Sunday, January 15, 2012

The Omnipresent Sweets

I have a weakness... They're called sweets. One of the best/worst things of being a teacher is all the fricken sweets that are available to you. It's one of the best things if you love snacks. It's one of the worst if you are trying to watch what you eat and it takes you great effort to do so. There were sweets everywhere on Friday.

I start my morning at Chabot Elementary around 7:30 am. Around 8 ish am, one of the teachers brings in this red tin of chocolate covered cookies and leaves them on a table in the teacher's lounge. My gut reaction was to walk over. I stared at those cookies for the longest time. I just kept staring at them. I was hoping that my desire to eat them would go away. Believe it or not, eventually, that's what happened. Victory!

Now, I go to Mr. Agajan's classroom. Class hasn't quite started yet. This one student knows that I love cookies. Every day of last week, she brought me a homemade fudge cookie with white chocolate chips. They tasted really good. Smart thinking. Apples are so antiquated. This time she brought some figs. I'm not very picky. I'll eat figs too. But, the more I eat, the more calories I consume. "No no... That's ok. I'm really trying to watch how much I eat. Thanks though."

On to lunch time. I go back to the teacher's lounge. Another teacher went on a field trip to this organic farm. They made oatmeal raisin cookies. Oatmeal raisin cookies aren't my favorite, but these cookies looked so beautiful. You could bend off a piece so easily and the cookie wouldn't crumble. On top of that, those cookies were colossal. If the Hulk died of sunbathing and reincarnated as an oatmeal raisin cookie, these are the cookies he would come back as. Again, I had a staring contest with those oatmeal raisin cookies. "God... please... no no. Just take them away." I didn't give in.

It's after lunch. It's a 3rd grader's birthday. You know what that means? They bring in snacks... So, her dad brings in this variety of ice cream sandwiches. There's mint, cookies and cream, napoleon, and strawberry. So, she offers me some. At first, I'm just kind of feeling the ice cream sandwiches (Don't worry. They were still wrapped). Then, I back my hands off. "Uhh... That's ok. I'm good. Thanks." You remember that girl that brought me the fudge cookie everyday of the week? So, she picked up a mint ice cream sandwich. And, she knows that I want one to. She unwraps her ice cream sandwich, stares directly at me, and slowly... she bites into it. She was teasing me! How evil! :-(

Ok. So, class is over now. I head over to one of the portables because that's where some of the students go for their after school classes and that's where I work after the school day is over. So, I think that I'm home free. No more snacks are available to me. I've succeeded. I go to the very back of the portable. I see this white square cardboard box with this plastic window. There's this assorted fruit pie sitting in it. On the border of the box, it says, "We love those after school teachers." So, again, I have a staring contest with the pie for a while... But, I lost. "Damn it! Screw it! Fine! I'll have a fricken slice of pie." So, I take a slice and duck my head under the counter as I eat it.

You must have an iron will or no desire for sweets whatsoever to resist all the sweets that you'll encounter as a teacher.

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