For as long as I can remember, I've heard people reference the moon phase in relation to human behavior. "It must be a full moon!" my mother would say at the end of a day filled with peculiar interactions. As a child, my acute imagination depicted her coworkers morphing into werewolves; as I grew older, I took the expression to be something used to describe an "off" day.
When I began teaching high school, I heard the expression again, often. Once a month, actually. What's more, I started using it myself. There were days when my students would be particularly trying or overly juvenile. When my husband would ask me how my day was, I would preface my answer with, "It must be a full moon because..."
And one such day he looked up the moon phase. It was full.
So I began—albeit reluctantly—giving credence to the moon's effect on human behavior. "Easy" days seemed to occur in the new moon phase. I found myself hoping that full moon phases would coincide with weekends and mid-week holidays, and I witnessed teenagers become were-students when the lunar and school calendars didn't cooperate.
Since leaving my post as a high school English teacher, I hadn't given this superstition another thought. But as I drove home from work earlier this week, I noticed the full moon piercing the clear, starless sky. I half-smiled as I thought of my day: not uneventful, but not trying, either. Gone are the days that are as volatile as the tides. My only calendar is the one on the wall—and I'm obtuse to the day marked with an open circle.
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