Lies I Tell My Students

Honesty is the best policy, right?

Wrong. If you work with children, you tell them whatever it takes to get through the day.

#1: "The principal is coming to watch YOU learn."

What I'm Really Saying: "She's here to watch me teach, so you'd better not act up."
Does it work? ...eh.

#2: "Yes, I'm grading this."

What I'm Really Saying: "Like I have time to grade every single little scrap of paper that you write on over the course of a school day. Do your work anyway."

#3: "We had a rough start to our day, but you did a great job of turning it around, so I'm going to give you back the recess you lost."

What I'm Really Saying: "It's a really nice day and I want to be outside. So even though you were horrible this morning, we're having recess."

#4: "I'm not going to repeat these instructions. Listen carefully so you will know what to do."

What I'm really saying: "I'm going to say these directions six times, but you still aren't going to listen to them, and then you're going to call across the room when I'm working with a small group that you don't know what to do. And then I'm going to lose it."

#5: "I don't listen to tattles."

What I'm Really Saying: "I'll listen to your tattle, because one time you told me that so-and-so said the S-word, and that S-word turned out to be 'stupid,' and I need a funny story to tell at happy hour later."

**If you know me at all, you know that this is all highly satirical. And yet, I feel obligated to say so because some people take things WAY too seriously. To those people, I say:

Alternate title for this post: Jess Goes Overboard with Teacher Memes.

I Lied.

Okay, so remember way back to a month ago, when I promised that I would be posting again soon? Well, "soon," it turns out, is a relative term.

The first five weeks of school have simultaneously flown by and dragged on. Noteworthy incidents include:

• A student cutting his own hair on the third day of school;
• Vomit (luckily into a trash can, but it was a close one);
• Finding out that one of my students knew literally ZERO English (and of course, I knew ever-so-slightly-more-than-ZERO Spanish);
• One student cussing out another student (who had told the first student that his hair looked like noodles);
• Two nosebleeds from two separate students on the same day (unrelated...I think);
• A decidedly failed experiment in which my students chose their own seats;
• And countless technical difficulties.

To sum it up, a rather eventful first month.

To say that I am tired would be a vast understatement. To say that I am frazzled would be an understatement of mythical proportions.

I mean, I knew that the first year of teaching would be tough, to say the least, but....the metaphor that I'm using at the moment is that I am just barely treading water. My head frequently dips below the surface, I feel like I'm drowning, and I'm going literally nowhere but somehow I'm still floating.

Too much negativity? I concur. I just had to get that off my chest.

And now for what I love about my job:

• The hugs that I started getting from my students on the second day of school.
• Math. (I hated it as a student, but I LOVE teaching it!)
• Writing positive post-it notes to my students (on a semi-regular basis) and watching their faces light up when they read them first thing in the morning.
• Posting teaching memes in the faculty bathroom. (And only one other person knows that it's me doing it...heeheehee.) This one got the most laughs:

• My classroom. It's chaotic, but it's my own personal disaster zone.
• STAR time (Students and Teachers All Reading) at the end of the day. I'm reading my class Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and even though it feels like nobody is listening sometimes, they always ask me at the end of each day whether we're reading Harry Potter today. 😊 Now if I could just get them as excited about the stuff in the curriculum, we'd be in business.

Anyway. That's it for now. It's about 3 hours past when I wanted to be in bed. Just wanted to let y'all know that I'm still alive.

Ish.