20+ Tips for Living With a Teacher

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: 

1.  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
2. Thou shalt not touch the Flair pens.  They are for grading papers. They are NOT for borrowing.
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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.)
6.  Just pretend you understand all the acronyms we spout. It will speed up conversations.
7. 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
8. 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
9. If we could have brushed the glitter off our clothes at school instead of getting it all over the car, we would have
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Pretend you don’t mind when we correct your grammar. It’s like a tic; we literally can’t help ourselves.
14. 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.)
15. 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!
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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.
19. Don’t make us use our teacher voice
20. 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."
21. We’ll spend all year yearning for the end of school, then spend all summer preparing for the next school year. Just accept it.
22. Thou shalt not mock the salary. We know it sucks. We appreciate not being reminded that it sucks.