Monday blues

I’m not exactly blue, but today has been kind-of a “meh” day. I think I have an end-of-daylight-savings hangover. That extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning has me feeling rather sluggish and unenergetic.

I washed my car yesterday. So today, naturally, it rained. But I also have one new windshield wiper, so at least I could see very, very clearly on one side. Why just one? Don’t ask me. PG was in charge of that. Ask him.

At work, one of the volunteer things I do with the kids is organize and train our morning PA announcers and our MCs for our assemblies. Two new PA announcers started today, one of whom has come to see me about five times in the past week. She was so excited and bubbly and full of questions. She didn’t show up this morning. So much for enthusiasm.

Also on the subject of those announcers, another girl whom I have scheduled in and who is due to have her turn in December came to talk to me this morning. She has now decided that she doesn’t want to be a PA announcer after all, but if I really need her, she’ll still take her turn. Good of her. I told her we’d talk closer to December. I think I’ll still make her do it. I’m just that mean.

I had to change my own classroom clock back to standard time. I didn’t even notice that the time hadn’t been changed till almost noon. Ohhh … that’s why I was hungry! And I also didn’t go get the stepladder to do the climbing. I hopped on a chair. They don’t like that around here. We’re supposed to be all about safety. I was all about speed right then.

Am I the only person in the entire school who bothers to make coffee??? Well, yes. Yes, I am. Asked and answered.

Our school computers have been completely out of commission since last Wednesday, because all the schools in my district are going on this new centralized system. I have no idea why. I thought our old system worked just fine. We were given some training after school this afternoon on how to use the new system. The training lasted an hour. I figured it out in under five minutes – and I am most emphatically NOT a computer expert. And teachers are just the worst group of people to try to teach! We don’t listen, we continually make random comments just to hear ourselves talk, we don’t even look at the speaker – and after an hour of instruction, at least half of us are still wandering around saying, “I don’t get it. What was that first step again?”

And once again, when I finally got home, the recycling guy had thrown my emptied recycling box right in the middle of my driveway. I had to open the garage door, stop, get out, pick up the box and place it in its spot in the garage, get back in the car, drive into the garage, close the garage door. I must have wasted at least two extra minutes doing all that!

But the rain had stopped by then. And there was leftover Halloween chocolate to snack on. I’m feeling better now.

Weight, shmeight

Halloween will be upon us in two weeks. This is a huge event for kids. I don’t especially like it myself, but seeing as how I spend my working life with kids, I do have to suck it up and “enjoy” Halloween for their sake. I’m just that altruistic.

The school at which I am currently teaching has a Great Pumpkin contest every year. Somebody (the principal? a teacher? the parent group?) gets a really big pumpkin and places it on a table in the front hallway near the main office. Kids take a good look at this pumpkin and guess how much it weighs. They write their guess on a piece of paper and stuff it into a box beside the pumpkin. On the afternoon of Halloween or the day closest to it, somebody (again, the principal? a teacher? the parent group?) looks at all those slips of paper, and the kid whose guess is the closest to the actual weight wins. Something. I don’t know what. Maybe the pumpkin itself? As is by now obvious, I’m not a huge Halloween fan, so I haven’t honestly paid a lot of attention the the Great Pumpkin contest.

But I do pay attention to the kids. And one little kindergarten boy had what I would definitely say was the best guess ever. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the contest should just be shut down right now, because this youngster should win, no question.

His guess?

“At least ten hundred feet.”

Oral guesses count, right?

Ms Fix-it

When I had fully recovered from my weekend of fun and frolic and went back to work on Monday, I turned my attention to my classroom. You remember, the one in which there had to be a massive cleanup due to the discovery of vermiculite laced with asbestos? Oh okay, if you want to be picky, it ended up being a cleanup of every single classroom in the whole school, but this is my blog so I’ll write what I want. And I want to write about my classroom.

So: one of my tables was wobbly. I only figured this out when I sat down with a kid the other day and got him to do some writing. He was just a little kid, but that table nearly buckled under the pressure of his skinny little arm. So that needed to be fixed. All that was necessary was to tighten the screws on each adjustable leg of the table, so this wouldn’t be a huge job.

I had also unearthed a room divider to separate the kids’ computer station from the rest of the room. This divider is necessary because while I’m teaching small groups of kids, I’d prefer that they not be disturbed too much by other kids who come in at various times during the day to work independently on this special computer program on one of the two laptops in the corner. This program is supposed to “retrain the brain”, but we only got it at our school last spring and no one has yet completed the program, so I’m not sure if anyone’s brain has actually been modified thus far.

But anyway, this divider was exactly what I needed – except that it too was extremely wobbly. When the principal and I had carted it down to my classroom, we had flipped it over to see how its stands were attached, and he had quickly deduced that the nuts just needed tightening. Preferably with a wrench. Finger tightening wouldn’t quite work for this job.

Now, for little repairs like these, we are supposed to ask our custodians. They, of course, have nothing better to do than to fix things for teachers. Clean the school? Nah, not when there’s things to fix!

And if the job is too big or complicated for them, we are supposed to put in a work order for someone from the maintenance crew to come out and do whatever it is. Sure, and they’ll show up in about six weeks. And in the meantime, whatever needed to be fixed has now completely broken and must now be replaced at great cost.

So I brought my good wrench and my trusty screwdriver to school this morning. And I tightened the screws on that table just like that. And I quickly got the nuts on that divider good and tight too. Nothing wobbled any more. I was most pleased with myself!

I put the room divider back into its place beside the computer station. I’d had to move out another table (not the previously-wobbly one) to pull the divider out, so now I shoved that table back against the wall. Just a little too enthusiastically, possibly …

The clock on the wall of the classroom next door to mine immediately crashed to the ground. Its plastic cover popped off and the clock stopped ticking. I don’t think I can fix it with my wrench and screwdriver.

Day one is done

The first day of school is now over. And for me, it wasn’t so bad.

Much to my astonishment, The Great Vermiculite Clean-up of 2009 was, in fact, completed on time. The manager of the clean-up project came to explain what had gone on over the past week, that they had two companies on the job, working around the clock to get the classrooms ready for this morning. The only part of the job that they couldn’t quite finish was the cleaning of the furnaces and air ducts in each room, so that will be done in the evenings while no teachers or kids are there. We were told that this would take about a week at that rate. That’s fine by me, since it’s still too warm to have the furnaces turned on anyway.

The big issue for all of us is the things that the cleaners threw out because they couldn’t clean them properly. Things like the kindergarten dress-up clothes, puppets, stuffed animals, cushions, area carpets, couches. room dividers – anything made with fabric is now history. Even all our ergonomic teacher chairs are gone!

But all things considered, those cleaners did a pretty good job, I think. They even had to remove everything from each teacher desk, wipe every centimetre of the desk inside and out, then try to put everything back in its correct place. In my desk, at least, most of my items were right where they should have been, and if they weren’t, they were close enough. I’m sure they would have tried to do the same thing in my big cupboard and in my filing cabinet, but I’d locked those, so they couldn’t get in. I don’t imagine that there would be much vermiculite dust inside them, anyway.

Also, to my immense joy, they put all my furniture right back where I had placed it last week (for the second, and in some cases, the third time)! And another exciting discovery was a small shelf unit that someone didn’t want and so donated to me, since this classroom is incredibly shelf-challenged. So after the kids left, I spent the rest of my day happily getting to know all my teaching materials again, unpacking boxes and arranging and rearranging. I haven’t yet finished putting up all my posters and my wall alphabet, or neatly stacking under a table the books and boxes that don’t fit on my few shelves, but I can do that tomorrow.

I mean, tomorrow I’ll have to do something to keep myself busy. After all, I don’t have a desk chair, so it’s going to be really tough to sit at my desk and drink coffee or play on the Intarnets. (I wonder how soon we’ll get new chairs?)

Ready or not …

I went into my school yesterday. I figured that since I technically start getting paid as of September 1st, then September 1st would be a reasonable day for me to go in for the first time this school year. We’re starting school relatively late this year, on September 8th, so this would still give me lots of time to get all ready for the kids. This way, I would actually not be working for free, was my thinking.

Just so you know, teachers in the public school system (here, at least) are on a monthly salary. We are required to be at our place of employment each day 15 minutes before school starts till 15 minutes after school ends. Other than that, we choose when we put in the time necessary to prepare lessons, materials, coach teams, run clubs, etc. Some teachers arrive early in the morning. Some stay late in the afternoon. Some cajole the custodian to let them back in the school during the evening or weekend. Some work mainly at home. But we all put in the time. We have to. During the school day, we’re teaching. We have to have stuff ready to teach, we can’t just wing it (although, to be fair, sometimes we can – it just doesn’t work that well).

It is the rare teacher who does not show up a week or two before school officially begins, ostensibly to set up their classroom and prepare materials that they know they will need. This is especially important if you are changing the grade level or subject that you teach, the school at which you teach, or (and this one applies to me) you have had to move classrooms within the same school.

I had already transported my furniture and boxes to my new room last June. I have so little shelf space that I had left most of the boxes just sitting on the tables. I had put away some stuff in the one armoire-type cupboard. I had placed the furniture and area carpet where I wanted them. Then I closed the door, locked it, and left for the summer.

And yesterday I returned. To a classroom with furniture all piled up in a corner. To boxes piled here and there. To a disconnected telephone. To a carpet tossed in the middle of the room. To a missing computer desk and a missing computer. To the wrong chairs stacked by the door.

So I had to begin again. I spent an hour hunting down the missing desk and computer (someone had placed them in the classroom next door, for some reason), then finding the right chairs and trading them for the wrong ones. I carefully rearranged all the furniture – then rearranged my desk and the computer desk again to minimize the glare on the computer screen. I reconnected the phone and set up a new password on its voicemail system. I gave away a bunch of books to our new Grade 1 teacher – and a rolling bookshelf to hold them all. I set up a laptop computer station for the kids to use in one corner, complete with that area carpet and two big screens for privacy from the rest of the room. I also broke two of those plastic sticks that are used to adjust mini-Venetian blinds.

I worked really hard. And it’s not like I haven’t been working hard moving boxes and furniture over the past several days anyway!

I got kicked out at only 3:30 in the afternoon, because the custodians wanted to secure the school early. No problem, I thought. I’ll have the rest of the week to try to do something with all those boxes and to properly organize my desktop and deskdrawers and my lone cupboard.

This morning, the school secretary phoned me. She told me that there were maintenance people working in my hallway, and that they had requested that no teachers whose classrooms were in that hallway come in today so that they could do whatever they have to do more efficiently. And they may need us to stay out tomorrow too. And perhaps even Friday. But next Tuesday, the first day of school for the kids, should be fine.

Well. I guess I should have gone in last week and worked for free.