Thursday, October 27, 2005

Well I think I insulted all the 4th grade female teachers. I guess it was bound to happen eventually so it was good to get it over with.

Yesterday we were talking about teachers' clothing. At my school male teachers have to wear ties and button-down shirts. Well, I made the comment that the clothes that many of the female teachers wear isn't even close to being comparable to a man's shirt and tie as far as formality goes and that many of the female teachers were "slumming it and looking like they're dressed for a day at the beach" while we've got to wear these ties. As you can imagine that didn't go over so well. I knew that was going all wrong the second that I got my first response of a somewhat offended sounding "I don't look like I'm going to the beach." Oops. I wasn't referring to any of the teachers in my grade when I said that but not really seeing the big picture I dug myself a little deeper by then referring to something that they all wear when I said "For example - capri pants are not at all comparable to nice slacks." Well at this point I've now implicated all of my female coworkers directly and thus accidentally tied them up in a direct association with the teachers who are "slumming it." I guess I put my foot in my mouth (nothing that I'm not used to). I noticed today that all three of them seemed to be dressed a little nicer than usual. I made my apologies at lunch and told them that if I'd been including them in those comments I would have said it in a nicer way. Really. Hopefully I didn't sour any relationships with that.

This morning my class all comes in and one kid tells me that his mom got an email from me telling her he needed to bring some cookies to class today. I was totally confused by that and assured him that I sent no such email and I had no idea what he was talking about. Then all of a sudden I'm getting showered by packages of cookies and juice and whatnot. I was like "Whoa! Whoa! What's going on here.." Kids were literally dumping cookies in my lap and just walking off. Apparently my PTA "room mother" had called all the kids' parents the night before and asked them to bring snacks for this parent meeting they were having that night and bring said snacks to me. She didn't let me know about this until around noon or so, well after I'd gone through the confusion of sorting out the cookie shower. Oddly, one parent sent juice and a big box of saltine crackers.

Today while the kids were reading I opened up the Merriam Webster dictionary online and looked up one of the kid's name. It was there...so I hit the button to say the word out loud and the computer said his name..much to the surprise of himself and the class. Then I realized I could find reasonable representations of everyone's name in the dictionary and make it say the name out loud. They got a big kick out of that and everyone was saying "Make it say my name! Make it say my name!" That was kinda funny.

Ok, I'm out. Later.

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