frantic elvis

January 22: Just inside the main entrance of Lowe’s, there is an aisle of shelves stacked with powerful cleaning detergents and liquids. Many of them are bright colors and packaged in clear plastic containers that make them look more like gallons of sugary fruit juice than soap and bleach.

January 23: Miss Karina’s classroom had a new poster for her students to tack up their feelings for the newly-elected president. There were Post-its talking about how feo he is and that he is muy malo. Along the bottom, there were a few yellow squares that depicted crude drawings of Trump getting decapitated by a creeper from Minecraft.

January 24: I taught my lesson on how to tell if someone is lying to my detective class today. Now the third graders keep chasing each other, asking questions about their personal lives and then screaming WHY DID YOU LOOK AWAY WHEN I ASKED THAT?

January 25: Melissa handed me a stack of papers today that turned out to be Robert's instruction manual. It was a series of tips for working with children with disabilities that looked like they had been copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia. Each page was personalized with clip art of Spiderman or Catboy, but not personalized enough to go beyond recommending that I praise successes.

January 26: Angel couldn’t wait to show me his hula hoop skills at recess today. He planted his feet far apart and his arms shot straight up into the air, but his wrists and fingers drooped, making his look like a human marionette. His tongue poked out of his mouth in his eager concentration while he wildly swiveled his hips, a tiny, frantic Elvis.

January 27: Addie has two tiny whirlpools of hair on either side of her snout just under her eyes that make it look like she was recently wearing reading glasses

January 28: It’s been awhile since George’s last haircut and during his walk today, a chunk of poop got stuck in his hair again. Nick didn’t want to bother trying to clean it off, so pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and set to cutting away all the hair with the scissors that came with his sewing kit. When he was done, he threw the scissors straight into the trash.

January 29: I’m getting started on my detective lessons for this week. I wrote out a few riddles in invisible ink on post-it notes that I plan on hiding throughout the classroom. For a few brief, horrifying and ironic moments, I completely lost both of my invisible ink pens.

January 30: The fire alarm went off twice today at the school. The principal tried to play it off like the first one was planned, but I don’t think anyone is buying it.

January 31: Heidi spent all day texting me the interesting names she has found while organizing clients’ files. We are now trying to figure out how to set up a client whose first names is Shizang with a different client whose last name is Wigglesworth.


much love,
hedgie