The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

I changed my classroom bulletin board this week.

With Halloween over, I decided to go with a fall/grammar-ish theme and was pretty happy with how it turned out.
When I set out, with die cuts in hand, to change the board, I told myself that, "This time, the board will be THE ONLY THING I decorate."

I had to tell myself that because I have this, uh, problem with bulletin board decorating. Well, actually the problem isn't so much with the decorating of the board, as it is with what comes after the decorating of the board.
You see, I can never stop with just decorating the one bulletin board. I just keep going until my entire classroom has been swallowed by whatever theme my sleep-deprived brain has decided to fixate upon.

In this case, it looks like an oak tree has barfed all of it's autumnal refuse over every surface of my classroom.

As I was pinning and stapling leaves to various and sundry pieces of classroom furniture, I kept thinking about the essays I could be scoring and the PowerPoint presentations I could be building. Deep down I think I was hoping that a beautifully decorated room would somehow carry over and make me a beautifully prepared teacher.

But while my room may look different than it did last month, the teacher inhabiting that room is just as behind on grading and lesson planning as always.

And my classroom decor isn't the only thing I changed this week.

On a strange Thursday morning type of whim, I decided to flip my hair out instead of under.

That could have wreaked some serious havoc in my classes that day, but luckily the fashion-forward seventh graders deemed it an acceptable change.

In fact, 97% of my seventh graders rated the different style as "cool" and/or "better than before" while only 2% claimed that the change had a negative impact on their ability to learn while in my class. The remaining 1% threw up on my shoes, but I am hoping that had more to do with the piggy flu than with my hair style.

I also made a few changes to my school wardrobe this week and attempted, for three out of the five days, to actually look like an education professional. I thought I had made some serious progress in the "grown-up" department for a while there...

...then I ended up buying these shirts, the one on the left for me and the one on the right for my English teacher mother. So not only was I NOT progressing, I was actually causing my mother to regress. Sorry mom.

When I made a quick trip back to my parental homeland this weekend, other changes were in store. Literally, the "store" being Winco.

Normally, I take my almost 3 year-old niece Kenna on a gummy run whenever I come into town. The tradition continued Saturday morning, but this time we included Kylie the monchichi baby in our candy crusade.

I think that it will be a change that sticks from here on out. Of course, at some point we are going to have to explain to the monchichi that she has to wait to eat her gummies until after they have been paid for...and taken out of the plastic bag. And we will get around to teaching her that someday, right after we finish trying to teach her daddy the same thing. ;)

The biggest change this week has brought, however, is the one my home ward went through today when my dad was released as their bishop.

After spending so much of of the past few years going to meetings and visiting ward members and working with the missionaries and going to meetings and presiding at funerals and performing weddings and going to meetings, I thought that the change would really throw my dear old dad for a loop.

But yesterday, as we continued our long-standing tradition of daddy-daughter Christmas light hanging, he told me about his new calling and I realized that he is going to be just as busy as ever. He will have plenty of meetings to attend and will actually have the opportunity to spread his inappropriate behavior over a wider swath of people than ever before.

Which just goes to show you, bulletin boards, hair styles, and gummy runs all may change, but the list of words my father is not allowed to say from the pulpit will be around forever.

(It will just get longer and longer and longer....)