Seriously.

One of my 8th graders walked up to me this afternoon and said "I thought of a name for your daughter: Stephanie. That would be really pretty with S******."

I blinked a few times. "Uh, what?"

"Your daughter that you’re going to have? Stephanie should be her name."

Last year, a bunch of my 7th grade girls (now 8th graders) had this thing about making lists of baby names for me as part of their "Procreate Now!" campaign they were running.  I had pretty much forgotten about it, except for some of the really ‘Um, No" names.  But obviously, this kid didn’t. (Incidentally, she picked the worst name, which was "Shay."  This was after knowing the guidelines that the middle name would probably be Faye, and that any babies will have my surname.  Shay Faye is only one phoneme away from my last name, so if you said it all together, well, it sucked on many levels. Of course, Shay is also the first syllable of her name, and she probably wanted to be a namesake. OMDB, as I tell my kids.)

I laughed, maybe too heartily, and was all "AHAHAHAHHAAA, Yes that is a good one!"

A few minutes later, back on social studies, the same kid was trying to find information on Baron von Montesquieue.  I pointed at the last name and said "yes! that’s what I’ll name her, ‘Montesquiue. No! MonteSQUIRELLY!"

"Omigod Mrs S, that’s awful, you can’t name your baby after a SQUIRREL!"

"Why not, it’s a nice French name, like Stephanie."

"Stephanie is NOT French, it’s beautiful."

I turned away and another kid said "ummmmm, can I  something something" and the girl who wants to name my baby said "OH MY GOD!
DId you just call her MOM?! Because we were JUST TALKING ABOUT BABY NAMES. OH my god!"

Like I need a 14 year old to fan the flames. ARGH.

Also in class:  "Mrs S! If you were a booger, I’d pick you first."

–"But then that means you want to get rid of me, right? So how is
that nice?" — "Oh, I never thought of it that way.  We need to find a
better one!"

–"My dad thinks you’re the coolest teacher ever!"  –"just from our
conference? What does he know, math teachers are the OPPOSITE of
cool."  –"Yeah, but not you!"

We did our daily "bare bones sentence," where I read a sentence and
everyone has tomake it better with striking language.  The sentence
was "I laughed so hard."  I read mine (I always do) which was this:

"I laughed so hard, tears were running down my cheeks.  I couldn’t
believe it.  I was gasping for breath and choking on my words.  I
tried to breathe, to calm down and repeat what I’d heard. "Wait a
minute, mom, you put WHAT in your ice cream?" I couldn’t believe it,
I’d heard her right.  I doubled over and held the phone away from me,
laughing like a crazy person."

When I finished reading, the whole class started asking "What was in
the ice cream?!" etc etc.  And I said "Why, what makes you ask that?"
We went back and forth, and I told them, finally, about the cheese.
"But would it have been as funny if I just said ‘My mom put cheese in
her ice cream?’  That’s creating suspense with striking language."

"ohhhhh, coooooooollll! I get it!"  And then we started working on our
webs and rough drafts.

See, days like this make it almost okay.  But, we also had 7 kids
absent (from across the behavior spectrum) and there was a sub, and it
was a Monday after having 5 days away from each other.  They aren’t
all like this.