As the new school year begins and many teachers are either already back in their classrooms or busily preparing to be there soon, there are several things they also CAN’T WAIT to deal with (if they’re not dealing with them already.)

I present you with 20 start-of-school things teachers can’t wait to do:

1. Endure back to school dreams. 

They usually start about a month before school begins and include any or all of the following: not having copies or syllabi prepared, showing up to school naked, drowning in paperwork, losing it in front of the class (and maybe even inadvertently telling somebody to fuck off), dealing with a nightmare parent, or butting heads with administration. They’re super fun, these dreams. SUPER FUN.

2. Analyze data. 

I can’t think of a single way teachers would rather spend their first few weeks back in the grind than being trapped in staff meetings for hours, brainstorming ways to help the miniscule non-English speaking refugee student population miraculously pass the state standardized test.

3. Find all the classroom materials that somehow disappeared over the summer. 

Not sure how hard it is for summer classroom users and maintenance staff to return clearly labeled items to their appropriate places, but apparently the answer is very.

4. Learn a new teacher evaluation system. 

Because it would seem the one we spent months discussing and suffering through last year wasn’t quite ineffective enough.

5. Get stuck talking with that one parent at open house. 

You know the one: She expects you to know her child’s IQ, standardized test scores, blood type, and schedule of toddler milestones after having spent just a mere week with the kid in your classroom and wants to know exactly how you plan to guarantee he will be elected president when he runs at age 26.

6. Spend evenings memorizing students’ names. 

It seems Kinzie and Brantley topped the baby naming charts this particular year, and what’s worse is they all look the same.

7. Make it through 7 hours and a half pot of coffee with only one restroom break. 

This may be a good year to petition the Guinness Book of World Records to add bladder holding capacity to their list of categories.

8. Go to war with the Xerox machine. 

The thing has been lying dormant for 2 months. HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE SO OVERWORKED IT’S JAMMING ALL THE TIME?

9. Engage in a battle of wits with the kid who thinks he’s the first ever to challenge authority. 

Little does he know you’ve been challenging authority since before he was anything but those two pink lines on a pregnancy test. WATCH AND LEARN, KID. Watch. And. Learn.

10. Withstand days of forced inservice or continuing ed credits. 

The best part is when colleagues and classmates chime in incessantly with questions about and reasons why the proposed interventions and tactics won’t work in their particular, unique situations — situations that have no bearing on your own and no relevance to anyone else’s circumstances whatsoever.

11. Master the new electronic grade book or file storage program. 

Just when you thought you’d gotten the last one down pat, they introduce Grading and Filing 3.0.

12. Perform a week’s worth of manual labor in 2 days. 

Those textbooks and student desks and bookshelves and computer stations aren’t going to move themselves, after all. Sure, you could put in a maintenance request, but so is everybody else, and you’d rather have these items in place before November.

13. Return the massive accumulation of over-the-summer emails. 

It’s unclear why Susie’s mother believes Susie should be allowed to still turn in missing work from last March in August of a completely new school year, but whatever. This little debacle should only take the next 3 weeks and no fewer than 2 meetings with administration and the girl’s counselor to sort out.

14. Miss your own kids’ first-day-of-school activities, open house, and parent fun night. 

When you’re a teacher, you’re required to man these tasks at your own place of employment. Sorry, Junior. I’m sure your future therapist will have some great suggestions for getting over it.

15. Spend the weekends planning and grading. 

Lucky thing they pay us overtime. OH, WAIT.

16. Commiserate with colleagues in the teacher’s lounge about state and federal politicians’ new plans to destroy education. 

Apparently the reign of terror they implemented the last few years didn’t meet their expectations for disaster, so they’re concocting new methods of torture and hyping up the media with more fabrications about why you suck at your job and everything’s your fault.

17. Take your 5-minute lunch break at 9:53 a.m.

You try to convince yourself that it’s perfectly natural to stuff a tuna fish sandwich or microwaveable pizza down your gullet just after dawn while setting up for your next class and hitting the toilet the only chance you’ll get all day, but you still come home and cry about it between bladder spasms.

18. Spend a fortune on necessary classroom supplies not covered in your school budget. 

You’re this close to requiring students to cut paper by ripping with their incisors instead of purchasing scissors and requiring students to write in their blood instead of purchasing pencils, but you’re pretty sure there are laws against that sort of thing.

19. Memorize all 37 IEPs and 504 plans before next Tuesday. 

You want to make sure you’re accommodating each kid’s unique needs, but Christ Almighty, why do there have to be so many of them? You’re a human, not a machine!

20. Collapse from exhaustion. 

You’re so tired, you may have just signed the mortgage payment check with Abraham Lincoln and agreed to let your kids play lawn darts with kitchen knives.

What did I miss?