So you're becoming an art teacher...

Congrats! You are making the move from general homeroom teacher to art specialist! Here is a list of differences in your new role that will become your reality soon enough.

• You will get away with looking like a mess all the time.  Goodbye pressed khakis and dry-cleaned blouses, hello paint-stained yoga pants and smocks!
• You will get birthday cupcakes from 175 students. Great for the ego, bad for the waistline.
• You will know every child's name on the playground. And every child will know yours--instant celebrity!
• You will come in on weekends to prep. You did this as a classroom teacher too, but now you will have to dedicate time to cleaning dried paint and paper mache globs off of everything in your classroom in addition to lesson planning and assessment.
• You will wish for longer class periods. There will be times when a student will bring up an interesting question/misconception/interest/experience and you'll want to address it, but you just won't have the time within a 30-40 minute class. This is the one thing that will make you miss being a homeroom teacher...just a tiny bit.
• Your students will eagerly await coming to your class each week. Of course they will! And you will smile often each day because you will know that you are the luckiest teacher in the entire school : )