Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - Preparing the classroom - a house of cards...
 A curious mixture of realising I need to get the classroom in some sort of order before the kids get back next Wednesday and a rather lengthy sense of boredom sitting at home saw me while away most of yesterday afternoon back at work. The cleaners had paid a second major visit to the room since I had last been in just after New Year's and had moved all the piles of stuff I was still to sort from the back half of the room into the main area of the room so they could clean the lino floor. No worries, except those relatively neat piles were stacked on tables and chairs and my desk. So five hours later I emerged having inhaled several cubic metres of dust and sporting a nose that was running faster than a kid tied to the school bus.
I also came across the box of a dozen sets of playing cards, as well as about five other decks that didn't fit into the box. So I sat down to sort them out. Well, that killed two of my five hours right there. Now we have twelve complete decks of cards, and a pile of extra cards taller than the box they all live in. So many extras, yet not enough of the right cards to make another deck.
I think I might just sit those twelve complete decks up on the shelf, tell the kids they are there, and then not let them touch them again. I was starting to relish the boredom I had been feeling back at home before the cards were all sorted.
Anyway, the afternoon proved productive as the kids' locker tubs now have bright blue on orange name tags contacted onto the front, their little name tags I use for all sorts of random draws are laminated and chopped up in a little plastic bucket, and the tables are now relatively clean and all the piles of unsorted stuff have now been either sorted and put into appropriate places, sorted and put into inappropriate places until I can find an appropriate place for them later, or unsorted and hidden in the supply cupboard in the back room.
I'm thinking of taking a photo of the room, because experience tells me that it will not get cleaner and more organised than this for the rest of the year, so I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
Which will probably be until this Wednesday. Yep. The day the kids turn up.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008 - cleaning the classroom |
| Posted by Anonymous |
I laughed out loud at your description of cleaning the classroom. Over the Christmas holidays, I sorted playing cards in the library annex because I have 2 different groups which play Euchre every month, plus a couple of teen groups who play Rummy or War. So I have leftover cards from the Euchre decks and they seem to migrate into every storage drawer in the library annex. Thankfully it didn't take 2 hours though.
Back in my teaching days, I used to clean the room once a month or the chaos would take over. Teens seem messier than younger kids to me. Worst time ever - I had a sophomore boy helping me move desks to sweep and reaarange the room, and he somehow managed to shove a chair with attached desk which flipped onto my foot and broke 2 bones. He's in his early 30's now, and he still apologizes about once a year for having broken my foot.
Who knows where all the stuff comes from, maybe there are classroom gremlins or pixies? Or a "school spirit" with mischievous and messy inclinations. |
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This is an offspring of the School Spirit Webcomic site. Where that site features the comic strip itself, this site focuses more on the real life minor adventures of teaching in semi-rural Victoria.
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