Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat

No one tells you this when you first start teaching, but rule number one in "Cultivating a Positive Classroom Environment" is you don't change your hairstyle during the school year, especially in middle school. Students don't like it when you change. They are allowed to saunter in suddenly donning cat ears atop hair newly streaked in psychedelic colors, but trim a bit here or curl a bit there and you are met with near-Puritanical scrutiny -- furrowed brows, whispers behind your back. The bolds ones will state, with flat-as-a-pancake intonation, "You got a haircut." 


So a hairstyle change for a teacher must come prior to day one. With all the stick-to-your-neck heat this summer, I went shorter than usual on my back-to-school haircut and had it graduated in the back to get it up and out of the way. There! A new look. Shorter than ever!  If I like it, I can keep it up with slight trims as we go through the year. If I don't like it, I can allow it to grow out slowly. Either way, my students will be sheltered from the sudden shock of their teacher changing her appearance mid-year.

With my new look established, I thought I could turn my mind onto more important things, like how can I refine the clarity of my Student Learning Objectives? And, more importantly, do I have enough boxes of not-the-scratchy-kind-but-the-good-kind of tissues?

Then my 22-year-old son saw my new haircut and my confidence sank. 

"Mom, why did you get a Can I Speak to Your Manager haircut?"

Google it. It's a real thing. I did, and I was horrified. 

"Is it really that bad? Isn't it a little more skillfully cut? A little less extreme?"

He walked around me a few times, rubbed his chin, and changed his mind. He decided it was not a Can I Speak to Your Manager. My haircut was, in fact, a Watermelon Head Cat.

Go ahead. Google that one. It comes up too.

Here I am three days away from lift off and I am Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat! 

Well, there's nothing to be done about it now. I could don cat ears too, but that would just be weird. Nobody wants a weird teacher.

As always, my husband to the rescue. He says cheerily, "Do you know the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?" He smiles then delivers the punchline, "About two weeks."

Two weeks. Two weeks until I am Mrs. Cowperthwaite again.