It’s amazing how much better the start of this year has felt than last year. Though I am (literally) about twice as busy, and feel incredibly overwhelmed by everything, it was great coming in and picking up where in left off with all the relationships I developed last year. The insanity of teaching and coaching is tempered by the hilarious relationships I have with these mini-friends, which I did not have to keep me going last year. Some vignettes:

• I have this ongoing contest with one student, who was in the group that I took to India this summer, whereby we try to catch the other person doing the teeth-baring monkey face. At a nature park, we found ourselves feeding monkeys potato chips at a little rest stop, and one daddy monkey took issue with me feeding his wife and baby potato chips and attacked me. Luckily, he was probably 12 pounds, so he didn’t do much damage, but spent the rest of the time standing about 10 yards away from us repeatedly opening his mouth as wide as he could, baring his teeth and then closing his mouth again. So if I see this student somewhere on campus looking vulnerable, I will make the monkey face until he looks, at which time I would receive a point. It’s 3-3 right now.
• One guy insists on rolling up his sleeves, especially in the weight room, so I often ask him if he would like me to help him find his lost sleeves. This has turned into a fun running, muscle flexing gag.
• I turned the corner and bumped into one of my students in the hallway, and when he realized it was me he says “Oh, I was just singing your name!”
• A few students have decided to continue the trend I found last year of blurting out completely unrelated things during the middle of the class. One girl raised her hand in the middle of a calculus lesson and said “Mr. Bowman, you’re a really good teacher,” which was very sweet, but took me off guard, so I ended up responding with something about parabolas. A few classes later, a senior guy asked in the middle of class, “Mr. Bowman, how do you not have a girlfriend?”, which again took me off guard, and I ended up responding with something about limits.
• And the bow tie following is growing. There were a good fifteen students sporting bow ties this past Thursday, which tells me that the number is only going to grow…

These might seem stupid, but it’s the little things like this that have really kept me powering through the busy workweeks. I guess I also had a senior girl tell me that I was “ruining her life” with Physics. You win some, you lose some