-Spitballs. So. many. spitballs. All over my stuff. On my desk. On many of my children and their desks. Everywhere on the floor. And yep, I took one to the back of my head and it got stuck in my hair. It must be some obscure law of the universe that I will never be able to catch a child actually in the act of making or launching a spitball, and yet they will blanket my room by the end of the day. Honestly don’t understand how this is physically possible.

-Stealing. So. much. stealing. Down to three red grading pens after 2 weeks. Also missing: countless pencils, half a bag of cough drops, a full bag of candy that was in the bottom of my desk under stacks of folders, and half of the jumbo pack of Mentos intended for a Diet Coke + Mentos science demonstration (hidden inside a bag, in the back of one of my cabinets).

-Preteen love drama. Today I confiscated at least 5 different ranked lists of most of the girls and boys in the sixth grade. I now know which lucky gentlemen are most likely to be “hugged for 30 sec,” “kissed on the cheek for 5 sec,” “dated for 1 minute,” or “punched.”  Ranking methodology still unclear.

-Papers, papers and more papers. The amount of paperwork that I accumulate in a week’s time is actually unreal. I think I have enough stacks of ungraded papers in my room right now to heat my apartment for the winter…and I live in Minnesota. I try to alternate between the opposite strategies of furiously grading like no tomorrow, and closing my eyes and pretending that I could just throw all the stacks in a gigantic recycling bin and forget about them.

-In-class lunch. Whoever came up with the concept of “let’s have all the students eat pizza and carrot sticks for lunch in their classrooms every Friday and put teachers in charge of lunch distribution and clean-up” was obviously deranged. And evil. Very, very evil.