my work boyfriend...

Okay, so I have this teacher friend, not!Angela Lansbury. We'll just call her Angela.

We have a lot in common, and get along really well. I generally try to avoid going to chat with her in her classroom unless I have five hundred and sixteen minutes, because once we start talking, time seems to sink into this school-portal time warp that makes time go by extra-wicked quickly to the point where one of us says, "holy crap, is it really forty-seven o'clock??" and the other one says, "I didn't think the clock could GO that high..."

A big part of it is that Angela just "gets" me professionally. We have similar views on children, on teaching, and talking to her always helps give me greater perspective. We also do some extra curricular activities together: running a Dance club for some of the older kids, taking dance classes together, and going for lunch & giggles on teacher work days.

She's my work boyfriend.

I say this because one evening, a week or so ago, when the clock was doing it's school-portal time warp trick, Angela and I were sitting in her classroom, solving the problems of the educational world when the Speech & Language clinician poked her head in,

"Angela!" she called, "where's your other half?" (meaning the other teacher that works in Angela's room)

My immediate (internal) reaction was, "I'm right here!" with a strange sense of near indignation. Could she not SEE me? Sitting RIGHT NEXT to Angela??

Clearly having a close teaching buddy has some interesting implications.

I wonder if this counts as cheating on my husband...

love notes...

This was a rather new brainstorm, though I don't know why it took me so long...


I now keep this little container on my desk. I pull out a note when one of my students has done something insightful, something kind, or just something that I want to note. I write a few lines about what I wanted to say, read it to the child, then have them put it in their backpack to bring home to their family that night. I've copied them all on brightly colored paper and so far I've been writing a few of them every day.


Hopefully I'll keep up the habit; it takes a very short time to write one, but I love knowing that the student for whom I wrote a love note is going to be able to share something great about themselves with a family member later on... plus, pretty colors and a great font -- how can I go wrong?

I do think that six year olds in pajamas walking down the hallway with gigantic, anticipatory grins for Read Across America Day might be the eighth wonder of the world. ♥