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1. Always prepared. Need a pen? Need a band-aid? Desperate for a safety pin? You can bet your bottom dollar that if anyone will have those things, it’ll be a teacher. And they will magically produce them all from even the tiniest of bags, à la Mary Poppins. Because they too are practically perfect in every way.

2. Always organized. In order to maintain some semblance of a work-life balance, teachers need to be reasonably well organized at home. Whether it’s color-coded plastic wallets for their life admin or an alphabetized DVD collection, every teacher has their organizational tell. Some more curious than others. 

3. Always a disciplinarian. Someone else’s child misbehaving in public? Any teacher in the vicinity will almost definitely have noticed. And if they don’t march right up and say something to the culprit, they will at the very least make a loud and purposeful tutting noise as they stroll past.

4. Always a hoarder. The back of a teacher’s car is always weighed down with boxes of marking - alphabetized, naturally - and lovingly made resources that they used in an observed lesson one time and vowed to reuse but never did. Still, you never known when you might need moustaches on sticks again. 

5. Always generous. If someone’s manically clearing the shelves of 32 seasonally themed boxes of chocolate, it’ll most likely be a teacher. And if the supermarket fails them and has only 29 in stock, they will buy 29 and spend the rest of the afternoon trawling other local shops until the set is complete, such is their dedication to equality when it comes to feeding their young.