The student body’s adrenaline may rush, but that of the teachers surges when weather looms.

“Are you thinking hopefully?” I asked one. “I’m so often disappointed.”

“I know, me too,” she replied. “But this one looks promising.”

At the faculty meeting after school, another teacher said, “Do you know Mr. R, over at the high school? He’s had a bad track record this year, but he’s usually the best predictor of weather, and my son said that he said we’ll be out for the rest of the week.”

“We won’t be here until Thursday,” my principal told me.

I’d grabbed a Sprite to go with the meeting snacks and told him, “I’m going caffeine free–I’ll be up all night even without it.”

At least two other teachers cheerily muttered something about having to get work together to take home with them. I grinned at their glittering eyes, knowing that I was already caught up–last Friday was a work day, after all–and would carry out only my empty lunch bag.

“I’ll make a bet with you,” I’d told my last period students. “I bet that we’ll be here in school tomorrow. If I’m wrong, you can stay home. If I’m right, I get to make you miserable.”

I’m glad we got that covered before a real cover descends.

I teared up in class again yesterday. Actually, I pretty much bawled quietly–so much so that I had to stop reading for a few minutes.

I’ve been reading out loud to my students the historical novel Blue, and I hadn’t thoroughly previewed yesterday’s chapter. It tells of the narrator’s little brother’s death from polio, how her tears ran over his withered body and how her mother repeated the boy’s favorite saying–“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”–as they buried him.

Children suffering hits a soft spot for me, and this was no exception.

My students were a bit taken aback by my tears. I heard a chuckle but mostly low whispers of “He’s crying” and “It’s a sad story” and general, respectful quietness as I let myself cry and then tried to regain my composure.

Along with my tears on Tuesday, my expression yesterday may have sealed my reputation as an emotional basket case. When I read that same chapter to a later class–the only class that I haven’t yet cried in–I noted at least one student watching me very, very closely. I guarantee I’m not that interesting to watch while I read, so I’m pretty sure he was watching for salty pearls. Since I knew what was coming in the story, however, I braced myself well; he must have been sorely disappointed.

After I came home, I learned that M, t00, had shed tears. At about the same time that I began reading to my students, M said, she cried as she learned in a BBC report about a family who lost two young daughters to an Israeli soldier’s deliberate gunfire into a “terrified procession” of a “mother, grandmother and three little girls.”

If only, if only–if only this was fiction. Composure be damned.

I may have to stop reading Gone with the Wind. The desperately situated and harshly manipulative protagonist Scarlett O’Hara brings me consternation and bad days.

Or maybe my bad days are because students go crazy when we have early release days, which describes all this week due to bad weather and mid-year exams. It seems that it’s all I can do to reign in a wee bit of sanity in my little classroom, which I would like to be a literary haven but too often becomes a dungeon of rowdiness.

But I’m tired of thinking about this. Maybe I’ll go read more.

Not long ago I wrote about a cool commercial I saw on Channel One. I’ve found it online; here it is.

“Why would people cry about this?” a student asked at one point; whispers circulated in my classroom and heads turned towards where I stood as we watched the inauguration today, tears running down my face.

I didn’t think I could explain it succinctly, and so said nothing.

In high school I wrote an opinion page piece about the public school nuisance Channel One. Never heard of it? Basically, a company installed TVs is participating districts’ classrooms in exchange for 12 minutes each day of undivided student attention for a news program interspersed with commercials.

When I was in high school, back when Anderson Cooper worked for the program, I thought Channel One was more like commercials interspersed with news, and so I wrote about all the things I’d learned during those last 12 minute segments of my many school days: Big Red’s cinnamony ability to let you kiss a little longer, and so on. You get the picture, and I’ve not been alone in my outrage.

Now, as a teacher, I’ve come to appreciate Channel One a little more. Much of the coverage is soft–an up-and-coming trend, a featured school sporting play of the week, a look at dating violence–but daily headlines make it in, too, and are explained in a way my seventh grade students can grasp.

The commercials have improved, too. Many of them are no longer candy and gadget oriented; instead, they tout facial creme, college search help, and a subtle navy ad (Approximation: “Mom, have you thought about–.” “How you want to be part of something bigger than yourself? … I’m thinking about it.”).

My favorite commercial by far, however, is a public-service type ad about respect. It shows a teenager listening to his blasting earbuds at a crosswalk. His face shows uncomfortable surprise when the little old lady next to him puts her hand in the crook of his arm. He reaches up and pulls out an earbud and looks uneasily at her.

“May I walk you across the street?” she asks him.

“Uh,” he says. “Uh, sure.” And then, a moment later, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she says.

“Hey, guys,” I said this week to my students, “that’s an example of two types of irony–verbal and situational. Verbal because when she says, ‘May I walk you across the street?’ what she’s really saying is, ‘Would you please walk me across the street.’ And it’s situational irony because we don’t expect her to say that in the first place.”

“Oh yeah, it is,” one student responded.

One of my struggling students who is very shy and quiet but really tries wrote this in one of his spelling activities for the word “write”:

“I only like to write about wresiling In fith grade I wrotne a story about 7 front and back papers and it was about the wrong thing. I hate writing.”

If my excitement level is detectable it’s because we’re under a winter weather “advisory” right now, and the thermometer might dip just low enough to make a little freezing rain happen. As my principal said today, however, “We haven’t had winter weather for two years.” So we’ll see.

Regardless of tomorrow’s happenings, today was a rather straight forward recovery from the end of the world, which was my two weeks of vacation coming to a close. No matter that I’d had a more-than-adequate “re-entry zone” as recommended by KTdid, which unfortunately devolved into nothing but yesterday’s recovery zone for my ailing belly. Today was a full day of school and my belly rose to the occasion even as it sank in misery that the holiday festivities were over.

As mundane as “getting back to work” may sound, however, it was actually a pretty fun day, partly due to my off-the-cuff operation of instruction.

Today was my day to meet with a group of seven boys who receive remedial attention from their teachers. As is frequently the case when this group traipses in, I pulled a stack of trusty workbooks off the shelf, passed them out, and flipped to the next section, about an inventor. “Perfect,” I thought. “We’ll learn about biography.”

And learn we did.

Now, let me just say that these boys suffer from a variety of maladies, mostly that they would rather not read and rather not be in school. Their interjections of “I went bear huntin’ on Saturday” into our pre-reading discussion of important inventions in their bedrooms (“I have a John Deere,” one drawled. “I have lots of them posters in my room.” Another said, “I have a blow torch.” Another said, “I can make a blow torch. If you take a lighter and hold up a bottle of cologne…” but I didn’t let him finish) and new vocabulary (“‘Artificial’ is like getting a cow pregnant, right?” said John Deere boy) created a general semblance of chaos that I barely rescued by diving wholeheartedly into the passage I had blindly selected for us to read.

I did not remain blind for long. It turned out, the inventor of note was in fact a certain Ruth Handler, whose daughter Barbie loved to play with paper dolls, which gave Ruth the idea to create a doll with more adult-like proportions and with body parts that moved–named Barbie, of course–whose boyfriend Ken was named after the real Barbie’s brother. Ruth and her husband went on to form the Mattel toy company.

Now, if boys in general don’t necessarily like reading about Barbie dolls, and the “adult-like proportions” hadn’t yet caught their imaginations, this group of prepubescent youngsters would soon be fully engrossed in the text. The next paragraphs did away with any need for internal conjuring. Indeed, I had to pause the reading occasionally for some “giggle time,” to let the boys just let it all out. (I was about to burst myself.)

It seems that later Ruth came down with breast cancer and lost one of her breasts–and none of the various sizes and shapes of replacements seemed right to her. (The seriousness of this was not lost on this group of boys, mind you. One said, “We thought my mother might have breast cancer, but on Christmas Eve we found out she doesn’t.”) Ruth went on to make a more suitable silicon implant known as “Nearly Me,” which was then nicely described in our workbook and manufactured by her new company Ruthton.

We made it through, in the end, and I turned the boys’ attention to a review game in which I asked questions only about the doll portion of Ruth’s life, thereby avoiding further blushing and giggling.

It’s not that sandals aren’t okay, M says; it’s sandals in the wintertime, below khakis and button-down shirt and tie, with socks that are not okay.

Now, I should just say that most of the time I don’t wear sandals because I think they look right. Rather, if I wear them it’s usually because it’s convenient. With occasionally biking to school, I often leave my dress shoes there, and so I wear sandals or sneakers for the ride or drive to and from–and while I never wear my sneakers all day (that would be frowned upon), I sometimes take the bold step of not switching out of my sandals.

I learned this week that M isn’t the only one who scorns this sad habit. Coincidentally immediately after confiscating a pack of gum from one attitude-prone, angst-laden preteen in my classroom, I launched my first period class into a “word choice” activity in which students were to write for five minutes about something that makes them angry.

“And you can’t write about other students,” I said.

“How about my sister?” one boy asked. “I get so mad at her.”

“No other students,” I said. (I teach his sister, his twin, in a later period–in which she would be quick to ask, “What about my brother? Can I write about him? He spit in my face this morning.”)

“Can we write about teachers?” Miss Angst glared at me. “Some teachers make me mad.”

“Only if it’s me,” I said.

“Well, okay then,” she said.

After the five minutes of writing, students paired up and selected one particularly expressive sentence to share with the class. Miss Angst was eager to offer her choice: “‘Those sandals are annoying and they’re not cutting it any more.’ Can I read the rest, too?”

I didn’t take her up on her offer, but I haven’t worn the sandals since (although I promised her I would, just for her). See, the weather’s been really rainy, and tonight I won’t sleep well because that rain is supposed to turn a bit snowy, which means it’s slightly possible that I won’t have to work a full day tomorrow.

In which case I wouldn’t even have to put on socks.