August

June

July

AUGUST!!!!

I love August.


August is when I get to take the butcher paper off my bookshelves.


August is when I get to pull "the lamp" out of the storage closet.



And when a light fixture of this caliber appears, you know that a new herd of kidlets can't be too far behind.

And the kidlets can't return to naked walls.


In fact, it's best to stay as far away from the word "naked" as possible when dealing with 7th graders.



Words like "naked" have been known to cause 7th graders to lapse into giggle fits that result in puddles of piddle on the newly cleaned carpet.


And puddles of piddle are not appreciated by our hardworking custodial staff.



Not even a little bit.



So naked walls, naked bookshelves, naked bulletin boards, and everything else of the "naked persuasion" must be avoided at all costs.



Except, of course, for naked mole rats.

Naked mole rats make the BEST hall passes, and are not prohibited by the "naked ban" because the kidlets are too busy laughing at the disgusting burping sounds the hall pass makes to process the word "naked" in the over-developed giggle centers of their cute little brains.


August is when posters come out of hiding and retake their positions on the walls.

August is when the cross walks are repainted.

August is when Iron Man reports for duty, guarding my battered classroom sets of Tom Sawyer and Artemis Fowl.

August is when the back corner of the custodian's office is filled with an obscene amount of copy paper. Paper that we will run out of way too soon.

And this August is even more exciting than most, because this August our kind and benevolent school board saw fit to scrape up some money for new literature and grammar books. After laboring on the textbook adoption committee all of last year, I was so very excited to line my bookshelves with those much-anticipated tomes. I couldn't wait for my room to be filled with that "new book smell."

It felt like Christmas morning when the truck backed up to the back door of my newly cleaned, 70% decorated classroom on Friday morning. I couldn't wait to fill up my empty bookshelves with our newly adopted editions.

That excitement did ebb a bit, however, when the district folks continued to bring in boxes long after my classroom set had been unloaded. Before I knew it, the the boxes threatened to cover the Emerald City in a tsunami of texts.

My classroom, the one I had spent the previous week meticulously decorating and arranging, became storage shed for the entire school's new supply of literature and grammar books.

I can't complain too much, though.

I mean, my poor desk was already a mess long before the media components were dumped there for inventory and the stacks of boxes will eventually be hauled out of my room as the books are stamped and numbered and assigned to their new homes.

And before I know it, the desks will be empty of book boxes.

Those desks will be covered with college ruled paper, black ink pens, pieces of sentence skeletons, and filled with a new crop of 7th graders who are anxious to squeal when they cut into a nice, juicy dissection sentence for the very first time.

And then they will beg to use the naked mole rat hall pass to go to the bathroom to wash the imaginary sentence juice off their faces.

Naked mole rat.

Naked.

Hehehehe.