My mom is in grad school for nursing. She shares my work-and-school pain, and to make matters worse (for her) she's going to take a lot longer to finish her degree than I will mine. Hurray for teachers! For one of her projects, she has to work with a family that shows many health risks and try to help them improve their habits. Because I work at a very high-risk school, she came to me asking for help. I forwarded her email to our school nurse, matched her up with a family, and went back to slogging through my own homework.
A few days ago, I got an email written only as a Catholic mother can. It was actually a forwarded email response that she had sent the mother of the family she is working with:
"Meeting at 3:00 in the office sounds great. Now we just need to hunt for a nice, quiet place to work."
No "Dear Colie" No "Do you know of any places we could work?" Just a sad plea for help. Naturally, I took this to mean that she wanted to work in my classroom.
I should say here and now that I love my mom. She's funny. She's smart. She usually doesn't give unsolicited advice. She let me shave my legs when I was in fifth grade. All excellent qualities. However, as soon as I replied that she could use my room once my students left, I panicked. Since then, I've been on a cleaning frenzy. Every pile of papers on my desk had to go. The tables had to be Cloroxed. The shelves of toys had to be reorganized.
Forget that I'm a successful, well-regarded teacher with a high academic success rate. Mom's coming, and if my room is dirty, I will SO be grounded.
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