Few jobs impact marriage the way that teaching does. Forget boundaries: teaching is one of those careers that delights not just in blurring them, but erasing them entirely. Here are some tips that may help you cope:
- Never throw away those Back to School sales
flyers! In the weeks leading up to the new school year, you will be
dragged to every store in a 10mile radius offering loss-leaders like 10 cent
composition notebooks
- Thou shalt not touch the Flair pens. They are for grading papers. They are NOT for
borrowing.
- Don’t expect dinner or cleaning services around
the end of the quarter or semester. For that matter, don’t expect company or
conversation. A teacher in grading mode is basically as accessible as a coma
patient
- Do not, under any circumstances, begrudge us our
summer vacation, or expect us to work through our summer vacation. We earn our
vacation the way soldiers returning from the front have earned shore leave.
- When we return from school in the afternoon, we
don’t want to talk about our day. At least not yet. What we really want is
20-30 mins of blissful, peaceful silence. (After that, however, brace yourself
– once we start talking about our day, the anecdotes tend to just keep coming.)
- Just pretend you understand all the acronyms we
spout. It will speed up conversations.
- Unless you have experienced the thankless task
of writing a sub plan that anticipates every possible nightmare classroom
scenario, don’t bother trying to convince us not to go into work unless we are
actually attached by tubes to hospital equipment
- We may not be able to figure out how to use the
new grading software the county recently hoisted on us, but there’s not a copy
machine in the world we can’t fix
- If we could have brushed the glitter off our clothes at school instead of getting it all over the car, we would have
- No need to feed us the last 2 weeks before
Christmas break – we’ll be surviving entirely on plates of cookies brought to
us by our students as gifts, peace offerings, and or bribes.
- Accept that we will never see anything wrong or
embarrassing about wearing novelty math ties and/or DNA earrings in
public. Because, secretly, we all see
ourselves as Ms. Frizzle.
- Accept that, starting 7-10 days before before
the slightest chance of snow, we will be glued to the weather channel like
Susan Lucci waiting for the list of Golden Globe nominees to be announced.
- Pretend you don’t mind when we correct your
grammar. It’s like a tic; we literally can’t help ourselves.
- Prepare for the fact that every time you go out
shopping there’s the chance we may end up entrapped in a spontaneous parent
teacher conference. (Tip: If, while running errands we suddenly stage-whisper
“Quick – duck into the next aisle!” … don’t delay, don’t ask questions – just
GO.)
- Friday nights are NOT date nights. Friday nights are “go to bed as early as
humanly possible” nights. Sunday nights are not date nights either: they are
“prepare our battle plans for tomorrow” nights.
Saturdays are the sweet spot – snatch them up before they’re donated to
grading!
- Speaking of date nights, get used to spending at
least part of outing running into our students. For some reason, date nights
attract students like honey attracts bees – the more romantic the occasion, the
more times the two of you will be interrupted by students squealing our names
like they just spotted Beyonce
- You may want to stockpile extra wine in advance
of the following occasions: full moons, the day before Christmas break, the day
after Halloween, and the last day of school
- Don’t even try to out-anecdote us. No matter how
outrageous that thing that happened to you at the office today, we can top that.
- Don’t make us use our teacher voice
- Just accept that every mug in the cabinet will be emblazoned with either the school's logo or some variation on "World's Best Teacher."
- We’ll spend all year yearning for the end of
school, then spend all summer preparing for the next school year. Just accept
it.
- Thou shalt not mock the salary. We know it
sucks. We appreciate not being reminded that it sucks.
