Nuggets of Matt Brilliance

Matt and I are getting some new appliances, so we're taking the old ones to our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I was looking through the list of accepted donation items to see if we have other things to give away...

Me: "Matt, they also accept tools."

Matt: "Great! We can get rid of you. Bazinga!"

Monkey see...

I always thought I was a good driver--a bit aggressive, yes, but good. But while driving home late on the highway one night last week, I may have caused a little traffic problem.

A few lanes of the highway were closed due to construction, so I became a little confused about where the lane ended and the shoulder began. I pulled into what I thought was the far left lane, only to realize quickly that I was careening down the shoulder. I pulled back into the correct lane right away. Okay, fine, I passed the car that was irritating me, and then I pulled back into the correct lane.

For several more miles, I watched in my rear-view mirror and saw car after car pull into the shoulder...and not go back. The shoulder ended rather abruptly after a while with some construction equipment and a concrete wall. I found myself vacillating between yelling at the other cars ("It's not a lane! I'm sorry!") to reminding myself that covering my eyes so as not to see an accident would just create another series of problems.

Pearls of Teenage Wisdom

I wore my hair in a ponytail to school the other day, in small part because I was in the mood for a change and in large part because I slept in. They say that people love change, which is the explanation I'm using for a day full of variations of this same comment:

"Wow! You look good today! What's different?"

As (unfortunate) luck would have it, that same day, a student said she could eat whatever she wanted without gaining weight. I told her I was jealous and another (rather precocious) student said, "Oh, c'mon! You're not that fat!"

Nuggets of Matt Brilliance

Matt: "I think I know why you're an English teacher."

Me: "Oh, really? Why?"

Matt: "So you can correct whoever you want."

Me: "That's not true. And it's 'whomever.'"

Nuggets of Matt Brilliance

Matt is not a fan of horses. I grew up loving horses (and with a mother who adored them), so I've never understood his aversion. While watching the Preakness yesterday, Matt finally put it into words I could understand:

"Horses are like way-too-attractive women. From far away they look really nice, but up close they're just stupid and disappointing."

Pearls of Teenage Wisdom

Honestly, I should just rename this blog Pearls of Teenage Wisdom. Anyway...

I LOVE to incorporate Barley in my daily lessons (shocking, I know). One rather obnoxious student pointed this out to me yesterday.

"I swear, I've never met anyone who likes their dog this much. I mean, I like my dog, but she ran away for, like, 8 hours last night, and I didn't really care. She came back this morning, and she was fine, so who cares?"

After a few more minutes of his ill-timed outbursts, another student turned around and said what I couldn't: "Well, no wonder your frickin' dog ran away! You never stop talking, and she couldn't take it anymore!"

Pearls of Teenage Wisdom

This morning, while my students were working in small groups, one of my more affluent students was having a conversation with another student who is from a less-privileged background. The second student stopped me while I was walking around the room and asked if I had a job while I was in college. I said I did, and the rest of the conversation went something like this:

2nd student to 1st: "See? I told you! Everyone has a job in college."

1st student: "But I'm not going to need a job. I'm going to take out loans, but I'm going to earn at least $80,000 right out of college, so I can pay it all back."

Me: "Is that really what you think you'll earn immediately?"

1st student: "Of course."

Me: "When I graduated from college, I had a lot of loans, and I couldn't find a job. I ended up waiting tables. After a few months, I got a job that paid $30,000, and I was thrilled."

1st student: "Well, that won't happen to me. I'm going to be successful."

2nd student: "Yeah, a successful gas station attendant."

Pearls of Teenage Wisdom

Today in Speech class, my students were giving impromptu speeches. In other words, they were making speeches up off the tops of their heads. One of the topics we did today was "If I had just $1, I would buy..." Most of them headed to McDonald's or Taco Bell for their respective dollar menus, but one boy still has me concerned. This was the gist of his entire speech:

"Well, if I had just $1, I'd probably play it safe and head to Rite Aid for two bottles of hydrogen peroxide."

That was it.

So I asked (all the while not really wanting to know), "Um, why is that 'playing it safe'?"

He looked at me like I was an idiot.

"Only because hydrogen peroxide is the most useful chemical on Earth."

We left it at that.

Weekend lesson

Weekends are a time to get caught up on everything I let slip during the week and to try to get a jump on the busy week to come.

It's also time to let go of my control-freak tendencies long enough to allow for a little help.

Nuggets of Matt Brilliance

In honor of Matt's birthday today, I have to share another installment in my "Matt's funny email of the day" series. Matt has a theory that certain animals portray specific personalities. For this reason, he despises the alpaca. "They're just so smug," he says.

So it's fitting that on his birthday, I honor him by sharing this most recent email of the day (the subject of which, by the way, was "This is what I'm saying"):