Usually, I’m a chiller. But my best friend is a serious clomper with a Type A personality. After college, we went on a girl’s trip to Vegas. She got us nice rooms thinking I was ready to chill all day and planned four-hour visits to buffets. But then I discovered Red Bull and drugs, and I don’t think I slept all that…

Okay sentimental teacher memory time...

Me too! We deserve do-overs.

We did not have sex. As soon as I boarded the plane, I felt achy all over and couldn’t stop shivering. By the time we landed, it was the full-blown flu. I was sick with a fever and spent the first day hallucinating and drenching the sheets with sweat (the sick kind, not the sex kind). My poor husband spent the first…

I’m the same way. It took me a few months. Dirt, grass, and other pollen on animal fur makes it worse, so if you can get a mostly indoor breed that will help. Purifiers help out so much. I have two cats. We have to sweep and mop every day. I make my husband dust/vacuum every day since it sets me off (which means I am…

Claratin does nothing! I have two cats. We have to clean our house and wash sheets and sweep/mop floors to keep allergies under control. We also have purifiers in the main rooms. I rescued both cats and they keep my stress levels down so much that I’m willing to deal with the compulsive cleaning.

I’m so allergic to my…

My mom loves him. I think it’s his name. She keeps repeating it like Fllaaay. Even now, I read his name like that. Bobby Fllaaay. If his name was Dourchkle, he’d probably get no action.

I don’t have kids of my own.

I have my teenager niece and nephew living with me. They both hate parties and social outings that require effort. My nephew doesn’t even like cake. On his birthday, he wants pancakes for every meal and to play video games all day. I (reluctantly) tried to do a birthday dinner with their…

Me too! I just want to pay off my loans and get a decent car.

I went to a school with mostly white teachers and classmates. But an amazing teacher in my sophomore year realized I needed motivation to stay in school. She hooked me up with a program for first-generation college kids (TRIO programs WORK!) and the mentors were mostly minorities. Looking back, I have to admit that it…

Can you imagine the craigslist ad about finding an immigrant for an interview?

I did a traditional academic program at a large university. My classmates were mostly white and middle-class. We had an embarrassing assignment to talk to a minority (racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual preference) and report back on our findings. No one knew what the instructor was looking to accomplish. Did he want us…

I definitely joined for wanting to make a difference, but I wouldn’t mind getting paid what I was worth. We have an end of the year bonus that’s about an extra $3,000 but with all the extra requirements they put on top of our normal duties (supervising student activities, weekend tutoring, etc.) I realized that with…

It definitely made me uncomfortable in our teacher education programs when the fellow students would marvel at the “tough circumstances” of all these at-risk students. They’d moan about the troubles of teaching these kids. And I’d be like, “Uh..I was one of them.” It made me feel inferior as if my education wasn’t…

I’m Hispanic and the first in my family to attend college. Once I decided to be a teacher, I knew I’d end up working with Latino or Native American students.

At first, I did not want to become a teacher because of the low-pay (and a promotion in education means moving further away from students). I have a lot of…

I will. We live in a small, rural town where the older generation can be intolerant. But my kids are open-minded and generous and really believe they can make a difference. We’ve had a rash of suicide attempts in our middle school and the same kids came in asking what could be done to address the issue. I have a lot…

I really didn’t do anything. It was my students who were on the front line dealing with bullshit and it was the girl who struggled with finding a place to pee standing up for herself. They were the brave ones. As an adult I should have thought of this, but I’m guilty of taking for granted the rights I have being…

A co-worker of mine is an unabashed lover of these types of movies and will break into tears at the idea that she will never have that kind of love. She has never dated and is incredibly awkward around guys. I feel like if she had dated and had the requisite awful experiences, she’d stop putting herself down for not…

I’m so interested in how she felt about it. Did her feelings change over time? How are the family dinners? I feel like such a vulture for wanting to know how the extended family tried to deal with this craziness especially now that the girls are older.

We had kids start a petition for our transgender students to be allowed to use the staff restroom- we have four in the building- and one of them is in the teacher’s lounge. Someone said it violated FERPA (privacy laws) to have the kid in the teacher’s lounge one with access to student grades being printed out and the…