For context, I teach a technology class. Each marking period, my students have the option of working in a structured online class that teaches you about a specific technology skill (coding, 3D design, typing, animation) or working in a small group with me on “analog” technologies (different types of arts and crafts). 

It’s the first week of me introducing a new analog technology and only one of my eighth-grade classes has started it. Second period, I spend a few minutes talking to a seventh grader in the hall about the analog technology he’ll have the option of trying later in the week. 

After school, we have a staff meeting.

Seventh Grade Teacher: “What were you talking to [Student] about in the hall this morning?”

I explain to her the craft we’ll be starting this week. The seventh-grade teacher bursts out laughing:

Seventh Grade Teacher: “[Student] was telling people you said [VERY bad word] and some of the seventh graders were worried you were going to get fired.” *She mimics their high-pitched voices.* “Miss [My Name] said [word]! Miss [My Name] said [word]!”

Me: “Oh my god. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

I inform my principal of what happened in case she hears any terrible rumors, and she is a little amused by the confusion.

The next morning, I grab some of my crafting supplies and I go to [student’s] homeroom and in front of all the seventh graders I say:

Me: “[Student], what am I doing?”

Student: “You’re knitting.”

Me: “Yup. And what do you call someone who knits?”

Student: *He gets very quiet.* ‘A knitter.”

There are some gasps of realization from his classmates who had heard the rumors.

Me: “You understand now?”

Student: *Holding back a smile he nods.*

I drive a small school bus, transporting students who live outside the main catchment areas for the schools they attend. So while most students at a given school live with a few miles of it, these students live further but still attend that school instead of a closer one for various reasons. Fewer students means smaller bus, which uses less fuel.

For one such school, I only have one student, a teenager. When she started riding the bus, she asked if we could listen to the radio, and I obliged with a warning that the radio didn’t always work well. I set it to an alt-rock station, and we had nice time listening to songs and chatting during commercials, until the radio would inevitably cut out after about twenty minutes.

This past week, the radio lasted a few songs longer, and we got tunes all the way to school. It was a nice surprise! Then came Friday. I picked her up, turned on the radio, and “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers came on, a song we both like a lot. The radio petered out just before the song ended, and didn’t come back to life the rest of the ride to school.

When it was evident after a few minutes that the radio was done for the day, the student mused:

Student: “The Killers killed the radio. Not much of a bright side to that.”

I’m the author of “The Fire Can’t Get You if the Asthma Gets You First!“, this time with a very cute story from after I transferred to a different middle school.

This middle school had a very unorthodox reward system in place for students. Our mascot was a wildcat (insert High School Musical jokes here), and the reward was simply called “Paws”.

These Paws were a little three-inch square of paper with a lion pawprint on them and two lines: one for the student’s name, and one for the name of the teacher who issued it. Students earned them through various means–helping teachers, behaving in class, getting perfect scores on difficult assignments, and things like that– and would collect them. One thing to note was that teachers often didn’t give Paws out to a student two days in a row, so as not to seem like they were showing favoritism.

What was the point of collecting them, you may ask? Well, these Paws were a currency!

On Fridays during the lunch period, there was a small school store that would open, and we could buy things with the Paws we’d earned. Candy and snacks, books, crayons and colored pencils, small toys, things like that. The reason for having our names on the Paws was to ensure we weren’t using another student’s Paws for a purchase.

When I first enrolled, I didn’t know what Paws were for, and was a little confused when, on my second day, one of my teachers came over to my desk and slipped a little piece of paper with a pawprint on it under my notebook–I don’t even remember how I earned it.

After class, I hung back for a moment to ask about it; she explained that the Paws were used to buy things at the school store at lunch on Friday. I was excited–my old school didn’t have anything like this!

I did my best to earn as many Paws as I could during the week. Being the new, awkward kid in class, I probably seemed like an overachiever, but I was too excited to care. By the end of the week, I had earned about ten Paws altogether.

Friday rolled around, and come lunchtime, the gates of the kingdom opened. Each table of five students was called one at a time to shop in the school store, and it was at this point that I learned that the ten Paws I had earned were…meager. One student had a manila folder packed to the brim with Paws he had accumulated over a few weeks, one student had an inch-thick stack bound with rubber bands…

When it was our class’s turn to go shopping, I brought my piddling ten Paws in…and I realized why the students had saved so many.

This store was PACKED full of cute stationery, snacks, and the like. Small items, like erasers or singular pencils, were one Paw apiece, but other items like stylized notebooks or honey buns were five. To get anything of note, you needed to save up. I guess it was to teach us the value of saving money or something, without actually using money?

One thing in particular caught my eye–a pack of twistable colored pencils. In the singular week I’d been there, it was no secret that I loved to draw, and loved to get my hands on new art supplies. The pack was eighteen colors–including shimmering metallic colors. It would have been amazing to work with.

It was also fifteen Paws, and there was only one left.

There wasn’t any guarantee that it would have still been there next week–there was another lunch period, after all, and we also weren’t the last table called in. Someone else might buy it before I could save enough to get it.

It was a bummer, but I accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to get them. Instead, I used my Paws to buy myself two spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks and returned to my seat dejected but not empty-handed.

I ended up having to step away to use the restroom as lunch was working through me a bit too quickly for my liking, and tucked my notebooks into my binder for safekeeping as I had been the first one to come back to our table. I was gone all of five minutes, and when I came back…there was something in my seat.

The pack of twistable colored pencils.

One of the other kids at my table had a very tiny smile on her face while she watched me put two and two together.

Those colored pencils saw a LOT of use.

I handled first aid at schools. 

One day, a teacher sent a message to the pastoral team and me asking for first aid to check on a student in their class. When I came in, he was speaking with a slurred voice. He mentioned falling backwards after tripping over his shoelaces. When I pointed out it made no sense since when you’re walking, your momentum is forwards, his friend explained that he did fall forwards and his backpack slid upwards, hitting him in the back of his head.

As I was taking my work phone out of my pocket, my line manager and the safeguarding lead arrive. I tell them he needs to go to hospital, so they extract him from the classroom while I am calling for an ambulance. They take him to reception, and the staff there call his parents.

Mum arrives to see two paramedics looking him over. They agree with my suspicions and take him and Mum to the hospital nearby.

Fortunately, he was back at school the next day, admittedly still with a headache.

Ever since, when I tell kids to tie their shoelaces, I say:

Me: “I had to call an ambulance for a kid who didn’t once.”

My then-boyfriend and I were dropping off some papers at the physics department of a (world-renowned, very prestigious and expensive) university, and the staff mailboxes happened to be in the faculty breakroom. I was amused to see that the breakroom microwave had a big sign taped to the front saying:

Sign: “PLEASE DO NOT MICROWAVE FORKS!!!!”

Me: *Quietly to my boyfriend.* “Wow, you’d think a bunch of top-notch physicists wouldn’t need that reminder!”

Passing Faculty Member: *Darkly.* “Tell that to the last three microwaves.”