"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!! :)