The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie

My daughter looks just like her dad, except she has curly hair and a unibrow. When she was in-utero, my perinatologist gave me a 3D ultrasound photo of her face around 27 weeks, and I thought I recognized my small, upturned Irish nose. I imagined having a baby with red hair and green eyes. It puzzles me that having spent most of my life hating my looks, I was hoping for a child who looked like me. Biology is bizarre. Often, women will tell me how adorable my toddler is, and then apologetically admit that she looks exactly like Odie. Like it’s going to hurt my feelings.

“The next one will look like you,” one of my friends assured me.

The good news is, I’ve always loved the way my husband looks, so seeing his features on my daughter is fine by me. When I was pregnant, we fantasized about a child with a combination of our best features. His lips, my eyes, my nose, my hair, his height, his thin frame, and so on. Because I’m kind of a thin-lipped fat ass.

Lo and behold, V has MY lips, his eyes, and the hell if I know how she got curly hair. I don’t spend much time speculating about Pringles’ looks, but I certainly wonder. My three sisters and I have many physical similarities, but we look strikingly different. I’m a redhead, the oldest is a brunette, the younger is a blonde, and the youngest… well, she’s had blue, green, pink, purple, blonde and black hair, and I honestly don’t know what the real color is. Two of my sisters are 5’10” or taller, and one is 5’1″. Pringles feels smaller than V. She might be mommy’s little runt of the litter. Then again, she could surprise me and pop out 21 1/2 inches long like her big sister.

More than anything, I wonder if Pringles will be a talker like V. One of my greatest sources of motherly pride is my daughter’s speech. Not that I have anything to do with it. She started early with words and quickly progressed to sentences. At her 18 week well baby visit, the doctor assured me she was a “precocious talker.” A month ago, I had to take her to urgent care because she had pneumonia after hours. While the nurse was taking her vitals, V pointed at something and said, “What’s that?” The nurse looked at the painted lion on the wall and said, “It’s a lion. Can you say liiiiiiii-uuhhhhnnnn?” To which V replied, “Not the lion, THAT,” and pointed to the scale. I told her what it was called and she said to the nurse, “I want to play with the scale, please.” That’s my girl. My little talker.

She cracks me up all of the time with the things she says. She’s pretty good at repeating what she hears, so we have to be very careful. Sometimes it’s just adorable, though. Like how she copies the phrases I say to her and says them back to me. She cries when I rinse her hair, but as soon as I’m done, she declares, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Last night, on the changing table, she announced to me, “We don’t eat poop.” Good to know. This morning, I asked her if she had poop in her diaper and she assured me, “No, it’s just a wet fart.” Odie and I were having a scheduling discussion about the week, and I said to him, “That’s not going to work.” He asked what IS going to work, and my little “The Wonder Pets” fan cried out, “TEAMWORK!” with glee.

So, I just assume Pringles will stay mute until at least Kindergarten. Because one thing I never hear the parents of two children say is, “I can’t believe how they are exactly alike.”

There’s a joke going around the internet. There are several variations on this joke, and here’s one:

A corporate billionaire, a private sector worker and a teacher are sitting at a table with 12 cookies. The corporate billionaire takes 11 of the cookies, then turns to the private sector worker and says, “Look out. That teacher is trying to steal your cookie.”

I am a greedy, fat cat teacher. Why did I choose teaching as a profession? One word: money. Everyone knows teachers are positively rolling in it. In fact, both yesterday and today, I stayed at work until 5:00 p.m. I work part-time (ALL teachers only work part-time, of course, but I actually do not have a full assignment) and I get off of work at 1:45. But I worked until 5:00. What was I doing in my classroom for so many hours after my paid workday had ended? Counting my money, natch.

After work, I drove my luxury car home to the mansion I own, all spoils of the teaching trade. My husband, who is also a teacher, welcomed me home and we exchanged stories about how lazy we were at work today, how we don’t teach anyone anything EVER, and what a hoot it is that we can’t get fired.

I spent a little time on Facebook, and enjoyed exchanging some stories with colleagues about what a clever deception we’ve all pulled off, convincing people for so long that we are competent, hard-working professionals, when we’re really anything but. My work colleagues and I are such losers, the only jobs we could get were teaching jobs. In PUBLIC schools (which everyone knows are full of icky impoverished people).

We had a hearty, millionaire’s chuckle over how our union intentionally undermines any efforts to improve public education. I mean, why would we want to make it better? We hate children!

The only thing teachers hate more than children? Meetings.

Okay, that part is actually true.

It has been downright bizarre to see teachers portrayed as greedy fat cats, responsible for the budget crisis. There was an episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” this week that had a montage of clips of different people criticising and blaming teachers. One such commenter said that the “average teacher salary” in Wisconsin is somewhere in the neighborhood of $51,000. I wonder if he just looked at the teacher salary schedule and picked the number in the middle, or if he actually researched the salaries of all the teachers and did some math to find the average. This kind of critical analysis is the sort of thing Odie and I try to teach our students every day. Even though the government thinks our time is better spent preparing them for ONE state test they will take on FOUR days out of 180.

In my state, I pay nearly 30% of my salary in taxes. So, even if I made $51,000 a year at my part-time job, that’s not my take-home pay. And that summer off we all enjoy? Unpaid. Plus, few of us take the summer off. Most of the teachers I know either scrimp and save all year to afford those two months of mortgages, groceries, utilities, and insurance or they work summer school or other jobs to make ends meet. I’ve worked as a teacher for 12 years and I’ve worked 10 out of 12 of those summers.

Here’s a true account of my day yesterday. It’s true I worked until 5. I graded papers, tidied student desks, scrubbed spilled juice off the floor, threw away gum and candy wrappers left behind by students, prepared my agendas on the whiteboards for the next lesson, entered grades into my computer, and put student journals on desks where they’d be ready first thing tomorrow. I noticed that three of my students STILL hadn’t purchased a spiral notebook or composition book. I felt irritated, since I’ve reminded all three of them several times. I considered stopping at the store and just buying them some notebooks, but I was already so late, I decided to go straight home.

As I approached my car in the parking lot, I could see that it was leaking some sort of fluid AGAIN. Thank goodness the old clunker is still getting me around, because with a baby on the way and unpaid maternity leave coming up, I don’t have room for a car payment in my monthly expenses. Maybe next year. We could use up a big chunk of our rapidly shrinking “nest egg,” but we have to prepare for the possibility that with the state budget like it is, one or both of us could be laid off in the near future. How’s that for “a job for life”?

I’m not saying I’m some kind of saint, but I’m not a villain, either. I knew what I was getting into when I chose to be a teacher. I knew I’d have to work hard. I knew I’d be unappreciated for the most part. Knowing all of this, I went into the profession because I love the English language and I have a talent for teaching. 

And I want to be filthy, stinking rich.