The Usual Chaos

Friday - our unused bad weather day - a "free holiday" of sorts. I didn't get a mani/pedi and enjoy a spa day or eat bonbons while lounging next to the pool like most normal  teachers do in their spare time. No, not me. Why be normal ? I geeked out and fangirled at the North Texas Teen Book Festival's educator day in Irving.  What more could a girl ask for? Met my fellow book nerd buddies at the convention center and trekked inside. After climbing to the clouds via escalators, we found ourselves in a room mostly filled with fancy tables. The ones with cloths and multiple forks and properly folded napkins spilling from coffee mugs - just like our usual teacher lunch every day (not!). We stared for a moment, acclimating ourselves to the room, noticing the piles of books for sale in the back and the three authors we came to see in the front. Then, we bought books. Because it's what you do! View from our seats Kate & e lockhart! Next, we found seats

It's in the air like the scent of burnt popcorn from the teacher workroom fogging the halls. It's on our faces like thick blue cupcake icing that will never, never wash off.  What is it, you ask? The spring slide. The end of the year blues. The how-many-more-days-do-we-have weekly question. Yup, it's that time of year. It happens annually. Spring Break concludes, and it takes all of our patience and enthusiasm with it. Students go off for a week and leave any interest and motivation under the blankets where they slept their break away. We teachers leave our efforts to collaborate and abilities to reason in the pages of our reads and on the beaches of our trips. And there is just never. enough. coffee. Ever. That sad and disappointing part of the spring slide/endofyearblues is that it leaves us snarking at each other and our students. Our patience is minuscule and our tempers are pre-lit. And everyone - everyone - we encounter wears a target gleaming, waiting for our

In the fourth grade, I owned an Alvin and the Chipmunks album. You know, the record kind that you listen to on an actual player. Just like mine, radio dial and all! I knew all the songs, word for word, note by note, and I spent my free moments singing them in the front entry way of our home, bumpy dark tile below my feet and adoring fans inside my imagination. Despite having never seen Arthur  or Chariots of Fire  or Rocky  then, I could certainly belt out the themes from the first two and "Eye of the Tiger" from the last. And, when auditions opened for the play Annie  at our high school, I just knew - I knew  - that I was brave enough to try and perfect enough to be an orphan.  One teeny tiny problem - when a young girl of freckles and mousey brown hair learns to sing with Alvin, she is sadly not in the same range as Annie! Thus, my version of "Tomorrow" did not make the cut. My friend Sara was Annie. My friend Holly was Molly (the part I really wanted). An

My childhood home was always littered with posters screaming this phrase in vibrant colors, still leaning in a corner after the most recent bond election. Dad was a superintendent, and his philosophy was always, always "Kids First!" In planning, he put kids first. In finances, he put kids first. In teaching and coaching and mentoring, Dad put kids first.  Because it is the right thing to do. Now that Dad is retired and spends his sunny days putting fishing first, I take up the mantra myself and hope to live it daily and share it as he did. Yes, it took me a while to come to this conclusion. I always thought I was doing it, actually, but early on I needed to feel in control. I was young. I was scared. I knew classroom management gone awry could be the death of any actual learning. So I chose control. This meant that I scripted every moment of class and drove the bus forward no matter my riders. I structured my days down to the minute and sent students home with pounds of