"Hey, Ms. Sarah, LOOK!"

The other day, I went into another teacher's classroom to ask a student a question. While I was trying to find him/her (I can't even remember, I was so distracted by what happened next), one of my boy students yelled, "Hey, Ms. Sarah, LOOK!" Before I could react, I found myself looking at his pants, ripped right down the front, where I, as his teacher, definitely should NOT be looking. Luckily, he was wearing his gym pants which have some mesh on them, but WHOA, buddy, I don't want to see that!

Today I had an emergency situation. I was about to fill out a professional document that I had to turn in to my principal. I went to pull out a black pen and realized that ALL of my awesome New Zealand black pens were gone. I panicked. I didn't have any other color besides red and apparently here, that's a little disrespectful to write in. I then remembered that at some point during the day (after I had had 5 classes), that I had given it to a student, but could not for the life of me remember who it was. So, being the dedicated teacher that I was, I went to every single class and asked who took my pen. And I found it! And the girl just smiled and said, "Here you go". Doesn't she understand the stress she put on me?! That was 10 minutes of good work time, lost to the pen predicament ;-).

I don't know what you guys do to celebrate happy occasions at your schools, but at ours, we have CARNIVALS (rides and all!) On Saturday, we were required to go for an hour. Dave and I went nice and early when it wasn't very hot outside. We watched the boat ride (the one that goes back and forth up really high) and as I was watching, I noticed that the bottom of the ride was literally RUSTED out in some places. And we thought our carny rides were bad!! :-P

"Ms. Sarah, are you a runner?"

So a few funny things have happened in the past couple weeks. I sent a student to the office for being disrespectful and a few days later, he was entering the classroom and said, "Ms. Sarah, I love you." And not knowing how to respond, I said, "Yeah, ok, go sit down." Him: "No, really, Ms. Sarah, I appreciate all that you've done for me." Me: "Um, thanks, go sit down." Him: Huge smile. I brushed it off as a student just being goofy.

Last week, he was a part of the huge math competition we had at school. I saw him in the morning and he said, "Ms. Sarah, I'm going to win this thing for you!" That afternoon, I was the moderator for the last competition (thanks, Mrs. Stewart!), where the top 10 students compete head to head to be the champion. When I saw the list of names, who was in first place but this student. I got all excited and nervous for him, but couldn't help but say to my coworker, "He's going to win this for me!" He ended up taking second place, but I went up to him afterwards, gave him a big hug, and said, "I couldn't help but notice you were in first place... and you did it for me!" And he said, "Ms. Sarah, you remembered! Of course I did it for you." Another time I just didn't really think anything of it.

On Saturday, I was grading my students essays they wrote about a superhero they invented having to do with Newton's 3 Laws (If you're a science teacher, let me hook you up with this awesome project!) I was reading this lovely boy's essay, when I got to a sentence that literally made me laugh out loud. "One really special thing about my superhero is that he only falls for 8th grade physics teachers." Either this kid is the master at brown-nosing, or I've got a little boy crushin' on me. I'm going to go with the former, haha.

Today, I decided to sit with some of my students for lunch. They were mostly girls and we were chatting about girl things and they were just really silly, but then one of the girls asked me, "Ms. Sarah, have you ever been a runner?" I went on to tell her about cross country and soccer and marching band for a while. We talked about their sports experiences for a while and then she said, "Well, yeah, this might sound weird, but I've been noticing your calves, and well... you seem like a runner." Her friends all just started giggling. So for the first time in my teaching career, I've been complimented on my calves by my students. So of course, then I had to show them off like the muscle men do in competitions. There's something to be proud of, Ms. Sarah, awkwardly showing off your calves to your 8th graders. I wonder if anyone else witnessed that and thought, "Well... um.. that's uncomfortable." ;-)

But, at the end of the day, you've gotta do what you've gotta do to make 'em laugh!! :)