LAUGH
It’s 8 P.M. and you have made it to the end of your day. The dinner has been cooked, the kids are in bed, the laundry is, well, OK that can wait for the weekend… but other than that you’re good. You crack open a bottle of wine, you grab your largest wine glass, you begin to finally unwind after yet another mentally exhausting day in the classroom, and that’s when you see it. Out of the corner of your eye, you gaze out the kitchen window and see the moon. Full, bright, and burning a hole in your soul.
For others, a full moon is a natural wonder. A sight to behold. An excuse to take yet another Instagram picture, attach some deep esoteric quote and 7 hashtags. But you know better. You’re a teacher.
For teachers, full moons are harbingers of doom. Every month like clockwork the full moon ushers in another 2 to 3 days of complete and utter insanity from students that were only slightly insane just a day before. We’ve never fully understood why this happens. Is it all the extra moonlight pouring into their rooms disrupting their sleeping schedule? Well, considering my entire 8th Grade Science class is up till 3 in the morning playing Fortnite, I doubt it. Is it some other-worldly, supernatural reason? Maybe all those myths about werewolves came from ancient teachers attempting to get a cave full of teenagers to focus on how to construct arrows so their tribe could have a bountiful harvest, only to find their class on all fours sniffing each other. Come to think of it, that’s also an accurate way to describe my 8th Grade Science class.
It’s not that they all suddenly turn into rotten students, they just become a little… extra. It’s a little extra skosh of whatever that particular student is normally like. The emo kids become so over-dramatic they could be extras in Twilight. That one kid that can never seem to stay in his seat starts to twitch like he chased his morning coffee with a Red Bull. The student that loves to ask questions raises her hand so often you’re afraid it might detach from the rest of her body at any minute. It’s a lot to take in, even for the most seasoned of teachers.
So what do we as educators do? You could try planning a class activity that involves getting up and moving around in an effort to burn off some of that “extra energy”. More often than not, however, I find that children seem to have an endless supply. You could attempt to bury them in busy work, but once they get bored you run the risk of your classroom turning into the food fight scene from Animal House.
However you chose to handle it, teaching during a full moon is one of the most challenging things we as educators are asked to do. We can see it coming, we know it’s going to happen, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. The best we can do is gird our loins, slug down an extra glass of wine the night before and count the minutes until the moon shifts its position enough so that it no longer has any power over our darling, precious children.
