Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Unless you're sleep deprived.

And then you just want to punch someone in the throat.

It's back to school time, and while I have the hang of going to bed early, the getting up early is not working well with me.

At all.

In the words of the BFF's little man, mornings "make me sad and angry."

Unfortunately, not only do teachers (like myself) have to face brutally early hours like 8am (or in my case 7am), we have to do it with several other people of the same haven't-been-up-this-early-in-three-months mentality. And no one's going to come out unscathed.

I chose to redo a few things in my classroom this year. My thoughts on teaching are that you have to be constantly evolving and recreating things and experiences or you run the risk of doing things the same year after year. And that doesn't make for good teaching. So I've redone my classroom, and added two new bulletin boards and come up with some pretty fun and creative ideas.

Immediately, upon seeing my bulletin boards, the other team members wanted to do it. So they asked me to email them the files. Then they saw something else, and asked for those files as well. I'm emailing other people my files left and right. And showing them the special way to put the paper through the printer so it prints on the sticky notes. And it's only flattering for so long before you want to punch the next person that asks you to email them a file in the throat.

One team member in particular almost took a #2 pencil to the jugular today. Multiple times. When we went to our morning meeting, she moved my stuff out of the way so that she could sit down in the seat I was saving for KC. We had to play a game in our meeting (because what's more fun than getting a bunch of sleep-deprived teachers with a million other things on their minds together for a little Parcheesi) and when she didn't like my answer she yelled at me. The girl yelled at me. This little snit that wasn't even alive in 1984 yelled at me.

Then, there's the final bulletin board "incident" and subsequent conversation today that almost pushed me to the dark place of twitching and stabbing. 

I found something similar to this on my new drug Pinterest, and I decided to recreate it for my room. I did it as a poster, but then decided to do them as individual pictures and make it a whole board. I think it came out quite nicely if I do say so myself (and yes, I know it's off-center. My whole life is off-center. Why would my bulletin boards be otherwise?)

Little Miss Antisocial Unless She Wants Something came by and had the following conversation with me (aka Twitchy and Stabby):

LMAUSW: I like that board, and (blah blah blah) can you send me the file?
T&S: Sure (big heavy sigh). I made it a poster but I'll send you the poster and the individual files. I printed them off as photos of 8 x 10s and 4 x 6s at the Walgreens.
LMAUSW: So did you just print them on cardstock on the color printer and cut them out?
T & S: *muttering curse words under breath*

It was because of this last incident that I fully realized the extent of my sleepiness and am subsequently calling it a night. Yes, I realize that it's 8:26pm, but with my attitude today, I think it's perfectly acceptable, if not downright late.

I need to be well-rested tomorrow when someone needs my files.