So you're married to a Teacher... A Drinking Game

***This post brought to you by: Being stuck inside with nothing to do but distance teach and drink. Also the letters W, N, E and the number 1.***

I'm sure all professions have their personality quirks or behaviors that make being married to someone in that job difficult. Lawyer spouses must say, "I object!" or "I'm not out of order, you're out of order" sometimes. I'm sure firefighters are not much fun at bonfires or fireworks. It is time we teachers celebrate our general teacheryness (and let our spouses drink while we do it).

At my wife's suggestion (and because we've been quarantined together for two months now) I have created a drinking game - not for Teachers (unless you are a teacher, married to another teacher - in which case may God have mercy on your household and liver) - but for their significant others.

So let's get to it.

Take a Drink every time your Teacher Spouse:

1. Uses their Teacher Voice in regular conversation
2. Uses the words, "Well" or "Actually" when correcting you. Take three drinks if they use them together.
3. Is super particular about the day's schedule or lack thereof.
4. Assigns grades/levels to random stuff like chores, bird feeders or foot rubs.
5. Criticizes teacher movies for their various inaccuracies. 
6. Asks anyone to 'wait their turn' or 'put their hand up' in normal, human conversation.
7. Talks about 'this student in their class' or 'what happened in the staff meeting' like it is interesting or anyone actually gives a f*ck about that nonsense.
8. Still has a dedicated snack time, nap time or recess. Everyone else is doing those things constantly now.
9. They show you a 'funny' teacher meme on Facebook/Pinterest.
10. Drink twice if the proceed to explain the meme when you don't laugh at it.

I'm sure there are more - please share your suggestions.

Guess How Many Ways my School Board wants to Contact Me? Nope - more.

I don’t know if our Board is weird/unique or what have you, but there are a disproportionate number of ways they can contact us, as staff. 

To call it redundant would be an insulting, libelous, slander to redundancy. Let me walk you through the 9 (NINE! Are you kidding me!) ways that we can be communicated at:

• Mail: For real. Regular, postal service mail and our in-school mailbox system of paper slips from guidance, the library, the main office, special education and what-have-you. It’s almost quaint in its old-tymey-ness, so I barely even resent it. Don’t get me wrong -I do resent it, but not on the scale of some of these other intrusions.

• Home (landline) Phone Number: Okay, admittedly, this was given when I was first hired. It is still valid, and (I’m guessing here) will only be used in the event of a global communications meltdown to let me know whether or not school was cancelled. It might be used to contact my spouse to let her know I’ve been hurt in a chalky-hands related disaster, but they actually already have…

• My Spouse’s Cell Number: Just in case I cut my thumbs off using a paper chopper and need to be medi-evac’ed by an actual chopper to the hospital.

• My Cell: I’ve gotten voicemail here from work, but I also get texts from other teachers, VPs and the Principal. None of the messages are ever good news. Why in the hell did I give them my real number?

• My Work number: It doesn’t actually ring - it just goes through to a voicemail box with the...slowest… robot… voice… menu… devised. I hate it. On principle (the principle of forgetfulness) I only check my voicemail once a month. Why not more often? Because...

• Our Department/School Phone/Paging me in my class: If there is an honest to goodness emergency (or even some shit that doesn’t live in the same time zone as an emergency) the main office/our department each have their own respective number that can be used to talk to a human who will page my class and interrupt a lesson.

• ‘Work only’ Email. Hosted on Board servers and using the worst donkey-balls-of-a-software web interface to connect. It has extremely limited storage space and the SPAM filter is fooled more often than a senior citizen talking to Nigerian royalty. And, AND! inside this email account there are at least three separate folders/message boards I’m expected to read. I’m going to be a sport and not count those as distinct channels to contact me.

• Student email: Hosted with Google and the only email with any reasonable amount of storage space so I obviously have to have all student work sent to this account for marking purposes. Probably the only one I don’t actively hate AND IT IS FULL OF GRADING TO DO! What does that say about all the other crap communication I receive? Nothing good. 

• REMIND/CREW/Other contact App: I could be using all of them, but again, to be fair, I will lump them together. It was awesome when 100+ staff members all joined CREW this week and my phone twitched like a fentanyl junkie every few minutes with the canned “Mr. TECHMORON has joined CREW and wants to say HI” default test messages. Now I doubly hate my phone and triple-ly hate my coworkers. Great team building!

How many ways can your school contact you? 

Can anyone beat my number?

BINGO Game for Staff Meetings and Professional Development Days

I won't claim ownership over this idea. 

I saw a 25 year veteran make a D.I.Y. version during an especially terrible full-morning session of forced professional development. She scribbled one on a sheet of paper, wrote in her own words, and began checking them off as the experts droned on. 

It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. 

Or it seemed that way at least. I mean, the oxygen was getting pretty recycled and the presenter as boring AF. I was also likely a little hungover from playing cards the night before with some other staff. But in any event, this seemed amazing. 

So, I've pulled together some bingo cards for you to print, copy and distribute among like-minded educators at your next PD day or Staff talking-at. If you play it, please comment and let me know how you yelled BINGO! Did you work out a complicated system of hand gestures or coughing? Or did someone just get all excited and actually yell 'BINGO' out? 

And for the love of everything, make the prize booze-based.