Tag: humor

Thanksgiving for Teachers: A Sample Itinerary

PavowskiLeave a comment

Thing about teachers is, it’s hard to describe being one. I mean, in a vague way I guess people think they understand it — well, you babysit some students who are sort of vaguely jerkish, you write some lesson plans and quizzes, you grade some quizzes, assign some homework, take an hour-and-a-half lunch every day, and then you get three months off during the summer. Oh and THOSE WHO CAN’T DO, TEACH HAW HAW HAW. And that’s true, in the sense that it’s true that bees are face-stinging forces of evil. Sure, they are, but that leaves out the much more important truth that they power the agricultural engines of the entire freaking world.

Teachers are people. Flawed people. People whose work gets the better of them sometimes, just like anybody else, and people who look forward to their well-earned vacations with a gusto that borders on the psychopathic. Seriously — take a walk through any school building in the days leading up to a holiday. See if you can’t smell the desperation coming off them in waves, if you can’t see the frenetic ecstasy rimming their eyes.

But as much as we look forward to our time off, we always screw it up. (Or at least I do.) Here’s how this Thanksgiving went in my life as a teacher:

  1. Organize a series of quizzes and essays to grade over the break. You have a week off; that’s plenty of time to fit in an hour or so somewhere to do a bit of catch-up work.
  2. Stuff said papers in your “teacher bag” and carry it home.
  3. On the short drive home, allow yourself to drift away completely from even the abstract idea that you are a teacher.
  4. Bag o’ papers goes in the closet. Enjoy a nice adult beverage with dinner because it’s vacation, dammit.
  5. Spend next few days doing house things and totally not doing teacher things. Bag o’ papers collects lint in the closet.
  6. Organize for your trip out of town. Do not, even for a second, consider bringing Bag o’ papers with you.
  7. Turkey and stuffing and travel whirlwind for a few days.
  8. Arrive home and decompress from seven hours in the car with kids who do not want to be in the car for seven hours. Bag o’ papers is still in the closet, lurking like bad leftover green bean casserole. Nobody is interested in either.
  9. Plan to hang Christmas decorations. Find that on your earlier trip to Home Depot, you got the wrong size staples for your staple gun. Go to Home Depot again. Get wrong size staples again. Give up and watch college football. (LOL what bag o’ papers?)
  10. Last day of the break. Plan to hang Christmas decorations. Watch Inside Out with the kids instead. Remember that you’re a teacher and you have to go back to teaching tomorrow. Write a blog post about the things you did instead of grading papers over the break. Think about taking some time to grade papers today (there’s still time) and remember that the Falcons play at 1 PM. That means: morning for decorating, football in the afternoon, and by evening it’s time for the usual Sunday evening routine of dinner, bedtime, and sobbing over the lost weekend while sacrificing a goat in hopes of buying more time before you go back to work.
  11. Wonder how in the hell nine days passed so fast. Drink wine until you no longer care.
  12. Monday morning. Retrieve ungraded bag o’ papers from closet. Go to work in a panic. Resume regular teacherly duties.

I’m assuming it’s pretty much the same for all teachers.

Channel Surfing At Its Worst

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I’m gonna keep this brief, because I’ve got leftovers to shove down my neck.

The Pavs are staying at a hotel this Thanksgiving, which means all the delightful things that go along with staying away from home as the parents of toddlers (packing a literal vanful of stuff for a two-day stayover, remembering that the 18-month old doesn’t do well at all with staying away and therefore won’t sleep or nap, and therefore, NEITHER WILL YOU… you know, minor inconveniences).

But today, I’m sitting here, both kids asleep (amazingly!) and with a little time to kill, so first of all I’m blarging a bit, and second of all I’m looking around to see what’s on TV, which is of course a mistake. Nothing’s on TV on Thanksgiving except a bunch of Black Friday ads that I don’t care about and the first in several networks’ series of holiday marathon movies. In short, I could turn the TV off from now until January and probably not miss a thing.

Anyway, I’m flipping through channels and not having a lot of luck, and I find this handy-dandy reference card by the TV. You know, the list of local stations. But there’s a problem…

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Just look at that abomination. Who in the name of all that’s holy designed that monstrosity? It’s totally unreadable and useless to anybody who might be looking at it. Channels arranged alphabetically? Who in their right mind, staying at the Holiday Inn Express from out of town, knows enough to wonder what station KET, Scottsville IND, or Trojan are on (these are all stations on the card, for the curious)?

Sorry, channel card designer, when I am sitting in my hotel room looking for something to kill thirty minutes on the idiot box, I want to know first what’s on the channels as I’m flipping through them, second — maybe — what I can expect to see in a few minutes on the same channel. Like, I’m flipping, and I see what looks like a documentary on giraffes, but I want to make sure I’m actually watching Animal Planet and not Fox News, where they’re about to replace the lovely peaceful image of a giraffe with some idiocy about how the giraffes have ruined the plumbing at the zoo and Obama is to blame.

Further, if you ARE going to list the channels alphabetically like an absolute tosspot, at least have the decency to list them left-t0-right. Top-to-bottom listings should be reserved strictly for numerical sortings. What are we, savages?

How dare they call this thing a Channel-Surfing Guide. More like a do-it-yourself instant aneurysm kit. My eyes won’t uncross.

On a more serious note, it’s Black Friday Eve, so I’m stockpiling ammunition and taser cartridges for my shopping sortie tomorrow. If you cross my path, it’s nothing personal, but I’m getting that last Minion doll.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Parenting High-Five!

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As a dad, I am always worrying about the things I’m passing on to my kids. Am I teaching them the right lessons, showing them how to be wise adults, instilling in them the best values?

It’s impossible to tell, day to day. Raising kids is a little like growing bamboo; you plant it, and you water it, and you tend to it day in and day out, but for years — years! — you get no outward sign of the plant’s progress. Kids, meanwhile, are angels one day, demons the next. Their moods can swing like pendulums on things as inconsequential as the order you buttoned their jackets in. So there’s really no telling how things are going in their little heads.

Until your oldest brings home his Thanksgiving project from preschool.

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If you can’t read it, that says “I am thankful cause I give mommy and daddy highfives.”

I could quibble with the grammar, but I won’t. (Yes, I will. It should say “because” or, at the very least, have an apostrophe before “cause”; Mommy and Daddy should really be capitalized; and high-fives should be hyphenated.)

That picture up there tells me I’m doing something right.

Excuse me while I take a victory lap and then high-five my son at the end of it.

Totally Not Helpful

Pavowski2 Comments

Reading the search results that lead people to my site (when they aren’t blocked… thanks Google) is sometimes insightful, sometimes telling, sometimes hilarious.

Today’s gem?

what happens if you accidentally inhale a puff of comet

You’re not going to see me going grammar stickler all over somebody’s search terms. It does, however, give me a fit of the giggles that somebody — presumably in a panic after breathing in a lungful of bathroom disinfectant — stumbles onto my site, looking for some sort of deliverance from their freshly bleached trachea, and finds only my short story about a kid who sneaks onto the train that carries the elderly into space on a one-way trip.

Totally not helpful, but maybe I have a new reader.

Unless the comet did its work and ravaged his throat and windpipe enough to make my site the last thing he saw. Which is, if you think about it, kind of still a win.

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

Pavowski2 Comments

Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.