Hot for Substitute Teacher

The Social Studies teacher on my team today was absent, so he had a substitute teacher. By lunch, every 7th grade girl I teach was calling him "the hot sub." When we got back to my room after lunch, three of my girl students and I had this conversation:

Students: "How was your lunch today?"

Me: "It was fine. Why?"

Students: "You got to sit at the teacher table with the hot sub." Swoon. Swoon.

I think he's going to be back tomorrow. I'm contemplating getting drool rags for every girl I teach. Or maybe going in to observe them bat their eyelashes right off their faces.

I then proceeded to have this conversation with some boy students:

Students: "Did you see the sub? You should date him."

Me: "Thanks. But he's younger than me."

Students: "Are you ever going to get married?"

Me: "I guess if I met a guy I liked and he asked me, I would say yes."

Students: "You need to get married."

Me: "Really? Why?"

Students: "You deserve a husband."

The student who told me I deserve a husband is the same one who on my birthday told me that if I got married, I would be happy.

When my last class came in, no less than four of them told me that they had informed "the hot sub" that he should ask me out. Seriously. If it weren't so ridiculous, I would have been embarrassed. I guess maybe I should be flattered since apparently my 7th graders think that I am cool enough to date.

But really, it ended up being one of those days when all I could do was sit back in my desk and think to myself, "This is middle school. And this is my life."

Jesus, Me, and a Skateboard?

There are certain times in my life when I feel more single than others. The two biggest ones are church and grocery shopping. Random, I know. But it is what it is....

In the fall I started going to a new church. I love everything about my new church, and I have made some amazing new friends who have been such blessings in my life. The only thing is that they're all married, so when I go to church, the pew looks a little something like this: couple, couple, couple, me. It's like that scene in Bridget Jones's Diary where she goes to dinner at her friends' house and it's all the couples and her--only no one has ever chased me out of church to tell me they like me just as I am, but I'm holding out hope that it might happen one week. Don't misunderstand me, I love my new friends and most of the time I don't even really think about the fact that they are all married but me. And, let's be honest, I'm 26, so a lot of girls my age are (a lot of them have babies too...which just the thought of being there in my life scares the mess out of me), but sometimes it's hard to sit in church beside a bunch of people who have husbands.

The church thing is sometimes made worse by the fact that on my way home every week I pass a billboard for a local jewelry store that has a giant picture of a fabulous engagement ring. One day, when I have a boyfriend, and he is driving me to and from church, I will give subtle hints about this ring every Sunday.

I'm not really sure why the grocery store makes me feel single. I think it's because groceries are packaged in family-sized packages usually, so I end up buying more than I need and I know as I'm putting it in my cart that I'm probably going to throw some of it away. Or, I buy the single sized things, like the Just for One frozen vegetables, and all I can think of is how my cart is now a glowing advertisement of my relationship status. It's not really important. (Total aside--my computer teacher just made a comment about someone having a wedding coming up and totally just looked at me and my 2 single friends....)

This weekend a church near my mom's house had a big rummage sale. My little brother went so he could spend his allowance on some new toys. One thing he got was a skateboard for a whopping 50 cents. Obviously, since he got it at a garage sale, it wasn't new. This skateboard looks very well-loved. And, in case you don't get it, by well-loved I mean beat up. He could care less. He invited me over, and when I pulled up in the driveway, he held his new skateboard up for me to see. His face was beaming.

I couldn't help but think that my amazing little brother's attitude towards his new skateboard is a lot like God's attitude towards me. My brother loves his skateboard. When he looks at it, he doesn't see something old and beat up that's pretty much past its prime. He sacrificed his time doing his chores to earn his allowance, so he sees his skateboard that he worked hard to get. He sees his skateboard that he paid for. He sees his skateboard that he loves.

Much like my little brother's skateboard, I've been through a lot, and I'm pretty sinful and messed up. But, when God looks at me, He doesn't see the beat up, sinful girl that I am. He sees something beautiful. He sacrificed His Son to get the blood to cover my sins, so He sees a girl that He worked hard to get. He sees a girl that He paid for. He sees a girl that He loves.

I think that sometimes I wish I were married so that when people looked at me they knew that someone had picked me out of all the girls in the world. Having a husband to sit with in church or a ring for the check-out person to see would be a sign to the world that, despite all my faults, someone wanted me. What I forget a lot is that despite all my sins, someone did want me, does want me, and will always want me.

And while that's not always visible to the outside world, like people in church or in the grocery store, that doesn't make it any less real or valuable. Because the real truth is that when God looks at me, His face is beaming.

I like to think that He looks a lot like a six-year-old showing off a skateboard.

Bake On!

I have a friend who loves to cook. But, she doesn't bake. Since I like to do both, she will occasionally bring me a recipe that she finds and wants to try that requires baking and instruct me to bake it. Recently she brought me her copy of Molly Wizenberg's memoir/cookbook A Homemade Life with instructions to read it and try my hand at the blueberry raspberry pound cake recipe.

Anyone who watched the early seasons of Grey's Anatomy will understand what I mean when I say that I, like Izzy, am a stress baker. And anyone who has ever taught will understand what I mean when I say that few things in life are more futile than trying to teach a roomful of kids anything after Spring Break when they can clearly see the sun shining outside.

Those two things combined mean that my friend did not have to do any convincing to get me to bake a cake. By Friday, I had an acute need to bake. Anything and everything I could think of. Friday night I made the cake, which turned out to be positively amazing. Saturday I baked some banana bread with chocolate and crystallized ginger--something I thought sounded a little bizarre but I think ended up being quite good. Tomorrow I'm planning on baking some chocolate cupcakes with a bittersweet chocolate glaze. (All three recipes are from the book.)

The only real problem with the fact that baking is how I unwind and release stress is that I end up with a bunch of baked goods and really no one to eat them. Sometimes I take things to my students, but they really don't need the sugar right now. Sometimes I take things to school, but teachers always seem to be on diets and never want to eat anything I take in. This leaves me and my roommate. (One important thing to note is that my roommate's brother is getting married this summer, and she is making his groom's cake. This week, she decided to bake and decorate her first trial cake, so before my baking extravaganza, we already had a cake meant to feed 50 people in our kitchen. Our house looks like a bakery....only we aren't selling stuff, so there's no one to eat it but us.) So far, I've eaten just under half of my cake myself--and it's only been one day. My mouth says thanks, but I can hear my waist crying out in protest...thankfully my mouth is much louder.

I couldn't help but wish that I had a husband so there would be someone to eat and appreciate all that I baked (I also had the thought that I will probably be the greatest wife ever since for two days I basically did nothing but bake yummy food and willingly watch and analyze the NFL Draft, but that's another story for another post--although I did think of starting a list of reasons why I would be an amazing wife but then decided that would make me sound very prideful, whereas comments in passing would come off as much less full-of-myself).

But then I thought that since I plan on teaching for a while, there is probably a lot of stress baking in my future ,and I thought that since I think if I were married I would have more things to worry about, there would be even more stress baking. This made me think that I would end up with a really fat husband, and I don't particularly want that. So I guess it's a good thing that I have to spread out my baking to multiple family and friends instead of just one husband.

I Can See!

As previously blogged, one thing I enjoy about being single is my financial freedom, the fact that I can spend my money how I want to. This week, I put the rest of the money I made from doing homebound into new glasses! I went for my eye check-up, and my prescription had changed a tiny bit--enough to make new glasses nice but not enough to make them absolutely necessary, especially since I don't wear them all the time anyway. But, I had had my old glasses for four-and-a-half years and thought a change would be nice.

My little sister pointed out to me later that I should have just gotten new lenses for my old frames. This, she argued, would have been the fiscally responsible thing to do. Fiscally responsible, yes. Fun, no. When I got my first pair, I was in college, so my mom was paying for them (and let me say she did let me pick out some fabulous frames). This time around, since I'm now a "responsible adult," I was in charge of footing the bill. While some people might think of this as a bad thing, I found it liberating. I could pick out whatever I wanted. If they cost slightly more than I planned to spend, that was ok. It didn't matter what anyone else thought about how they looked because I was paying for them. It was totally and completely my choice.

It only took me about ten minutes to find my new frames, and I picked up my new glasses yesterday. It may seem silly, but getting (and paying for) my new glasses made me feel a little bit more like a real grown-up. (It was also a nice way to celebrate finishing homebound--which I FINALLY did yesterday--since I wouldn't have felt comfortable spending so much on glasses if I hadn't done it.)

And while I'm sure it would have been nice to have a boyfriend/husband to tell me how amazing I look with my new glasses last night, I don't really need that. I just so happen to think I look pretty cute in them. And me liking me is certainly a lot more important than some boy doing it.

Pencils

So the school where I teach is by no means a low-income school. Most of my students come to school everyday wearing their North Face jackets over their Guy Harvey shirts, sporting their Sperry's, talking on their cell phones with unlimited text and data packages, and listening to their iPods. I write all that to make the point that obviously I have students whose parents can afford to buy them things. Apparently, their shopping trips for their students never make it to normal, reasonably priced items, however, because my students never have pencils.

I decided to order some pencils and have the word "pencilnapped" along with my name put on them. I thought that this would discourage students from borrowing them and not giving them back or that at least other teachers would take them away and return them to me. This has not worked. I ordered 24 and only have about 8 left. Well, on Friday, I did have a student "return" one of my pencilnapped pencils to me. Here is how it happened:

It was during my last block class, which means I was generally feeling discouraged and wishing it were 3:30 already. I had one group in the back who was supposed to be working on a group presentation, which they of course were not. Instead one of them was trying to show the others the new moves he had learned in Brazilian jujitsu (which I know because he did not even try to hide the fact that he was off task--instead he yelled at me across the classroom, "Do you want to see what I learned this week in Brazilian jujitsu?" Thanks student for the announcement, the fact that your foot was trying to get up by your head wasn't a sign that you weren't doing Language Arts). They were being loud and ridiculous, and I wanted to cry. Meanwhile, I'm trying to teach 5 students the proper way to use punctuation when you're writing with dialogue. 3 of the 5 are talking to each other instead of listening to me. By this point, I have basically decided that I could leave school at 1:30 because I'm not really doing any work anyway.

So I'm sitting there, trying to get 5 kids to do a dialogue activity when it happened. The kid sitting to the right of me is tapping one of my pencilnapped pencils against his desk. He was supposed to be using it to underline tags in an excerpt from a novel but whatever. So he's tapping away, and I guess somehow lost control of his/my pencil because the next thing I know, it has flown at me and hit me in the face right above my right eye. The pointed lead part. It hurt. It left a mark. Just in case you haven't picked up on it yet, this class makes me a little crazy. I almost cried, but I kept it under control. Barely. I decided to leave the mark on my face because as soon as class ended I walked to my friend's room to show her and then went to show my assistant principal.

Class finally ended, and my final class came in (it's like Study Hall for the last 30 minutes of the day). I was in a horrible mood, feeling useless and discouraged. A student wanted a pass to go visit my roommate who teaches 6th grade. Students know that if they want to go somewhere, they need to write a pass and bring it to me to sign. They also know that if they want it signed, they better bring something I can sign it with because I never have a pen or pencil handy. So, this student comes to me with his pass written out and hands it to me along with a pencil. I sign his pass, give it back, and he starts walking away. I tried to get his attention to return the pencil he had handed me to sign his pass. I guess he didn't hear me because he kept walking. I looked down at the pencil and it had this written on it: "I Have Jesus in My Heart." Seriously.

Some people say that God speaks to us in mysterious ways. Sure. But sometimes He uses a pencil.

Unsafe Expressions

During computer class yesterday, my friend's computer threw up one of those warnings that computers are sometimes prone to give you when you try to do something new. The ones like "you are about to send information over an unsecured connection." But her warning was one I've never seen before. It said, "Warning: unsafe expressions are not blocked." It's not too often that I see a computer warning and start to desire nothing but that in my life. To be honest, it has never happened to me before, but as soon as she called my attention to her warning, all I could think was, "Ohhhh. I want that!"

Seriously. Think of how amazing it would be if you could get a feature that blocked unsafe expressions. I'm a pretty expressive person; people can generally tell how I'm feeling or what I'm thinking by looking at me. An unsafe expression blocker would be wonderful--especially in the classroom.

I teach middle schoolers. Occasionally they ask incredibly stupid questions (I know...since I'm a teacher I'm supposed to say that there are no stupid questions. But since I love Jesus, I'm not supposed to lie. Jesus trumps teacher.)--for example, I recently had one student ask, "Burma is in France, right?" and another ask, "Are elephants man-eaters?" My friend had a student ask, "Is Mexico in the United States?" I don't care how mean it is; these are stupid questions. I try my best, but sometimes when a student asks a question such as these, I look at him or her like he or she is stupid.

I teach middle schoolers. Occasionally they laugh at incredibly stupid things. By incredibly stupid things I mainly mean things related to bodily functions. And by occasionally I mean pretty much all the time. My friend just told me this happened to her today whenever she said Vladimir Putin. I lived in Russia for a year while Putin was president. Never did I ever laugh at his name. But because she was telling me the story in the context of a middle school class, I laughed. I don't get it--I always laugh at this kind of stuff during class. Then, my students think it is ok to laugh at it and I feel incredibly immature. If I had an Unsafe Expression Blocker, I would be able to block the smirk and the laugh. I would look like a grown-up. It would be fantastic.


Someone needs to make this happen. The only downside to the Unsafe Expression Blocker would be that the show Lie to Me would not have been possible, and I like that show. I find it remarkably interesting.

Where Have I Been??

Nothing super eventful has been happening in my life, so instead of posting a bunch of mundane things, I haven't posted anything at all. A short recap of the past two weeks would be this:

-Wine tasting in Charleston and an Ingrid Michelson/Mat Kearney concert in Greenville (otherwise know as two of the greatest birthday presents of all time from two of the greatest sisters of all time). It was kind of fantastic for me to realize that I'm at a place in my life where I can get myself the things I need and pretty much the things I want (I might have to save up for them--but I can eventually get them), so for my birthday I got fun experiences.
-Spring Break, which this year for me meant a lot of sleeping, reading, drinking things that weren't water, and catching up on everything I've been DVRing lately. I also cooked a lot. I even tried my hand at making cinnamon rolls using a recipe from Food Network that was supposed to be like Cinnabon. My friend's young son pronounced them "yummy," so I think that means they turned out pretty good! The second half of the week I did a lot of sitting on my couch reading a Pat Conroy novel while watching the Masters. This means I felt extraordinarily Southern. I had originally thought about going somewhere for Spring Break, and I even tossed around the idea of going on a solo minivacation (I figured it was the next step up from going to the movies alone) as a way to celebrate being single. But, in the end, I decided that staying home and not seeing another person for two whole days was the way to go (my roommate was visiting her family). For a boring introvert like me, it was amazing! I am now feeling fabulously refreshed, so I should start getting into some interesting things again that will be blogworthy.