10. Don't use up all my lunch tickets for the week on Monday.

 9. If I forget to put on pants before leaving for school, just go back home and get some.

 8. Stop teaching that the South really won the War Between the States.

 7. Stop referring to faculty meetings as "totally useless pieces of crap that do nothing but waste what little time I have left on earth."

 6. Cut silent reading time down from four hours per day to twenty minutes.

 5. Stop telling the kids that the lunchroom cookies MAY be spoiled and that I need to test them first.

 4. Quit showing Letterman's monologue as "educational tv."

 3. Call certified subs from now on. No more hiring the janitor for $1.50 per hour.

 2. Quit driving the principal's car everytime he leaves his keys in it.

At the beginning of each year, I pass out questionnaires to my students concerning the school atmosphere. I don’t require them to include their names on the papers in an attempt to discover what they really think about school and teachers. After many years of reading their responses, I have discovered that by far the main complaint is the amount of homework the students encounter, but there are always a few entertaining remarks.

This year a student ironically stated that he didn’t like school because he had to "learn new things." Another student replied, "Teachers don't have fun at all. They all have this mean look on their face all day." Obviously, this student hasn’t observed our Tootsie Roll fights in the teachers’ lounge or our end of the year water gun fight.

Two replies concerning what the students didn’t like about teachers went from one extreme to the other. One student replied "everything" while another wrote "nothing." I am still not sure about the latter response. Possibly, the student was one who didn’t understand that two negatives create a positive and was thinking, "I don’t like nothing about teachers," or maybe he was actually thinking, " There’s nothing about teachers that I don’t like," but that’s not natural.

While we were discussing the class’s responses, a student asked me why some teachers say the same things over and over. Without hesitation I replied that some students ask the same questions over and over. Another student commented that the teachers shouldn't be allowed to do anything which the students weren't allowed to do. I replied that I would go along with that rule as long as the students weren't allowed to do anything that the teachers weren't allowed to do. I think that my reply actually caused their brains to engage in contemplation because there was a momentary silence following my reply.