The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
It was an insanely long day– I looked at my watch at one point, fully expecting it to be 7:30, and it was 2:30– but I am home now, and I can sleep, and somehow it is not Friday and I have to go back to work tomorrow. In the meantime, though, have classroom pictures. In some ways it’s very similar to last year, but I like the tweaks I’ve made an awful lot.
There’s still plenty to do, of course– I have never once in 23 years started the school year feeling like I was completely ready– but given that it’s Tuesday and I don’t even start getting paid until next week, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape right now.
I am going to put a lot of effort into being more explicit about my procedures this year so that I can tighten up behavior a little bit. These are going to be scattered around the room in appropriate places, and I think I’m probably going to actually laminate little cards for the “Start of Class” and “End of Class” ones and tape them directly to the desks. They won’t last the whole school year, obviously, but hopefully after a few weeks they won’t be strictly necessary any longer.
Am I missing anything obvious?
There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.
Maybe?
That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?
Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.
That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.
Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.
(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)
(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)
(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)
I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.
I could teach for another fifty years and I would not get over how comical the reaction of your average middle school kid is to change. Today was a hellaciously busy day– I got into work a good 30 minutes early, on purpose, to discover that yes, in accordance with prophecy, the renovations on my old classroom were complete and yet my stuff hadn’t been moved from the temporary classroom to my actual room. So I had to first haul everything downstairs– and the temp room is literally as far away from my original classroom as it can be and still be in the building. Then once I got downstairs I had to unpack and organize everything, and I mean everything– including finding the couple of things that didn’t come back from storage like they were supposed to and putting all my desks where they belonged. Despite leaving a note with a diagram on my teacher desk they put it back where it was originally and not where I wanted it, so I also had to flag down one of the custodians and ask them to move it before class started, then I spent the whole day throwing review worksheets at my kids and unpacking and organizing as quickly as I possibly could.
The whole room has essentially been flipped; if you look at my classroom tour from the beginning of the school year you’ll notice that my desk was in between my two whiteboards and thus prevented me from using about half of the whiteboard space in the room. So I moved everything to the back of the room where I don’t obstruct anything I could use for instruction, plus I can move the student desks closer to the board. The kids in the back of the room were really far from the whiteboards and I don’t have to worry about that any longer.
Watching the video– and I wasn’t going to do another classroom tour video, but I think I will now, so expect that later in the week– you can get a good idea of what the renovations were. A fresh coat of paint, new carpet (whee!) and most usefully, new and dimmable lights. I had to take down all of my LED lighting for the repainting, and not all of it is going back up until I’m 100% certain I’ll be back in this room again next year, but I have all the whiteboards now too, plus the ancient TV went away and I got a new projector, so the room really has improved substantially over the course of the school year. This is the second time, though, come to think of it, that they got halfway through finishing a job and then left me for the rest of it, because when they finally put the new whiteboards in (in, in accordance with prophecy, late December) they didn’t bother putting anything back where it was or cleaning up all the shards of hardened glue that went everywhere. I had to scramble the first day back from Winter Break, too.
Anyway, to circle back to the first sentence, despite having seen what the other renovated rooms looked like already, every single kid who walked into my room today had to have something to say about it, and a whole lot of them decided they didn’t like where my desk is now. “Shut up, it ain’t up to you” was my response to most of them, because I teach middle school and that’s how we roll.
(The blurred-out calendar, by the way, has everyone’s birthdays on it, and was damn near illegible in the original picture, and only had first names anyway, but … still. I’m going to continue with this in the future, though. Everybody gets a Jolly Rancher on their birthday or the nearest available school day, and the summer birthday kids get theirs on their half-birthday, which is fun because it’s always a surprise.)
I am probably 95% done in my classroom. I have to put some things in closets and do some cord management and things like that, but if school was starting tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be terribly worried about it. Since I have a week, we’re absolutely all good, and I can start focusing on curriculum.
Want a tour?
I have mentioned this already, I think, but it’s always worth repeating stories where I’m stupid: in June I bought a bunch of LED light ropes and took them to work and left them in my classroom. I then forgot that I had bought them and bought a different set of LED light ropes in July, and didn’t realize my mistake until emptying my closet in my old classroom last week.
Those are the first set of lights I bought. I have the second set up too; I like these a lot more. That design isn’t meant to be anything in particular but somehow ended up looking sort of like an anglerfish (look on the left) and I’m fully expecting my students to name it. One interesting thing: the lights are from different manufacturers and run on different apps, but it’s clearly based on the same underlying architecture, as the interface is nearly exactly the same. Those lights have thousands of different “special effects” and light patterns– enough that it’s almost too many– and the other set has, like, twelve. I need to see if there’s a way I can get the good app talking to the other lights, or maybe a generic one that can run both. Failing that, I bet I can swap out the controllers; the lights themselves should work exactly the same way.
In other news, I have 200 postcards in front of me, and over the next couple of months I need to handwrite a message to a voter on each of them encouraging them to vote and then mail them all out on the same day. Handwrite a message. This is … insanely intimidating. I haven’t heard anything about being a poll worker yet; I tried a different way to sign up yesterday, so maybe someone will get back to me soon. If not, I’m calling it good and taking Election Day and the day after off anyway.
(Election Day because my students do not remotely deserve the ball of stress and anxiety that I’m going to be on that day, and the one following because no matter how the evening goes, I know good and Goddamned well I’m not getting any sleep on the night of the 5th. I need to figure out exactly how far in advance I can take a personal day so that I can sign up for that shit the second it becomes available. Under normal circumstances the district isn’t allowed to say no to a personal day request if it’s filed on time (and most of the time administrators don’t care if it’s filed on time) but I’m anticipating I might not be the only person wanting to be gone those days, so I gotta get a jump on it.
If they had any sense it would be an e-learning day anyway.
I didn’t take any pictures at work today, but the classroom is coming along nicely even if it’s chewing holes in my bank account along the way. I really like the new room, though, and the first year in a new room is always more expensive, so hopefully what I’ve bought will last a while. I did discover, to my vague embarrassment and deep chagrin, that I managed to order rope lights twice, once very early in the summer and– and this was my critical mistake– brought to my classroom in June, and once in late July and brought to my classroom yesterday. I didn’t even notice the first set of lights yesterday since they were in the closet in my original classroom; I had a great moment when I found six boxes in my closet as I was moving stuff from one room to the other and for a few minutes couldn’t remember what the hell was in them. Then I remembered that at one point I’d been thinking I needed a powered USB hub, and I couldn’t figure out why I needed that, since the rope lights I just brought in plug in with a regular plug, and … shit.
Then I had to order a damn powered USB hub.
I have so many packages coming this weekend, y’all.
(You can still help me out with school supplies if you want, by the way. I’ll love you forever if you do!)
I am going to end up starting a fire in this room once everything is plugged in, y’all. I did find two more plugs in the room I hadn’t initially noticed, up near the ceiling next to a truly ancient tube TV that definitely doesn’t need to be plugged in and I’m going to see if I can get them to remove altogether. That brings the total to ten, two of which are simultaneously nearly inaccessible and somehow still perfect for a couple of the things I was going to stick in that corner anyway. Those ten plugs will have to power approximately fourteen thousand different things. I’m, uh, gonna have to do some extensive cable management.
I may not be able to make it over on Monday, but I’ll definitely be in my room every other day next week, since I also have a ton of curricular work to do and I want the room completely ready to go by the time I’m officially on the clock.
Anyway, in lieu of a classroom picture, please enjoy this cat.
Pretty sure you can click for bigger, if you want— but I popped over to work this morning so that I could drop a few things off, and my classroom has officially been moved, so I went in and sat for a while, trying to figure out where to put everything.
Two big problems to be solved right now: one, you will note in one of the pictures that there are huge globs of thick brown glue all over one of the walls. That glue used to be behind a blackboard which they just removed; I don’t mind losing the blackboard in favor of more wall space, but I was assuming they’d take the glue down with it? Maybe it’s on somebody’s To-Do list; I’m just gonna hope and not worry about it until August. Also, there’s print on one of the whiteboards– that bit that looks like watermarking on one of them is actually there— which is hopefully also removable somehow.
Second, I’m coming from a classroom where there were literally wall outlets every two feet around the perimeter of the classroom (my old room used to be a computer lab) to a room with a total of eight– two in each corner of the room. I am trading this for more floor space and an actual window, so I’m not mad about it– I made this decision on purpose, after all– but it’s still something I need to figure out, since I have a shitton of stuff that needs to be plugged in. I mean, extension cords exist, but at some point the building services folks are gonna get mad at me, right? Plus I have to control all those cables somehow, and that’s going to be a lot of work.
There’s a ton more storage, too, so I can probably get away with putting one of my bookshelves back in the old classroom, but I also want to have at least a small classroom library this year, in case we are doing silent reading in Advisory again.
(I am thinking about cell phone solutions, too, and I just discovered this exists. I don’t really want to pay for it, but an actual locking cabinet specifically to hold phones seems like a pretty useful idea, more so than a bunch of pouches on the wall.)
(falls down a rabbit hole)
Actually, let’s talk about that a little more: the state of Indiana just passed a law literally making it illegal for kids to have their cell phones in school, or, to be slightly more specific, requiring schools to have a policy that says the kids can’t have their cell phones. Now, we can say that all we want; we’ve been saying it for years and it doesn’t matter. The kids aren’t going to leave their phones at home, and they aren’t going to leave them in their lockers, but it’s not impossible to set up something where they put them in a specific place in the classroom, so long as it’s reasonably secure and other people can’t walk off with their phones. This is the problem with the “pouch poster” system– anybody can walk off with anybody else’s phone, and if I’m going to monitor when people get their phones out of a pouch on the wall, I may as well lock the damned things up somewhere so that I can just lock and unlock a box at the beginning and the end of class. I’m already planning on having as deviceless of a classroom as possible next year; we’ll be starting most days next year with everyone’s iPads in a pile in the back of the classroom where they’re out of reach. I just have to figure out a phone solution.
Anyway, back to thinking about what to do with that classroom. Anything stand out to you?
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