Bacon Bag

Last Friday marked the conclusion of the first week of school.  It wasn’t a full week, but it was close since we started on Tuesday. 

A few teachers wanted to complain about that—The first week of school usually starts on a Thursday to ease us all in!—until I reminded them that if we’d done it that way, we would have had to start the Thursday before to get in all the required days.

Unpopular opinion that’s probably better left unspoken but I’m not too good at that: Teachers will always find something to complain about. 

Always.

Fridays are my favorite day of the week.  Even though it’s a school day, there’s such a festive feel in the air: fun music floats from classrooms as you walk down the hallway; the kids have an extra pep in their step; recesses are a little longer; a word search might take the place of pages in the grammar book.

We have this deal at our school where teachers can pay $1 each Friday to wear jeans, and at the end of the year, we give all of the money collected to a charity that we vote on.  (You can insert any jokes that you want here—“I just built a new house!  Can we donate it to my house fund?”  “I just sent my third kid off to college!  Can we donate it to her college fund?”—but it won’t work.  I’ve tried them all. The teachers are all soft-hearted saps that want to give the money to the poor and hungry.  It’s frustrating.)

I don’t care if it’s 101 degrees with humidity so high that it feels like wading into a bowl of soup every time I step outside:  I’m wearing my jeans.  There are certain shirt and shoe combinations that only look cute with jeans and I look forward to my Fridays all week to show off my ‘fit. 

Sometimes I regret it a tiny bit when I take the kids outside for recess on our black asphalt playground and it’s so hot that my new shoes that I’ve saved just for this day get stuck in the melting tar and I have to try to lift my legs to get them out, but then it’s hard to move because the sweat trickling down all parts of my body glues my jeans to my thighs and knees and I can only lift either foot like 5 inches off the ground because I don’t know if you’ve experienced this but denim sticking to your body doesn’t allow you to move very freely.

So for the entirety of recess, I have to do that weird stiff-legged walk with melted asphalt on my shoes but I just remind myself that fashion isn’t always comfortable and sometimes it isn’t easy to look this good.

Fridays can be a bit of a downer, too, though, because the kids always dance into my classroom and say something like, “We’re not doing any actual work today, right?  I mean, come on, Wheatzie, it’s Friday!”

And I get their point, I really do.  If you’ve ever had a classroom full of 8^th graders on a beautiful Friday at 2 PM, you’ll know that they turn into gremlins that have gotten wet and enjoyed a hearty midnight snack—growing ears, growling, sprouting new gremlins out of their backs, flinging poop at the walls, that sort of thing—if you try to make them Stay in your seats, please!  I can’t focus with all of you walking around!! to talk about prepositional phrases instead of taking them out for a 45-minute recess. 

Last Friday—of the first not-even-full week of school!—I threw my hands up in frustration and made the mistake of saying “There should NOT be school at 2 PM on a Friday.  It’s impossible to get anything done when you guys act like this!”

One of them—quite handily, I must say—whipped a clipboard and pen from behind his back and offered them to me. “Would you like to sign our petition?”

“I would,” I said, accepting the pen and scribbling down my name.  Fingers crossed that they get enough signatures and we can start taking off at noon on Fridays.  I’ll keep you posted.

When I tell them that no, we’re not watching a movie or using our entire class period to take an “extra-long Friday recess,” they act very affronted, slumping their shoulders and rolling their eyes as they trudge into my classroom.

“Ugh. I can’t believe you’re actually making us do stuff today.  You’re supposed to be the cool teacher.  Will it at least be fun?”

“No.”

Lest they have you fooled, I get them outside for recess every single day—twice if I can.  I’m a huge believer in recess and also believe that PE should be a core daily class.  But I also do need to, like, do my job or they might fire me and hire some old bag to take my place who doesn’t get them outside at all.

I said that one time when they were being a little crazy and driving me nuts. I said, “You know what?  I’m gonna quit this job and you guys are going to be sorry because then they’ll hire some old bag who’s mean and nasty and you guys will be miserable” and one of the boys that I liked—one of the sweeter kids in the class that I really liked—looked me right in the eye and shrugged and said, “What would be different?” and the entire class burst into laughter at my expense.

I mean I don’t know how I don’t just go home and cry every night, but I guess the beer helps.

(Let me hop onto one of my soap boxes really quickly:  It’s hard to believe, but most adults in the biz that I’ve talked to don’t think middle schoolers need a recess. I find that crazy.  In my 25-year career, I’ve been to about 7 billion staff meetings, and I watch. Teachers start sighing, looking at their watches, coughing, rolling their eyes at each other, and outwardly complaining about how long the staff meeting is at about the 30-minute mark.

So we adults can’t make it through an hourlong meeting, yet 11, 12, and 13-year olds are expected to sit for 7 hours without a break?  “But Wheatzie, they get 3 minutes at their lockers between classes and a 15-minute lunch break!”  OKAY.)

A couple of things happened this past Friday that, in the spirit of comedy, I would like to say made me question my life choices.  But if I’m being truly introspective (and I normally am), I would have to say they actually reinforced them.

The first incident was during my second period 6^th grade language arts class.  As they were getting situated in their seats, the kids were doing the normal Friday routine described above:  “You’re not really going to make us do anything today, are you, Wheatize?  I mean, it’s Friday.  Fridays are supposed to be fun!”

I resisted rolling my eyes, not because I don’t find that a very effective means of communication for getting a strong point across, but because my eyes were  busy looking for a worksheet that I had just copied for the kids.  It’s not like me to lose things, and I mumbled that thought aloud.

“Oh, really?” they replied sarcastically.  “Not like you to lose things?  On that desk?”

This made me pause.  If there’s one thing my students know about me from very early on each year, it’s that I have a big ego.  Huge.  Massive.  One of their favorite stories to repeat to their parents about me at the beginning of every year is how I explain to them that I’m rarely late, but if I am, it’s because I spent an extra five minutes looking in the mirror that morning.  A lot of people don’t understand because they’re not as pretty as I am, I tell them, but sometimes I look so good that I have to spend a few extra moments appreciating it.

Anyway, that ego flows over to my work, too. I pride myself on being the best English teacher these kids will ever have—I remind them of that often, too—and that includes in all aspects of my work, like keeping an organized, clean classroom.

“What do you mean, on this desk?” I threw my shoulders back defensively and opened my arms over my desk to indicate how clean it was.  “Yeah, I have a lot of stacks, but they all serve a purpose and they’re all very neat.”

“She’s got a point,” one of the boys in the front pointed out.  “Have you seen how many times she lines up the corners of the books in each stack?”

I have a touch of the OCD, and when I say “a touch,” I mean I’m kind of surprised nobody has forcibly started shoving anti-anxiety meds down my throat in an attempt to curb it a bit.  So I wasn’t sure if I was happy he’d noticed that or kind of embarrassed, but since it served to defend my point, I would say I was more happy.

“They’re very neat stacks.  And each serves a purpose,” I said, nodding.

“That’s called ADHD piling,” one of the girls in the second row supplied helpfully.

“It’s NOT ADHD piling!” I shouted, sounding like a much buffer and better-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop.  “What even is that?  Did you make it up?”

Instead of answering, the kids all giggled.  I think they do that sometimes just to make us adults feel like we’re going crazy.

A little while later, my co-worker from across the hall stepped into my classroom.  I say “stepped” but it’s actually more like a good-natured swoosh.  She kinds of swooshes into the room in this breezy way that she has because she’s thought of something to tell the kids that she forgot while they were in her classroom. She’ll try to be quiet and wait for a good moment to speak, but I think the way she stands at the front of the room, legs planted in a basketball stance, frozen with her hands up to show that she’s trying NOT to be disruptive, eyebrows raised at all of us in question like, “Is this a good time?” is more disruptive and she should just get on with it. But I don’t tell her that. Sometimes it’s fun to see how long she’ll stand there like that.

This time, though, when she glanced at me, she paused and cocked her head.  “What are you eating?” she asked.

I held up my hand to show her.  “Bacon.”

She cocked her head the other way. “I love bacon. Where did you get bacon?”

I grabbed my lunch box from behind me and retrieved a gallon freezer bag full of bacon from it to show her.  “I made a pound this morning so I could nibble on it all day.”  I held out the bag. “Want some?”

“My gosh, that’s brilliant,” she whispered reverently.

I nodded. I thought so.

[It reminded me of the time I started bringing Ramen noodles every day for lunch to my first teaching job because I was barely past 21 and too hung over every morning to pack a decent lunch. But Ramen noodles are so delicious that pretty soon all the other teachers started bringing packets of them, too, and soon there was a line at our shared microwave so long that if you didn’t get there early enough, you may not get a turn to cook your Ramen at all in the 20 minutes we had for lunch.

I remember coming upon all of them lined up at the microwave with their Ramen one Tuesday afternoon in the teacher’s lounge and narrowing my eyes.  “I’m an irresponsible drunken 22-year-old,” I said.  “What’s YOUR excuse?”

They knew I was right.  From that point on, I got to cook my Ramen first each day.  Rightfully so.]

“Of course I want bacon,” my co-worker said, sliding a strip of bacon from the bag. She chewed for a moment, thinking.  Then I guess the bacon must have made her forget what she’d come into my room for, so she grabbed another piece and turned to leave.  Just before she hit my doorway, though, she stopped and turned back to me.

“A bacon bag,” she said, using her half-chewed bacon strip to punctuate her point as she coined the term for my snack.  “I mean, it seems so obvious.  Why wouldn’t people bring bacon bags to work?”

I turned back to the kids, who had been watching the whole exchange.  We were all quiet for a moment as my co-worker swooshed away.

Finally one of them broke the silence: “Can I have a piece of bacon?”

Listen, my ego might be very large, but I’m not a cruel woman.  And the thing that I’ve learned about a bacon bag is that you can’t eat out of one in front of other people without sharing.

It’s just not nice.

So next time I’ll be packing two pounds of bacon in my bacon bag, because one pound in a classroom full of hungry pre-teens doesn’t last very long, at least at the end of a long first week of school.

Happy Friday, everyone!