Teacher Drama

I type these words to you from my couch. It is 10:05 in the morning. On a regular Friday, my kids would have already had 100 minutes of class time, read with partners, learned in a guided reading group, taken a spelling test, completed an end-of-week reading assessment, and would be currently getting their snow pants and jackets on for morning recess. As much as I wish every Friday could be as productive as that, this Friday I'm awfully glad to be typing on my couch.

Let me tell you about the psyche of a teacher during weeks with treacherous weather. You have a back-and-forth series of emotions strong enough to give you whiplash. This is kind of how it went for me this week:

1. On Sunday night the Husband casually mentions that it's going to be below zero on Wednesday this week. You get sudden flashbacks of two blissful cancelled school days from last year, which you spent making silly trips to Target for frivolous things with your roommates, watched 9.5 straight hours of television, read an entire book, followed a 30-minute youtube yoga video to feel like you'd actually done something productive, and never changed out of your pajamas. Sweet nostalgia fills your mind and you start to hope that maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to indulge your indulgent side again to start out this new year.

2. You proverbially slap yourself and snap out of it, remembering the plans you've made, the ready-and-waiting classroom that's full of learning materials, and the end of year goals your kids have to reach. HOW ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO GET BACK INTO THEIR ROUTINE WITHOUT A NORMAL SCHEDULE?! You start to actually want school to go as scheduled, no, you start to NEED school to go as scheduled. You have too much to do.

3. Monday and Tuesday go by, cold but not too cold, and you are into the swing of regular routines and procedures, you realize how much you missed your kids, and feel ultra productive after having two weeks off for Christmas break. You get observed. It goes well. You feel like Super Teacher and accomplish a million things, including a health screening for life insurance, making dinner, and running on the treadmill before going to bed at a responsible hour. You are very nice to the Husband.

4. At said responsible bedtime hour, the Husband reveals that his school is, in fact, cancelled for Wednesday due to cold temperatures. Your school, in fact, is not cancelled for Wednesday. You turn into a whiny child who feels entitled to days off of work for no reason. You may or may not cry a little. He is nice about not rubbing it in your face that he doesn't have to go in to work when you do.

5. You self-righteously say goodbye to the Husband the next morning and carry on with your school day, surrounded by vacant area schools, Calvin Christian School the lone reed in a sea of quitters. You call yourself and your students "tough" for coming to school against all odds, valuing education above all else, braving cold and winds and treacherous roads (side note: the roads aren't really that bad) for the sake of your children's minds. You scroll through Facebook and mercilessly judge everyone who stayed home from school today, knowing that you've accomplished so much more than most of America alongside of the smartest kids ever. You rub this in to the Husband just a little. You even go to a dentist's appointment to prove your valor.

6. You repeat this process for Thursday, the coldest day yet this week. Nothing can stop you. You are SO GLAD that we didn't cancel school and tell this to your coworkers.

7. While making copies during your prep period, you hear murmurs from the office of a potentially cancelled Friday due to bus issues. The prideful feelings of #5 and #6 melt and give way to a desperate desire to stay in your pajamas all day tomorrow. No official word of a closing comes before you leave for the day. The roads actually are that bad on the commute home and it takes over an hour to get there. You start to bitterly make dinner. You are not very nice at all to the Husband, who innocently asks how the day went. You are grumpy for the next few hours, inexplicably. You may or may not cry a little.

8. The call and group text goes out from your principal that Friday, is indeed, cancelled due to bus issues. You are a little embarrassed at how excited you are about bus issues. You are ashamed of being happy. You sheepishly tell the Husband that you have school cancelled Friday, knowing that he has a full day ahead of him. You stop being totally mean to the Husband, who is not in fact responsible for the weather or for school being closed or for school staying open.

9. You wake up on Friday at 8:30, after an additional three hours of glorious sleep. You come to your senses and realize you have not been so nice to the Husband this week. You send an apology text, offering to start his laundry today and buy him some beer as a peace offering. He responds with an "I love you" and you remember to stop blaming him for things like the weather. He doesn't rub it in that you were crabby. Not even a little. You promise him that you will be more mature in the future, then go to the couch and turn on Netflix.

In conclusion: Teachers like routine, but they love missing school. Also, Brian is the nicest husband.

The fruits of my laundry labor.  

 

Nights Like These

Tonight I thought I'd go to a coffee shop to get some work done. The wifi cut out at the coffee shop, losing an hour of work I had done thanks to a dysfunctional autosave feature, so I closed it and decided to cut my losses and leave. Off I went to finish running my errands.

Upon checking out of target, I noticed that my computer charger was no longer in my bag. I called the coffee shop to see if I left it there, and they said they were sorry but it wasn't there. I went back home defeated, commenting to myself that this kind of thing always happens to my clumsy self. I think, somewhere in the stark and echoing night, I heard the voice of Brian Gesch telling me to work on my  situational awareness.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE.

I parked my car and slushed tragically toward my apartment, when there, lo and behold, in the middle of the street, lay a certain computer charger that I had inadvertently dropped out of my bag upon getting into the car to leave. Sure, it had been run over several times! Sure, it was buried in snow! Sure, the outlet tongs had been bent at completely a 90 degree angle! BUT. It was, nonetheless, my lost charger.

I got back home, ghetto-rigged it back so the tongs were straight, dried it off, and plugged it in, half excited and half worrying that I hadn't dried it enough and was about to electrocute myself. And....it worked. IT WORKED.

No, I didn't get back that hour of work I lost at the coffee shop. But I got my charger back and it works. In fact, it's helping me type this very blog post.

Let's just chalk this Wednesday night up to weirdness and be done with it all. I say this calls for some daydreaming about a honeymoon on the beach, making some tea, and reading a book that's not on an electronic device.

Good night world. I hope your Wednesday is over soon, just like mine is about to be :)

Share

In my first grade classroom, we begin every day with a Morning Meeting. We start by greeting one another, and then we go to a time of sharing. We sit in a circle and go around taking turns sharing about a given topic. I love it because every kid gets his or her voice out there, especially for those who might have come in the room a little extra cranky, shy, or tired, but it's also awesome because I get a little insight into their lives outside the classroom. Every single Monday our share is: "Over the weekend, I _______." The best shares come after long breaks and vacations, because then they get to be exciting things like "Over Thanksgiving break, I went to Key Lime Cove and cannonballed into the pool and made my sister cry." We have an extra day of winter break today and tomorrow due to the -50 degree windchill (not even joking) and so our big share day will have to wait until Wednesday. Each kid will get a turn to say, "Over winter break, I _____________." After all of the kids go, my fellow Instructional Assistant and I take a turn so the kids know what their teachers were up to as well. I woke up this morning and thought to myself what I'll say on our first day back. There was a lot of stuff that happened this winter break, both seemingly small and definitively significant. So here it is in pictures. Ready?

Over winter break, I....

cruised in the backseat with Xander, 

got engaged to this handsome guy, 

cleaned my disaster zone of a room, 

went out for enchiladas, 

ate some delicious gluten-free cookies, 

reunited with some of my favorite humans, 

braved #Snowpocalypse2014, 

and had the best snow-removal-service around de-snow my car. 

That Tim Allen is Full of it Man

(Yep. Dumb and Dumber reference.) We had plans this weekend. BIG plans.

Karley, Karyn, and I had plans to set out on Friday after class for Hudsonville, Michigan and see the beautiful Liz VanDrunen herself. Then on Saturday we were going to watch Trinity's track team rock the house at a meet at Grand Valley State University. And THEN we were going to watch Calvin's air band lip sync competition with one of my faves, Ann Marie, with the possibility of seeing my other high school friends later that night. Well. All of those plans and dreams kind of crashed and burned. Due to storms and snow Friday night, we decided to leave early Saturday morning (Write this down...I woke up at 5:45 for that!). We left with high hopes of Pure Michigan from all those Tim Allen commercials. He's the tool guy, after all. You should be able to trust him, right?!

We were going along, singing Taylor Swift, minding our own business, when suddenly, about halfway there,  this is what our drive looked like:

Bear in mind, we are three lame college girls who aren't very useful in most emergency situations. We turned Taylor down to a 3 on the volume knob (that's when you know it's getting serious), stared silently ahead for outlines of the road and other objects, and kept cheerfully (but nervously) telling Karley (who was driving) that we can totally figure this one out.

This is the first time in my life I've been happy to be stuck behind a semi truck because those were the only vehicles we could actually see through all that lake effect snow. We inched along at 0 miles per hour (I know it sounds impossible according to the laws of physics, but that's what happened. Just telling you the facts.), past countless cautionary tales that ended up in the ditch on either side of the highway and even seeing an accident happen a few hundred feet in front of us. Finally, after 3 miles and 30 minutes, we took the next exit, happily into the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel. How fortunate, we thought. Now THERE is a place in which we could spend all day! (That was a joke. Kind of.)

Karley beat the game! 

Their great candy selection. So colorful! 

As you can see, whilst in Cracker Barrel we had breakfast, played old Amish games, and looked at their beautiful selection of delicious candy. The other thing we did was call our trusty sources for advice. I called my brother Rudi, who looked up the weather (huge warning telling people to only travel in emergencies) and told me that turning around would be a good idea. We got the same advice from Karley's dad, my uncle, who is a truck driver himself and familiar with this stretch of driving in the winter. So we borrowed a shovel from the nice Cracker Barrel Candy Lady, shoveled our way out of our parking spot, got super brave, and headed back home, thus ditching our friends, our exciting plans, and all that colorful candy.

Shoveled out and ready to go.

Karley and Karyn

The cousins, ready to turn around for home again.

Back in Palos, catching a flick. 

And there we were at 1:15 in the afternoon, weekend plans kind of down the drain, but laughing due to the series of events that brought us back to Palos Heights 6 hours after we left it. It's funny though, because while you would think that we were in a terrible mood, going through that together was one of those odd bonding experiences. Like living in South Hall with no air conditioning in August as a freshman in college. I now know I can survive a snowpocalypse. Look, Dad, I'm building character! To salvage what was left of our free day, we decided to go see The Vow in the nearest movie theater to catch a matinee. (Sorry everyone, I thought it was awful.) It turned out to be a great weekend anyway. In the last 24 hours I've lived and learned one thing: Tim Allen is not to be trusted.

Snowy Days and Fridays

You know how the old Carpenter's song goes, right? Well, it wasn't raining, it was snowing. And it wasn't Monday, it's Friday. So I had to improvise.

And boy did it SNOW. The Facebook stati (statuses? statodes?) on the topic of snow were in full force today. They ranged from "OMGOSH I luvvv snow!!! xxoxoxoxoo" to "What is this white stuff?! I hate it I'm moving!" While I appreciate the gravity of the impact that a foot of snow can have on your day, let me let you in on a little secret: It's January and it snows in Chicago. Additionally: It ALSO snows in Wisconsin. Basically, let me just say:


You live in the midwest and it's winter. Snow is pretty, but it's not a huge surprise. And it's also not a tragedy. Stop tailgating everyone like a loser and drive safely. Now go build a snowman. 


I had plans with some of my roommates to hit up a Mexican restaurant about 30 minutes from here for delicious tacos and killer margaritas. Well, the weather interfered but also created a fabulous night anyway. We braved the block and a half to the nearest grocery store to purchase ingredients to make our own tacos and margaritas. (And let's not forget some place-and-bake cookies!). All of my roommates and our friend Ali stayed in and ate dinnner, watched movies, and laughed all night. It was fabulous. Obviously to enjoy these selections you need to be able to look past the usual Hollywood trash that can infiltrate most movies, but they were funnier than most romantic comedies.

Hilarious moment where her hair extension
starts on fire

We watched "What's Your Number" with Anna Faris and Chris Evans first. It was pretty entertaining with the classic Anna-Faris--wide-eyed-ditzy style of humor. Then we watched, what else, Bridesmaids, for our weekly fix of Kristen Wiig. "Oh you live in Milwaukee? Oh I'm sorry!"  

This weather produced a fun night. Along with this, however, is a lack of cuteness for my ensembles. I can't be donning dainty flats in 12 inches of freezing white powder. Why do that to your toes? These are what my winter outfits are turning out to be these days:

For the record, my shirt is from a thrift store somewhere, is paper thin, and features a cross legged moose saying "Yuh not from 'round here, are yuh?" Classy. Hopefully I can step up the outfit situation in the next few weeks to provide you with some confidence in my maturity once again. It's getting there, I promise.

Tomorrow I set out on quite the little road trip. I head to Washington D.C. with a pro-life group to march in protest against the ruling of Roe v. Wade (its anniversary is this time of year). I am really excited to tell you about it, but please also know that if your opinions differ, I'm really interested to hear those too! My blog is not about slamming you over the head with my thoughts when it comes to politics. But it is about my experiences, and part of that includes offering what I believe to be true, right, and important. I love people who don't agree with me, and also those who do. So have no fear. Stay tuned and wish Karyn Koopmans luck. She has to spend many hours on a bus next to me and I am afraid for her sanity - pray that she still wants to be my friend when we return early on Tuesday morning. It might be cutting it close.