Mug Shots, Driver's License Photos, and Yearbook Pictures: Proof I Existed I'd Like to Burn

School has started, and this year is shaping up to be pretty awesome. We have a brand new administrative team who is so on top of things it's frightening ... and wonderful. I am back in my element teaching only 8th grade classes (Can I get a hallelujah on not having 7th graders?!?). And I keep bracing myself for my students to turn into soul-sucking piranhas, but so far not even a little bit ... which is a little unsettling, like waiting for the ambush you know is coming.

With the first days of school come several standard "housekeeping" items. We have Camp Viking where the students get all the school-wide rules and expectations in one day. We have schedule changes and classes getting leveled (balanced). We also have super-torture time Picture Day.

Picture Day happens early on my campus because these are the pictures that will be on the students' ID cards. They are also the pictures that will be in the yearbook, so the students are allowed to wear casual clothes that day. This was hilarious. It was so fun to see what the students chose to wear when told they could ditch the uniform for the day. This year the girls all jumped in a time machine and went back to the 80s. The color scheme has changed (there are still the neons, but they are accent colors and not the entire outfit), but the style is still truly outrageous! Tight leggings layered with skirts and high-top sneakers. Shirts with wide collars hanging off of one shoulder with a tank top peeking out. Teased up, crimped hair. It. Was. Awesome. It was like looking at all of my friends from elementary school. It brought back memories, both good and bad, and made me glad that I had enough sense to leave the 80s alone and wear clothes that don't make me look like an extra in Flashdance because it was horrible enough the first time. The boys wore jeans and graphic tees ... BOR-ING! At least the girls made it possible to believe that today was some kind of dress-up-in-the-fashion-of-a-specific-decade spirit day. The girls won Picture Day by far.

Unfortunately, Picture Day is not a privilege reserved for just the students.We teachers must get our mug shots pictures taken as well. If we do not, our yearbook teacher had threatened to take last year's picture, Photoshop a huge beard on it, and publish that in the yearbook. So yeah, I was down there, cursing the camera and wishing I could avoid it all. Luckily for me, the company that did our pictures is amazing, and they let me preview and veto four shots before finally approving the fifth. That's right ... I'm a yearbook picture diva, and you would be, too, if you taught middle school! Don't judge me ... they do that enough without your help, thank you very much.

I could write some philosophical mess about how I appreciate my good pictures more because of the bad ones, but really I don't. The bad ones should be burned ... along with my DL picture and any future mug shots I might have. I want to be remembered as awesome, and you just can't do that with a bad picture forever on page 54 of the school yearbook.