I guess some sort of reflection would be appropriate

My first year of teaching has officially reached an end....and guess what? Next year I get a real classroom. I guess the administrators in the district finally read Brown v. Board of Education and decided that you can't actually expect the ELL teacher to teach in a tiny, ill-equipped, broke-ass joke of a classroom. So year #2 should be a real treat...stay tuned.

Today is only day one of my summer vacation (possibly the only summer vacation that I've actually ever earned) and by 7am I was on my second cup of tea and anxiously making a list of things to keep me occupied. Yes, I am that cool.

Here's the list:

budget/pay bills
weed front beds
laundry
swim
walgreens
rearrange bedroom
call piano tuner
call recylcing service

Here's what I actually did:

found the NYT crossword puzzle and did it as fast as I could before my roommate got home
watered house plants
watered outside plants
ate an english muffin
shower #1
did laundry
juggled soccer ball in front yard
added another length of bamboo fencing between my house and MY PSYCHO NEIGHBOR's house
rearranged bedroom furniture. four times.
went running
shower #2
paid bills
went to walgreens
went to library

Which is where I am now. Don't get me wrong, I did not include this list because I think my day was so fascinating, the opposite in fact. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with myself. You can only shower so many times in a day.

Oops, I forgot one thing. Pinche Guey from my soccer team called to ask where tomorrow's game was. And to ask me if I would like to be his girlfriend. I said 'no thanks', which is a step up from the last time he asked me something like that and I just laughed at him.

"You bought WHAT from your sister?"

As I waited outside in the designated stand-in-line-and-wait-for-your bus area after school today, a student I didn't know walked past and I gave him my best teacher smile, just like I give everyone who is under 5'2" my best teacher smile, and then my smile quickly faded into a look like what I imagine my friend was thinking when he saw a couple openly fisting at the B2B this year.  Actually, I take that back, that look was probably a little more gleeful than mine.  Anyway, imagine my face contorted into a semi-controlled holy hell/REALLY?/wtf face.  The student who passed me was sporting NIPPLE CLAMPS, chained to the appropriate region of his t-shirt.  Do you know how many other teachers he probably walked by who by virtue of the bumfuck Norman Rockwell town I work in didn't even know what they were?  Did I mention I was at the elementary school?  

It gets better.  Turns out he is in the 4th grade, he knows what they are and he bought them from his older sister.  For a quarter.