Excuse Me, But This Isn't In My Job Description

I am a teacher. Really. I went to teacher-school and everything.

And I learned some valuable things in teacher school...like how to give a withering "teacher-look" (I'm pretty darn good at that), how to grade papers during faculty meetings (I'm getting better at that) , and how to write on the chalkboard in a straight line (to use the 7th grade vernacular...I suck at that).
But when I left teacher-school and set out to run a classroom of my own, I quickly discovered that there is a lot more to a teacher's job than just teaching.

For example, they never told me in teacher school that I would have to spend a considerable amount of time each day functioning as a psychoanalyst...

...or a triage nurse... ...or as a policeman/investigator/bodygaurd...
...or as a one-woman substitute for a home entertainment system.

It seems like my "That's not in my job description" list grows by inches every year. This year, most of my new responsibilities are related to my position as "yearbook advisor". I am an editor, a publisher, a sales manager, an advertising rep, a photographer, and now...a graphic artist/fashion designer.

One of our first orders of business as a yearbook staff was to choose staff shirts. The shirts serve the duel purpose of advertising the book and giving the staffers a sense of camaraderie. I wasn't too worried about the whole shirt thing because I had seen the shirts the last two years and they were pretty basic...The school's name and the book's theme with a paw print for decoration. But this year's staff is made up of honor's kids, which is to say this year's staff is made up of very energetic high-achievers. They didn't want the theme and some lousy paw print. They wanted something...something...something....else.


So we had a brain storming session, during which I did a little tracing to try to jump-start the kidlet's creative juices. But instead of inspiring them to create their own designs, they very quickly decided they liked my little sketch, gave me a list of modifications, and then went home to do their algebra homework.

So I took the very rough draft and their list of modifications to after school tutoring and proceeded to make a larger, correctly shaded (they wanted black shirts so the color on the design had to be flip-flopped) version to take to the T-shirt printer.
A few days later, the t-shirt place faxed me their much better version of our design. I quickly faxed back my approval along with the kidlet's sizes and the nick names they wanted on the back of their shirts.
A week later, the nice T-shirt lady delivered the finished shirts to my classroom.
Now, I'm not saying I'm ready to apply to Project Runway and take on New York Fashion Week, but you have to admit that the final product isn't bad. Especially when you take into account the fact that the only art/design experience I have every had is limited to making visual aids for my Sunday school lessons...and really, who is going to criticize those? I mean, it's SUNDAY SCHOOL. The people who manage to both A) show up and B) stay awake are already so celestialized that they wouldn't dream of doing something so uncharitable as to criticize a construction paper visual aid. We are all wearing our staff shirts to school tomorrow for a pep assembly, and I was very tempted to make all of the staffers do a little cat-walk fashion show to better showcase my newly acquired artistic skills. I did eventually decide to scrap the fashion show idea, though. I am much to humble of a person to enjoy flaunting my talents like that...
...yep. Humble. That's me.