My Dieting Secrets

The pounds are coming off, slowly but surely. Here's my secret for losing five pounds in two weeks:

*Exercise for 30 minutes, walking in your school in between the end of the school day and taking your kids home from swim practice and musical tryouts. Whenever you see stairs, run up and down them twice. Do this only one day.

*IEP's--Don't complete one annual, two interim, and three partial Individualized Education Plans, which are legal special education documents and are paperwork that cannot be ignored, unless you're trying to lose weight. Save them until you start dreaming about them at night and fear the loss of your job if you don't find the time to do them. Finally, take Friday "off" to work at home for 12 hours. This will knock a whole 30% off your workload for next week.

*Make a to-do list that has 30 entries. Each day, be sure to go home with an extra 10-15 and the original 30.

*Arrange for a full moon. It does wonders for kids, causing them to create crisis after crisis that uses up every minute of your Planning time at school and forces you to "wing it" in the planning department. This is terrific for making you feel good about yourself and your competence as a teacher. Not.

*Eat more vegetables and fewer donuts.

*Narrow your caffeine addiction down to only one cup of coffee in the morning. Break up with Diet Coke (sniff). Drink Propel by the quart.

*Invite your Aunt Flo to visit.

*Make yourself the only EBD teacher in the school of 930 students. Invite the three grades and nine houses you work with to change their schedules two days this week. Be sure you have students who cross houses for some classes, so that you and your students can be sufficiently confused about the changes.

*Take six 8th grade boys with emotional/behavioral disabilities to the high school to see Hello Dolly, and stay for lunch as part of a transition experience. Make sure you let them bring their gang-symbol hats so that you can have something to argue with them about at the meal. Let them go ahead of you as you leave, so that they are stopped by high school staff and have the opportunity to demonstrate their colorful vocabulary and make a great impression on their future lunch supervisors.

*Add one School Board meeting. Have your son be the Student Liaison for the high school and your daughter be the middle school representative who hands the board a check for $571.00, raised by Student Council to aide in the purchase of a drug enforcement dog for the village. Beam with pride. (This will be the only dopamine infusion you will experience all week, so soak it up!)

*Send 810 emails (yes, in two weeks. And just for work, not at home)

*Receive 640 emails (none of them spam, and only about 5% Fwd's)

*Have some brilliant intellectual suggest that it's a good idea for a "random sampling" of boys with emotional/behavioral disabilities, who would rather poke sharp sticks in their eyes than take reading tests, participate in the NAEP test. (It's a national, standardized test and is not really optional.) Even better, have them choose the boy who last week told you to "F--k off" in the middle of a simple 20-minute reading assessment. Chiseling away at the self esteem of adolescent boys is a great way to increase stress, and thus, weight loss.

*Sell concessions with your students. (Make sure one of them disappears into the choir room with a girl for a few minutes.)

*Call Child Protective during your lunch hour, not just once, but four times this week, for four different students.

*Add one unemployed husband who you know is holding it together but needs your support. Thank God that he loves to cook and will keep the home fires burning for you.

*Be grateful for friends, especially Michelle, Dawn, Marilyn, and all of your sweet, loving blog- reading cheerleaders, without whom you might just lose your mind (or at least shove a sharp stick in your eye.)

*Be happy that your wonderful husband and two loving kids will massage your shoulders as you sit at the computer and give you all the love you need to get you to the next day.

It's not a Wii, but it works.

How are you holding up?