend like we’re going to win, even though the chances are incredibly slim of actually winning. We remind each other we’ll need to leave work early the day of the game, we discuss having to cancel previously made plans, and every single time we don’t win we act surprised. “Maybe they forgot to call us, and our tickets are waiting at will call” we wonder, as we search for another contest to enter. 

3 Orange Chicken Attempts: Before getting married, dinners for me mainly consisted of quesadillas, spaghetti, and whatever my mom made the family for dinner the previous night. Once my parents moved further away from me (and my GoFundMe project to purchase a private jet so I could still use food from my parent’s pantry epically FAILED) and I got married, I decided to learn how to cook. One night I decided to try making orange chicken in the crock pot. I put the ingredients in the crock pot before going to work, came home to a delicious smelling apartment, sat down for dinner, and it was TERRIBLE. The chicken was so dry it was essentially like eating the Sahara Desert covered with orange sauce. We both pretended it was fine for a moment, but it was clear the next day after work when we both brought home our tupperware still full of orange chicken that we were supposed to eat during lunch how terrible that meal had been. I swore off orange chicken for months, promising Tyler I’d never make orange chicken again, and used it as a reference point for other meals. (On a scale from orange chicken to 10, how good was the new recipe we tried?) A few months later, I went over to my aunt’s house where she served a delectable orange chicken. Apparently I had temporary memory loss and forgotten the first orange chicken fiasco, so I asked for the recipe. I made it, telling Tyler, “If this turns out bad, I’m never cooking again.” We tried it. IT WAS STILL THE SAHARA DESERT OF CHICKEN. How was this possible? I promised Tyler again that I would never try making orange chicken for as long as I lived. A few months passed, and “Easiest orange chicken you’ll ever make!” and “Orange Chicken: If you can’t make this, you probably also got a D+ in your middle school cooking class for burning those pancakes” recipes started showing up on my Pinterest feed. So yes, I tried making it AGAIN. It actually turned out pretty good! (But don’t think I didn’t warn Tyler beforehand to order a pizza so it would arrive just minutes after the chicken destroyed our taste buds for the third time in a row.)

1 Cubs/Braves game: Over Labor Day, Tyler and I were able to visit Chicago to see my grandparents and go to a Cubs vs. Braves game, who are mine and Tyler’s favorite teams, respectively. The trip also included touristy places, like the Sears Tower, and the Art Institute, where half the time I stood in front of a painting in awe wondering how it’s possible for one person to be so talented, and the other half I stood thinking “That’s it? I could do that. I probably have done that. Don’t I have a painting exactly like this in my kindergarten portfolio? Did the artist copy me? Did the artist break into my home and underneath piles of random papers and childhood artifacts my mom has been asking me to sort through for the past 7 years that I’m too lazy to actually sort through find my masterpiece and submit it to the Art Institute?” I assume that’s what most people are wondering about when they’re looking thoughtfully at paintings. The trip also included deep dish pizza (which I have spent every day thinking about since, which is why I now know you can order deep dish pizza through Amazon), my grandpa asking us frequently who won the World Series last year in order to remind Tyler who the better team is, the Botanical Gardens, my Grandpa making sure he used his Cubs World Series mug whenever he sat across the table from Tyler at breakfast, and Millenium Park.

Definitely my favorite 2,555 Oreos ever.

The Chocolate Milk Curse Continues

During the end of my first year teaching 6^th grade, my principal asked me to teach 5^th grade the coming year. This seemed stressful to me because everything was going to be different: the curriculum, my teammates, everything. However, once the school year started, I realized teaching wouldn’t really be that different. I still accidentally forgot to select the double-sided option on our copier and frantically pushed all the buttons to make it stop, I still sarcastically told my students that if they lost an important worksheet they would have to repeat the grade and they believed me, we still dressed up in group costumes for Halloween and spirit days, and my classroom still reeked of chocolate milk.  Here are some of the best moments of 5^th grade:

We learned how to use prefixes: As I was reading a book with a group of my students, we came across the word ‘Antifederalists’. I asked them if anyone knew what an antifederalist is, and while everyone else shrugged their shoulders or avoided eye contact with me, one boy reasoned, “Antifederalist is like AntiChrist. So they don’t believe in Christ.” In case you’re wondering, this is also the student who, during dodgeball, would stand in the center of the court claiming to be Samuel the Lamanite.

We played hard, and we worked hard (but somedays, not so much):

I introduced them to new music: Each year, our school has a dance festival where each grade performs a dance. My friend found a CLEAN version of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It”, and I taught the students a dance to perform for the school and their parents. After several practices, one of my students came to me during lunch and said, “That song has some kind of…weird…words. It’s just not really school appropriate.” I asked her to tell me what exact lyrics the song was saying, but she refused to say them out loud. Instead, she grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. The rest of my lunch was spent with me trying to convince her that NO, I was not playing a song at school that had the words “Weiner town” in it, and instead said “We in town”. I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t believe me. 

Children are still as honest and thoughtful as ever: One thing I love thinking about is what my students are going to do with their lives. Will the knowledge of fractions that I gave them inspire them to become incredible engineers, designing life changing technology? Will my love of US history inspire them to become the next president? One morning, the journal prompt for the day was, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” My favorite answer came  from a student who said, “I would like to get a waterproof phone and not get married. That’s because it would be too loud to have kids and an annoying wife.” I may not be the teacher of the future commander in chief, but at least my students will be able to have their phone survive if they drop it in the toilet.

Sometimes my students were honest, and sometimes they were TOO honest: Honesty is a great policy, but I don't think it really is the best policy when you make a thank you note for a volunteer who has been coming to teach your class and a student writes, “Thank you! But I never really paid attention to you.”

One student was VERY realistic about his homework: 

The chocolate milk curse continued: During my first year of teaching, one of my students left a carton of chocolate milk in their desk for WEEKS. Once I finally found the stink bomb, I vowed to myself I would never let that happen again. This year was going gloriously: our classroom was more than 365 days without the stench of rotting dairy until disaster struck. The last Monday morning of school, I unlocked my door and I could smell it. No, it wasn’t just a bad smell. It wasn’t an old apple or sweaty kids. It was chocolate milk, and it was rotting. I spent the thirty minutes before my students arrived tearing through my classroom. I looked in the trash cans, their desks, the bookshelves: NOTHING. Even the janitor came down because it smelled so bad. When my students arrived, I enlisted them in the search. (It’s really too bad the district people always choose to drop by the school when I’m teaching an actual lesson, instead of when I have all my students with their shirts covering their noses in the middle of a search party) There was only a few minutes of this until one student said, “Oh yeah….I forgot!! There’s chocolate milk on the ledge!!” In my classroom, there’s a ledge that’s too high for anyone to reach that goes all the way around the classroom. I’ve only ever used it to hang art projects from, but is also apparently a great hiding spot for fermented chocolate milk. My student was bottle flipping his chocolate milk and it “accidentally” ended up there. And then he conveniently forgot about it. It was that exact moment that my summer plans changed from “sitting by the pool” to “interviewing and hiring TSA officers to stand outside my classroom.”  

HAGS never stopped being cool: After our yearbook signing, I had one student who looked particularly unhappy. When I asked him what was wrong he said, “It’s just not fair. People are writing mean things in my yearbook. I don’t even know what it means!!” I opened his yearbook to see many scribbled “HAGS” all over the pages from his classmates. He was very relieved to find out that his peers were just hoping he would have a great summer instead of calling him an ugly, old woman. Of course there were also girls celebrating in the corner that a boy in their class wrote HAGS in their yearbook with a SMILEY FACE. Bring out the hidden chocolate milk and let’s celebrate!!

Was my definition of HAGS the only thing that my student will remember from this year? Hopefully not. HAGS!!