Measuring Your Life in Hot Cheetos

Well ladies and gentlemen, it’s done. I survived planning and carrying out a Homecoming dance. It’s been added to my resume. Which is good, because that baby is thin.

Marilyn Walker

English Teacher*

            Special Skills

·      Understanding teenage colloquialism e.g. Skiiiiin It

·      Explaining Shakespeare’s suggestive jokes to students with a 4^th grade reading level

·      Stopping a child mid-cuss word with just a look

·      Planning homecoming dances

*May occasionally be found crying in the corner.

Yup, that’s about it.

Last year I had some students come and ask me if I would be their class sponsor. I swore I would never do this, but they were sophomores, and it’s really not that difficult, we sold candy and hot Cheetos at games and planned a Valentines Day dance that was in the school cafeteria. No big deal really. Easy. So I said yes. This was perhaps the most shortsighted decision I’ve ever made. See the class sponsor moves up with the students, which means that this year I’m the junior class sponsor, which means I’m in charge of homecoming and then prom. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. Think about it. It’s painful. So I hit the ground running this year, trying to motivate my little students to fundraise so we can pay for decorations and other such nonsense. They apparently didn’t realize how expensive these things can be. Paying the police force alone will cost you almost $300.  So I started doing this thing, anytime they’d want to buy something we would have this conversation:

Student: Ms! We really want sashes for the royalty. They are only $25.

Me: Times 8, which is $200. Can’t we just make our own with red ribbon, glitter and glue?

Student: Ms! You are soooo ghetto.  (btw, being called ghetto by my students is the ultimate ghetto teacher win)

Me: Ok, how many bags of hot Cheetos do you need to sell in order to buy the sashes?

Student: Ummm like 60?

Me: Remember to take out our cost of the Cheetos. We only make $14 a box.

Student: Ohhh, so like… 110.

Me: 700. You’d have to sell 700 bags of hot Cheetos to buy the sashes.

*Cut to my students and me covered in glitter, glue, and red ribbon at 6 pm in my classroom.

So this is the way my life went. For months we measured everything by how many bags of Hot Cheetos we’d have to sell in order to get it.  Then that translated into my non-school life. My rent is 1608 bags of Hot Cheetos, and now I’m depressed.

So the theme for homecoming was “What Happens in Vegas…” Because why not? I would tell them that this is true for everything but debt, subpoenas, and STDs. That’s golden advice y’all.  So the gym was decked out in casino themed decorations with the Vegas skyline made of butcher paper hanging from one wall. I was actually very proud of what they did, and we did this on the cheap. I was talking to my department head about how much money we had made and he pointed out that this is my Mormon girl training in full-force. He’s right, the knowledge gained in every young women’s activity where we made scripture bags, all those wedding receptions in my gym, and all those Relief Society super Saturdays was being accessed on a daily basis.

The dance itself was pretty good. Each student was told upon entering that they couldn’t leave once they were inside (students try to leave and do/smoke/drink things in their car then come back into the dance) and that they couldn’t dirty dance. They had a hard time with that last once, and we ended up having to turn more lights on, which really just ended in me begging to turn them back off, because it really didn’t stop them, all it did was provide better lighting for me to be totally traumatized in. At one point a police officer came up to me and asked if I knew anything about the pool of blood. That’s one of those moments that doesn’t really have a proper response. I wanted to look at him and yell, “You’re the police officer! Why don’t YOU know about the pool of blood?!?” But I went and investigated. You know you teach in the ghetto when your first thought upon finding a pool of blood is “oh good, there isn’t enough centralized pooling for this to be a stabbing.” To ease your mind, I found a very sad girl who had a bad bloody nose. I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that it was her blood, mostly because I don’t want to think about any alternatives.  

So I’m 99% sure that all the students who came to the dance lived to tell the tale of their ghetto booty dancing in the well lit, Vegas style gym that had been hand decorated by a Mormon and 10 juniors.

Crappy cell phone picture of me and my senate.