It's finally over

Anti-intellectualism at it's finest

Every student has had this dreaded interaction with a K-12 teacher. "Can I use the restroom?" “I don't know, can you?” Not only is it unoriginal, but most children will not understand the grammatical problem at hand. That's because there is no grammatical problem with “Can I use the restroom,” and teachers who act like there is are simply in the mood to be pedantic. There is a specific Southern brand of this interaction that I remember vividly from elementary school. “May I use the restroom?” “…

It's that time of the year.

Five Six Seven Eight!

A big part of growing up is getting rejected from things. Whether it's a sports team or the top band, teenagers will inevitably be disappointed by rejection throughout their adolescence. My most devastating high-school rejection was from the elite group at my community theatre. I know, I'm really cool. I was in the Junior Varsity of musical theatre for three years before I finally got into the top group. The first two years in this group of self-proclaimed "rejects" were expected, but when I di…

These tweens would waste no time

Teachers get a lot of blame for kids' bad behavior. Parents go to parent-teacher conferences and belligerently demand that the teacher explain why their child is not doing well in class. Teachers are expected to kindly explain to parents what the issue is, even when the parents are being rude and demanding. The truth is, it's usually not the teacher's fault that a kid is failing to thrive in the classroom, and yet they have to shoulder so much of the blame. It's demonstrably unfair. In a perfec…

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

Telling them like it is!

Back to school! Again!

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…

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…