You Know You Are a Middle-Aged Public School Teacher When…

1. You pull a hamstring going up the stairs right after a fire drill.
2. You make a reference to a movie that a student claims that his parent may have seen.
3. You fondly look back at the time when there were no cellphones in the classroom.
4. You realize that you are three times older than some of the students in your room.
5. You realize that you are older than some of your students’ parents.
6. You see a school picture of yourself from early in your career and you do not recognize it.
7. You see that a fashion style from when you were in high school has come back in vogue.
8. You have your own child attend the high school where you work.
9. You are asked by a student what you looked like when you had a full head of hair.
10. You tell students that the shorts you wore when you played basketball in high school were really shorts.
11. You have school bells go off in your head on the weekends.
12. You still have VHS tapes of the movies you show with novels.
13. You have neighbors who come to you to ask what certain sayings they hear teenagers say just might mean.
14. You receive AARP invitations in the mail.
15. You laugh at jokes that no one else in class has a reference point for.
16. Your hair has been naturally more than one color in your career.
17. You are the slowest texter in the room.
18. Every student hears your knees pop when you get out of a chair.
19. You have seen a student pass out, go into labor, barf, scream, and cry in the same week.
20. You remember as a student that the person who made copies had purple ink on his hands.
21. You need new letters in the English language to create all of the acronyms that you have come across in education.
22. You can eat your lunch in ten minutes while grading papers and think nothing of it.
23. You have received 30 coffee cups as present from students and used every one of them.
24. You love the laminating machine.
25. You understand what herding cats is like.
26. You understand that the series “Breaking Bad” really is about the need to pay teachers more.
27. You wish that schools brought back recess time for all students.
28. You can make Princess Bride allusions and students know what you are talking about.
29. You have enough holiday ties for the entire month of December.
30. Your students poke fun at you for having an old iPod Shuffle.
31. You remember there were not standardized tests every quarter.