When you're a kid, you always have arbitrary rules thrust upon you for stupid reasons. In elementary school , we were only allowed to wear hats on Fridays, which as a hat girl, I found ridiculous. How is wearing a hat any more distracting than not wearing a hat? I would understand if hats were banned in order to prevent the spread of lice, but they weren't! They just wanted to restrict our freedom a bit more. Sometimes, teachers and educators can circumvent rules that are unfair. My 3rd-grade t…

No students allowed

I wholeheartedly believe that memes made me more empathetic as a tween. As a kid, I was obsessed with the internet and being on the pulse of the latest trends. Sure, the content on YouTube was entertaining, but I didn't really learn anything about myself by watching The Annoying Orange. Once I got onto social media proper, I began seeing memes that articulated the exact experiences that I'd had. Yes, I've rubbed my eyes for too long and seen colors! Yes, a teacher has responded to me asking, “c…

Telling them like it is!

I have the type of anxiety that makes me worried that I peaked in high school , even though I know I had a horrible time. My high school years had some positive moments, but my life got exponentially better once I graduated and moved far away from anyone I knew. There are some moments from high school I still think about, like my Senior prom , which was almost Carrie -esque in how traumatic it was, but that's a story for another day. Five years out from high school, I'm sitting pretty, knowing…

Well, if he wasn't going to be remembered as Carrot Boy before, he certainly is now; there's no walking it back from this one, folks. As commenters have suggested, if he had merely approached the conversation as if it was an old inside joke rather than something that he was harboring deep resentment over, he could have won his old classmates over and finally been rid of his demons in one swift stroke. Instead, the monkey's paw has curled—and the prophecy comes to pass. He is now, and forever wi…

Five Six Seven Eight!

Back to school! Again!

These tweens would waste no time

Teachers are some of the most harshly criticized groups of professionals out there. Everyone has their own idea about how teachers should do their job, but so few of them could do even half of what teachers do every day. So many parents expect teachers to be able to fix everything that's wrong with their bad kids and try to place the blame anywhere but on themselves. All of this criticism can get exhausting. At most jobs, employees only have a couple of supervisors, but teachers have administra…

It's finally time for teachers to take a load off. It seems like this semester has been rough for everyone, and every teacher who taught this fall needs a well-deserved break to catch up on their sleep. So many people give teachers crap about having a summer and a winter break . They think that because their office job is all year long, they must work harder than anyone who gets a considerable period of time off. What those people don't know is that teachers have to spend a lot of their breaks…

Teachers deserve so much more respect than they get, and I am partly to blame for this. When I was in high school , I wasn't blatantly rude to my teachers, but I did not give the educators in my life the respect they probably deserved. For instance, I called every single one of my teachers Senior year by their first names, either behind their backs or to their faces, depending on how close we were. Out of Barb, Cathy, John, Paul, Linda, and Kelly, I could only call Barb by her first name to her…

It's nearly as American as apple pie to have some sort of elaborate prank rock your high school. But at Edward R. Murrow in Brooklyn, there was pretty much only one. The old “5th floor pool” prank. Upperclassmen would hand out maps on the first day of school that touted a massive, Olympic-sized pool, complete with changing rooms and showers. Of course the incoming freshmen were giddy about this development. There was just one problem: the pool didn't exist. As school-aged pranks go, I've always…

Those who were never band kids don't know how much spit is involved. Sure, other extracurriculars like baseball might inspire youths to become chronic spitters, but the school band takes it to a new level. If you play a woodwind instrument, you've got to moisten your reed up with spit, and if you don't, it will probably sound not very good. If you play a brass instrument, you have a "spit valve." When you play your instrument, the moisture from your lips travels through your instrument and buil…

One of the hardest parts of being a teacher is that the work keeps coming and never stops coming . At a normal job, you clock in at 9 and leave at 5 without having to do extensive planning for days to come during the time you're not in the office. When you're a teacher, it's a completely different story. There's never time for not working. You have to grade papers, answer emails, create new assignments, work on lesson plans, meet with higher-ups, and that's not to mention having to teach classe…

It's like it was just yesterday