Sometimes I feel like I’m so hyper-into-teaching that it can be annoying to my colleagues. Like: they mention something to me (a program, a website) and about 95% of the time, I know about it. Annoying. Or I’ll be excited about something I’ve come up with and I’ll share it with then — and then I’ll be like “why am I geeking out about this?” and feel bad for geeking out on them. And sometimes when I don’t want to work, I will be like “hey, blah blah blah blah blah” and I’ll parasite my colleagues free time.

But I use some of my powers for good too. Sometimes I can troubleshoot tech questions. I love working on intractable math questions. And once in a blue moon, someone asks me how I might teach [X] — and then I really go crazy because that’s the type of question I love, and something I haven’t done in a while because I’ve been so busy with a billion other things.

All of that is to say: I can be useful.

One of my favorite things I’ve done for one of my colleagues was during last week — comment time. We write narrative comments on each of our little angels, and it’s intensive and long, and my colleague had 64 kids to write on. She needed some motivation. So I made her this gem:

As she write more comments, she got to fill in more things — and every so often there was a surprise for her! (The last 10 comments, the home stretch of 55-64, were on a separate index card for her to fill out.) How fun as this to make? I am proud of it, and she said it helped her!

So there. I do kinda rock sometimes. I know it.