It’s 5:30am. You’re feeling good. You’re freshly showered and smelling good too. Your hair is styled, your clothes are neat, and damn, girl! You are going to rock this day! You fill your belly with a (somewhat) healthy breakfast, get the preschooler ready to go, and you’re out the door, on time, at 6:45am. Nothing can get you down now. At 7:30am you arrive at work, 30 minutes early, just the way you like it. You’re full of energy, bouncy even. You’re looking good, and feeling good. Bring it on, school day, bring it on! But first, it’s 8:00am. Kiss and Ride duty. So back outside in the humidity to play bad cop with the make-their-own-rules parents. 8:35am, back inside because your first class is coming in ten minutes.
Your first two class are an hour long and back-to-back but you’re prepped and after a quick bathroom break, you’re ready to go. You nail the morning lessons, despite the unexpected lack of AC in your windowless classroom, and in spite of your angry, roaring stomach, which burned through your granola, yogurt and fruit breakfast four hours ago. It’s 10:45am and you scarf down your barely heated lunch so you can prep for your three, hour long afternoon classes, and maybe reply to those emails you’ve been meaning to get to. But you forgot to cut paper for your Kinder class, so those emails will have to wait. Again. It’s 11:45am, and your 3rd grade class is waiting at the door. You haven’t found the portrait mirrors yet, and you forgot to use the bathroom, but hey, you got this, you’re a pro. Time to put on your teacher face. It’s smooth sailing from here until 3:00pm.
And then it happens. You run into her. The cool teacher. Maybe she’s dropping her quiet, well-behaved class off at your door, or maybe you literally ran into her on your hurried way to the bathroom, but regardless, there she is. It’s 1:00pm, she’s cool, she’s calm and she still looks put together. Her hair is morning fresh, her clothes are sans wrinkles, she smells like a soap and perfume commercial, and her face looks like “sweat” is a foreign word. Meanwhile, your carefully tucked and neatly straightened outfit from the morning has become bag lady disheveled. Your face is beet red from running around all day and you’re sweating, and smelling, like a 1980’s body builder who hasn’t showered since, well, the 1980’s. Your stylish and strategic “messy” hair from 5:30 this morning is now just messy. But also flat. And greasy. Damnit! Was that your stomach that just growled? Do you think she heard?
As confident as you felt this morning, you now feel like the most inadequate, ill-kempt teacher on the planet. All thanks to Miss Cool Girl, who doesn’t look a day over 24. But you can’t blame her, it’s not like she’s a Mean Girl, or maybe she is, you don’t know, you don’t have time to leave your room to socialize, aka gossip, so what do you know? But hey, you got this, you’re a pro. You put on your teacher face, give her your most winningest smile and move on with your day. You sail through you’re 2nd grade class, and somehow manage to survive the hour long Kindergarten class. It’s 3:00pm, and you follow your Kinders out the door because your CLT meeting has already started, and you can’t wait to grace the tiny conference room with your stinky, smelly self.
It’s 4:30pm and you’re finally leaving to go pick up your child from preschool. Your tired body is almost, almost, looking forward to the hour and a half commute home because it means you get to sit down for the first time that day (you were the last one to arrive at the CLT meeting. There were no chairs for you). You pull into the driveway at 6:15pm, drag your bags and your three year old into the house, and before you tackle the chore of dinner prep, you sneak away to the bathroom where you can fully assess the end of the day version of you. Your fears are confirmed, you look as bad as you feel, tired, frumpy and drained of all energy. Oh, and hey, look at that. There’s a giant wad of spinach stuck in your teeth. How cliche. And you know Miss Cool Girl saw it. *Sigh* You pick it out, throw on your pajamas, and trudge back downstairs because there’s four hours left in your day and your child is complaining that she’s hungry.
me was given by one of my education professors. “Buy your beer in the next town over,” he said. You know, lest you run into your students’ parents and they think of you as a good-for-nothing degenerate, a bad role model and someone who is incapable of educating their child. Let’s ignore the case of Mich Ultra in their cart though, because that’s different. They’re not teachers. And so I did. I took extreme measures to ensure that I never purchased a six-pack of the refreshingly thirst-quenching beverage that I was legally permitted to buy in any store that I felt my students’ parents would frequent. Evidently, all of my students must have teachers for parents because we are all shopping in the next town over.
Art Teachers Hate Glitter 