tales from room 102 (part one)

[I love my job.  Like, love love love my job.  There are very few days where I wake up dreading going to work.  Do I dread waking up? Yes.  Do I dread being a reasonably responsible adult? Yes. Do I dread other parts of the day? Yes.  But overall, dreading my job ain't my thang.  Occasionally, ok often, funny things happen in my classroom or during my day.  Here's the part where I document them for your pleasure. Hopefully they don't end up being "you had to be there" moments.]

I am a creature of habit.  While I like to think that not every behavior needs or requires a diagnosis, I think I have some OCD-like tendencies.  Or, I like to think of these tendencies as just ways to make my life super efficient.

Like breakfast.

I eat the same breakfast nearly every day.  During the school year it looks like this: greek yogurt during first period (last year it was my planning period, this year it's my duty, so I'm not eating in front of students).  An hour or so later during homeroom and/or third period, I eat a banana.

This first week I was Struggling Stanley with getting back into the groove.  The first day of school I forgot both my banana and my water bottle.  I was in a state.  I was more careful the next few days, but forgot my banana again on Thursday.

Always one for preparedness, I keep a small stash of emergency items in my closet, including both a skirt and some snacks.  I'll tell you about the skirt sometime, if you'd like.  During third period, which happens to be my honors class, I realized that I had yet again forgotten my banana. The students were working on something in small groups so I walked over to my closet and grabbed a quick handful of trail mix.

Side note: Did you know that Trader Joe's carries 18 varieties of trail mix?  Eighteen.  That's a lot of trail mix.  My favorite mix right now? Almonds, peanuts, dark chocolate chips and dried raspberries. You're welcome.

Kids are always super curious about what you're doing, so as I was munching heads popped up left and right asking what I was eating.

"Trail mix," I said, "because I forgot my banana today."

"No, actually, you have a banana," some of them chime in.

I looked at my desk trying to see if I had, in fact, remembered my banana and maybe just forgot that it was there.  No banana to be seen.  So I asked for clarification.

One chatty redheaded boy proclaimed, " it's on your shirt!"

Here's the part where I tell you I have a thing for clothing with a whimsical print.  If you know me and/or have seen me in person, this is not surprising in the slightest.  I have items of clothing with chickens, birds, pineapples, assorted fruit, bicycles, dogs, more birds, the alphabet, barn animals, and more I'm sure I have forgotten.

So I look down at my shirt.  Apples? Yes.  Strawberry? Accounted for.  Orange? Right there front and center.  But no banana to be seen.  Witnessing my confusion a few kids point and say, "see, it's right there!"

Sure enough.  There's a banana on my shirt.  Exactly in the spot right under my right boob where I cannot see it.  But where, evidently, they can.  

"Huh, I can't see that" I say.  

And they all laugh.

And because sometimes I'm a sophomore at heart, and honors kids are generally funny kids, and because I can't resist the opportunity I add: "And stop looking at my banana." 

what to expect when...

Let's take a minute and talk about expectations.  I'm the kind of person who likes to know from the get-go where we're going.  What's the End Game? Where's our destination?  This very fact is probably the one that held me back from dusting off the old blog to start writing again.  The first blog I began was done so with the intent to keep family and friends abreast of all of the exciting things I was up to while living 2000 miles away from home in Arizona.  It had a point.  A purpose.

This space right here? I'm not sure what its point or purpose is.  And I suppose it doesn't need to have one.  That is, outside of a creative space for me to ramble on to a captive audience.  The risk that we run on this here path is this: blogs are, at their core, inherently narcissistic.  If an author isn't careful, a blog is likely to end up being all "mememememememememe" all day every day.  And while I have a small amount of narcism in me, that's not entirely who I am.

And, because I've put on Facebook that I've started writing again, out of fear of losing friends and admirers, I'm limited in some of the content I can write about.  You can all let out a sigh of relief that I probably (mostly likely, I'll try really hard) won't write about you, at least not in a negative light.  Yes, you.  You're welcome.  

Obviously there will be hilarious tales from Room 102.  Obviously I'll write about the silly things that happen to me.  I'll probably write about some serious stuff from time to time; you know, weigh in as I see fit.

But other than that, I don't really have an End Game.  I'm going to try to enjoy the journey and see where it takes us.  I'm also going to try to avoid only talking about myself.  Because frankly, that's boring.  Feel free to add into the comments what you're hoping to get out of this as a reader.  Anything in particular you want to hear? Thanks for hopping along on this adventure!

shifting gears

Sixteen-and-a-half years ago when I was learning to drive, my two vehicle choices were a gigantic conversion van or a mid 1990s Ford Mustang.  The obvious choice here is the Mustang, except for the fact that that beautiful blue Mustang was a manual transmission. This Mustang was also so fancy that it was the first car we owned that came complete with a tape deck.  This was such a high-tech feature that there was a serious argument between my dad and sister; dad asserting that there was no way a car he bought could have a tape deck, much much too fancy, and my teenaged sister insisting that yes, that is in fact a tape deck, here, pop in my Ace of Base cassette and find out.  Guess who won that argument.  But I digress.  My dad had a penchant for purchasing Mustangs (and frankly still does), and it must be a stick shift.  And thus I learned the dying art form of driving a manual transmission.

Driving a stick shift car is a beautifully choreographed dance.  Once a driver becomes a seasoned stick-shifter they no longer rely on the tachometer to know when to shift into a higher or lower gear; the music of the engine tells them when it's time.  There's a sweet spot to switching the gear: if you upshift without accelerating enough you're likely to stall.  If you downshift without slowing down enough, you're also likely to stall.  And stalling is the.worst.  Not that I would know anything about this.  Maybe I know a little.  Like stalling repeatedly at a fairly busy corner as all of my friends whizzed past in their automatic transmission cars.  Not that I remember that or anything.

The blue Mustang I mentioned earlier took its fair share of beatings from the learn-to-drivers in my family.  The transition from first gear to second gear got to be pretty ugly.  It required the driver to really give a good tug down into second gear, and if not properly shoved into place the gears would jam and make the most awful noise, not to mention some probably serious damage to the engine.  At some point in the life of the car it got to the point where the driver needed to skip second gear all together and slide right in to third gear.  This required a little more acceleration than normal, but it got the job done.

"Gee, Kerrie," you're all thinking, "why this driving lesson?"

Well, here I stand at a pretty big transition in my year.  And I'm not so good at transitions.  They're hard on me.  The rest of the working world is envious of my two month siesta and I'm all over here saying "I wish I could work more year round-er" (which is to say I would still like that amount of time off during the year, just perhaps more spread out.  Year round school anyone??).  The transition into summer is a hard one; it feels like I'm moving from fifth gear into first and I haven't slowed down enough yet.  And now, the transition from summer to school year is like going from first to fifth and I I haven't given the engine enough gas yet.  Case and point: I nearly fell asleep today in my yoga class ... before it even began.

Certainly I can't be the only one who experiences this to some degree.  But I can't help but wonder if it's a harder transition for me because I'm half introvert/half extrovert.  I only have it in me to be an extrovert until about 3pm. After that point I lose all steam and the introverted part of me takes over in a big way.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm not really sure.  I guess I'm saying I'm tired. And it's only the second day of school.  It will get easier, I know.  But it's this transition that's rough.  So why not complicate things just a little more by starting a blog? Ok! Will do! And awaaaaayyyyy we go!