Junior highers are so presh sometimes. Remember being at that age? Their hormones are the driving forces behind everything. They look like little adults, they think they are little adults, but they still have a loooong ways to go. One of the funniest things to me is to hear all the gossip about who likes who at school. It changes just about every week, and I always ask the 8th grade girls for a status report in Study Hall. It goes something like this:

“WEEEELLLLLL Sally told Tommy that she liked him, but he likes this other girl that he met at summer camp, but she doesn’t have a phone so she can’t text, and her parents won’t let her get a facebook so like they NEVER get to talk so like its not even like they’re actually able to like, like each other, you know? So Tommy is thinking that maybe he could like Sally. At least until the summer.”

“And then Timmy REALLLLLY like Suzy, until she got that hair cut, but then he started liking her best friend, which every one knows you can’t do that. And then Suzy started liking Tommy, and then she tp’ed his house over the weekend, and then they were texting and she told him, so now he doesn’t know what to do, because its really hard, you know, because he’s like caught in the middle!”

And then the kids start thinking they’re “going out” and I totally turn into my parents and say things like “well, then, where are you going?” and teasing them all because they don’t even talk to each other at school, they can’t hold hands, their parents don’t even know about it. “Going out” means that they get nervous around each other, ignore each other at school, and text and facebook all night.

My classes were pretty good for me today. I got a mocha from the cafe to start my day off right, and when teaching about aminal derivatives in Latin, I put together a slideshow with funny pictures of them, like snakes biting a guy’s face and a baby monkey screaming, so that was pretty neat. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort and the kids think I’m super cool when we get to turn off the lights for five minutes and look at pictures. I’ve been teaching them some  Mexican Sign Language for aminal signs, too, so we’ve been having  a good time. The sign for “tortuga” (turtle) looks like the ASL sign for “poop” from “Meet the Fockers,” so it always gets a laugh. And one of my favorite students snuck to my desk and wrote “buy Ryan a present!” and “Give Ryan extra credit!” all over my calendar in pink pen on random days, so that’s something to look forward to for a laugh when I forget it’s on there and re-find it.

So today I don’t just “like” my job. I LIKE like my job.