I made a very important friend today

So I've finally decided to start a blog about my experience as a student teacher. Every day has been a bizarre adventure, and I think I will benefit from writing down each catastrophe as soon as it strikes. I'm not narcissistic enough to think that my experiences are unique, but hopefully they'll still amuse some people while giving me an opportunity to reflect on my own pedagogical atrocities.

I'll be filling in some background information about myself, my school, and my living arrangements (which actually involve gay Nazis), but today I want to tell you about my new best friend: Brandy. I'm not referring to the beverage (although a flask of brandy would make each day considerably easier), but the woman who works in the high school copy center.

As a side note, what kind of school has a woman to work in the copy center? What kind of school even has a copy center? The kind that buys industrial Uber Copiers which are far too advanced for those of us who only have a Master's degree. Thankfully, we have Brandy.

One of my cooperating teachers excitedly told me today that he had solved his annual labor crisis by delegating the year's bitchwork to me. He was thrilled as he told me about all the copying, sorting, stapling, collating, distributing, etc., that were now my problems instead of his. My university professors had told me that professional enthusiasm is crucial while student teaching, so I nodded eagerly as he gave me a photocopying assignment that would consume more than 2000 sheets of paper. My eager nodding was replaced by abject despair once I finally found the copy center (which I'd originally mistaken for a NASA launch station). As I slowly put the first page into a machine that looked like a set piece from the lab on CSI: Miami, I heard a sweet voice call up to me from waist level: "Oh honey, don't do that, you'll be here all day. Now let Brandy take a look at this..." I looked down to find a nubian troll expertly hefting my giant stack of papers. Well, that nubian troll is now the object of my undying affection. Over the next two hours, Brandy showed me how to sort, copy, hole punch, and plot trajectories for the next Mars Rover mission. To hell with developmental psychology and pedagogical techniques, my education classes should have been about working photcopiers that double as particle accelerators. And Brandy should be the department chair.