Other Duties As Assigned…

As I sat outside in 90-degree or so heat (this is Texas remember) supervising my one hour and 45 minute Homecoming Float Duty, it just made me run through that mental list of “Things We Didn’t Go to College For” that bounces around the back of my brain from time to time. But with teachers flanking both sides of me sitting in those “Soccer Mom” folding chairs and grading papers, my friend the Spanish teacher glanced over my shoulder as I compiled my list and duly noted that a better title would be: “What they really mean when they say, ‘Other duties as assigned…’”

And, as usual she’s right, so there it is, and here we are with a list culled from years of experience, a number of teachers and from a variety of school districts.

Other duties as assigned…

• Playing yearbook "bingo" in order to sort through 1,000-plus books by teacher name and an assorted array of customized extras in order to distribute the book. Trust me on this one, you don't want to know the rules. There's never a winner.

• Stuffing tootsie rolls in empty rolls of toilet paper and wrapping them up for cheerleaders to throw to fans at football games.

• “Designing” receipts through all manner and forms of technology for items purchased for kids after misplacing the original receipts.

• Ascertaining whether “Lick Lamar” was too graphic to put on a lollipop when trying to come up with a theme for the Friday night football game against Arlington Lamar High School.

• Luring kangaroo mice with sunflower seeds and popping trashcans over them because we legally couldn’t set mouse traps or bait.

• Taking the temperature of vents throughout the school because no one in maintenance (located in a separate building, on a different street, with working temperature controls) actually believed the air blows at a frigid 53 degrees. Instead, the infamous “they” believed the teaching staff was comprised of menopausal, hormonally whacked-out females suffering from faulty temperature sensations.

• Chasing chickens (yes, real ones, not the wacky rubber ones) down the hallway after some end-of-the-year prankster put them in the girls’ bathroom.

• Arranging cookies on cocktail napkins for parents at the end of an assembly just so we could thieve a snickerdoodle or two.

• Rewriting about 100 statistics from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test results on a blank sheet of paper during teacher in-service (staff development) to prove we can (a) find the data (b) accurately record the information and (c) waste all morning doing it.

• Trying to teach a computer class for six weeks without computers. Unless that was part of the “monitor and adjust” curriculum of Education 101.

• Being issued not red pens, whiteboard markers or paper clips but a yellow and black flashlight as the only piece of official equipment to cope with the anticipated power outages from low-bid construction crews hired to renovate the school. And, yes, of course, they were used.

• Painting [substitute your mascot’s name here] paws for a mile in preparation for the Homecoming Parade.

• Being assigned to the Noise Patrol to confiscate air horns and other noisemakers at graduation. Or, better yet, being pressed into duty as part of the Gum Squad–that’s G-U-M not G-U-N–to make would-be graduates spit out their chewy blobs before being allowed to bebop down the aisles to “Pomp and Circumstance.”

I swear all this is true…I couldn’t make this stuff up even if I tried. Sure would like to hear some of your stories. You can post them here or you can email me at mybellringers@gmail.com.

In the beginning…my first blog entry

I doubt that I would have survived these 20-plus years as a public high school teacher if each and every day I didn’t ponder, “Is this the day?” You know that day–The Day to actually set your hair on fire and run screaming from the classroom. That day.

And now that I am just about to start my third year at my still-new-to-me school district in my new facilities, the irony is not lost on me that my classroom door is just mere feet from the emergency exit to the parking lot. So, you see, I really could set my hair on fire, run out the door, hop in my trusty blue mini-van and leave in a puff of smoke. If you love that kind of twisted humor, then I think you’ll like reading this blog.

Now that school is gearing up, I’m trying to shift my focus back to the classroom and my incoming students. I must say this focusing thing seems to get a bit more difficult each year. I know I’m not the only one. Kids have problems, too. Can’t you just hear the pens scribbling across prescription pads dispensing medication to treat ADD and ADHD in an attempt to find a magic pill to focus kids back on education? While I have no quick fix solution, sometimes I believe we should remember a simpler time when all a teacher had to do to focus students was to pop a bell ringer – an instructive little ditty that required no hands-on teaching from the instructor–on the overhead. Ah, those were the days, when kids labored over the day’s journal entry, math problem or some other bell ringer, while teachers throughout the school had a small, but important block of time to take care of things from attendance to handing back papers to recording grades.

My bell ringers always provide a small window of opportunity for me to exhale or inhale (depending on whether hyperventilation was in order for the day). Bell ringers also gave me a chance to survey the classroom scene and ponder whether this was, you know, “The Day.

Educational experts (defined as anyone and everyone who has ever sat in a classroom) like to ponder, too, and whine about the problems facing our public school system. They offer a wide array of this and that, believing they have the perfect solution to the problem du jour.

But I have a secret: perhaps instead of dissecting our educational system, we should just celebrate our successes, laugh at our shortcomings and learn from our mistakes and failures. This blog, Bell Ringers, is intended to provide stories from the trenches of more than two decades of classroom experience, three school districts, eight principals, four superintendents and hundreds of children. I’d also like to hear your stories, too, because we all need to celebrate, laugh and learn together.

To get us started, here’s one of my favorites: In my old school, I had just completed my allotted 20-minute lunch block with my lunch-bunch buddies when one of them — a social studies teacher — started talking about her morning class. She was lecturing about how prices have increased over the years. She used stockings as an example, except she used the word “hose.”

“I was telling the class about how the cost of hose had risen over the years, and I didn’t understand why most of the class was giggling,” she told us, “until my student teacher told me the class thought I was saying ‘ho’s’ as in prostitutes instead of nylons.”

Unfazed, she told the class it didn’t really matter which ones she was talking about — the point being that both have increased in price through the years.

Now, there’s a teacher for you, as well as a mini-lesson plan for laughter and learning – two things we certainly could use more of. Hopefully, you will find both here, and we can all survive another day.

And, should we fail? Well, we can always set our hair on fire and run screaming from the building.