Grad school is one of the craziest things you can willingly subject yourself to. You have to work 16 hours a day on one very specific subject, teach 3 courses, and live off of a $15,000 stipend. Sounds simple enough, right? Grad school is different for everyone, and there are many different types of postgraduate academics. There are the people who are in it for the long haul and for the love of the game, aspiring to be academics forever. There are those who go into grad school straight after un…

At a certain point it's just bullying

No students allowed

Telling them like it is!

Why are are these okay?

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…

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…

Vital life skills

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 a little OK"

We've all been through it- something so deeply cringey that it prevents you from sleeping at night every time you think about it, and it's just constantly floating through your mind. It's the absolute worst, but at least we've all suffered from some cringey moments. Earlier this week, writer Caroline Moss asked Twitter to share moments of their lives that seemed more like a bad movie than something IRL. She offered up a tale of being broken up for "not being Jewish enough" while at a National c…

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…

“College was the best part of my life” is a sentiment often expressed by weepy alumni. It can be a lot of pressure for college students to have the best time ever because college is supposedly the best part of their lives. I sometimes wonder whether college was the best part of my life, and it's all downhill from there, and I must answer that with a decisive no.