Elementary Education majors are unlike anyone else on campus. They're willingly volunteering to teach our future kids to be as smart and cool as we are. There are so many things that make us one of a kind on campus, and these are some of the dead giveaways:
1. Buying school supplies for the year made you giddy. You may have actually put buying school supplies into your planner (that you researched and had months before school actually started, obviously). And this doesn’t just mean picking up the first notebook you see on the shelf. Oh no, pro and con lists and hard research went into leaving an abundance of the perfect, sometimes matching school supplies.
2. Purchasing your school supplies means so much more than just notebooks and pencils. You know you’re an elementary Ed major if you buy crayons, colored pencils, construction paper and glue sticks.
3. Your classes are approximately 99% female. It’s always an exciting shift of point of view when the occasional male joins the classroom.
4. You can’t relate to your friends who have big lectures full of people they don’t know. Our classes are smaller and by junior year, you’ll know almost everyone in them.
5. You’re constantly having to convince people that your classes are hard, too. It’s difficult for other people to understand what we go through when our first week of homework consists of making brochures about ourselves and coloring.
6. You prefer an early class over a night class no matter how early you have to wake up everyday. We’ve done this schedule since the first day of kindergarten and we understand that we’ll have to do it for the rest of our lives, too. We might as well continue the trend.
7. Your cardigan and ballet flat collection is impressive. Even when compared to your mother’s. And sometimes your friends have to tell you you can't dress like a mom to the bar.
8. You're obsessed with kids. When you see them in public you have to force yourself not to go up to them and try to interact with them. But sometimes, we do anyways.
9. When we do interact with students, we can't help but pay attention to what all the little things they say mean. We analyze how they learn by just watching them for a few minutes.
10. You question if you're actually in college sometimes because you're in an elementary school so often. Seriously, it makes you wonder how you got so lucky.
11. You already have your first 20 or so bulletin boards planned. You also have multiple Pinterest board dedicated to the boards alone.
12. We don't have to get started on all the Pinterest boards for every other aspect of the classroom, as well. Trust me, just check out my pins.
13. You already know about all the places that have teacher discounts. Michael's and Jo Ann's are our new best friends.
14. You could sit in the children's section of the library (with or without a child) for hours. We all are just children at heart, right?
15. When you get a professor you like, you want to take notes on everything they do so you can reflect it in the future. What? It's not that weird.
16. When you get a professor you dislike, you mentally take note of all the things you would do differently in their position. #sorrynotsorry
17. Nothing makes you more excited than the idea of starting a classroom all your own. You especially cannot wait for your first day.
18. You've come to terms that your paycheck won't be the biggest in the future. But the other rewards mean so much more than that, and that's all that matters.