In a junior high, the Valentine's drama starts a few days before the actual holiday. The kidlets, desperate to give and receive Valentine gifts, start searching for that special someone with whom they can "go out" long enough to exchange candy, flowers, stuffed animals, balloons, or a combination thereof.
When I was in junior high, this was accomplished by passing THOSE notes. You remember THOSE notes, don't you? The ones with the "check yes or no" boxes? Well, THOSE notes have been replaced by text messages and Facebook posts, but even with the technology up-grades, the result is the same: a lot of note passing/texting, five to ten minutes of hand-holding during lunch on Feb. 13th, and then the Valentine morning exchange of gifts.
Valentine morning at a junior high is magical.
Then Valentine afternoon hits. Gifts exchanged, the need for a significant other disappears faster than the candy that came with their dollar store teddy bears. The break-ups start as the school day ends.
Thanks to texts and status updates, most of the break-up drama will be over before the kidlets walk into my classroom tomorrow morning. With any luck, there won't be enough tears to warrant an extra box of tissues from the custodial closet.
Despite the hormones and the drama and the sugar highs that negate any attempts to teach the children anything at all, I do enjoy Valentine's Day at the junior high.
Why?
Two reasons.
First, the cheesy Valentines provide a wealth of examples of puns in action.
Second, it is the one day of the year when breaking out my red pen to mark up their papers seems festive instead of punitive.
In other Valentine news, I may have had to give up the H Family Fantasy Football trophy (post forthcoming) but I managed to score a decisive victory in the competition for World's Nerdiest Aunt. My victory came courtesy of these Doctor Who Valentines.
And speaking of Doctor Who, my birthday this year has had a very Whovian theme. I will do a full post about my birthday, as soon as I finish celebrating my birthday.
I have a tendency to procure items that may seem a bit, well, useless.
A wicked witch of the west throw that doesn't match anything in my home.
Sirius Black's wand from the Harry Potter movies.
And about one hundred Kinder Egg toys, just to name a few.
But even though those types of things may seem useless, I always seem to find a way to use them.
The wicked witch blanket? It lives at school and keeps me ward during fire drills.
Sirius's wand makes a wonderful pointer during Power Point presentations.
And the Kinder Egg toys make great game pieces for the board games I put together when I substitute in Primary classes.
This Christmas, my little brother (with a little help from my big sister) gifted me with a Doctor Who cookie jar... a really cool TARDIS cookie jar with flashing lights and sound effects.
It is one of those awesome items that could have ended up on a shelf somewhere, only pulled out to play with when my Whovian nephews come to visit.
Instead, it ended up on my desk at school, filled with the fortune cookies that are the highlight of my creative writing fortune cookie lesson. Thus the cookie jar fulfilled the measure of its creation by holding and dispensing cookies and, by becoming an object of fascination to the kidlets, won a permanent home on my desk.
Last week, it held the creative writing kidlet's fortune cookies.
This week it will hold the English kidlet's pre-final-test-mints.
And the week after that, my lovely TARDIS will house dum-dums for the sub to use to bribe the communication kidlets to behave while I am at district leadership team meeting.
So what lessons can we learn from this post?
Well, first of all we learn that TARDIS cookie jars are cool.
And, perhaps more importantly, I should really own a fez.
