Tag: classrooms

Let’s see

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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.

New classroom!

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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?

Another short one tonight

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I am bound and determined to get some agendaless lazing-about time in tonight, and for the first time all week I don’t have anything to do for school and therefore don’t need to struggle with my Goddamn desktop— I’m typing this on my iPad, which would have been a monstrous pain in the ass to write tests on but works perfectly fine for bloggery. I published a post at some point about the several stages of being “back” at the beginning of the school year, and I think I’ve probably reached the first stage of being “done,” or maybe the second, the first being finishing all lesson planning for the year and the second being accomplishing all teaching. As they have finals tomorrow and then three days to finish off any missing work they care to do, while I’ll almost certainly show someone how to do something on an individual basis at some point between now and next Friday, I’m done with whole-group instruction for the year.

Done with Grading will be the next step, which I’ll hit next Wednesday, and then The Children are Gone. I might need to go in the Monday after school lets out— or at least sometime that week— to finish off closing out my room, since I’m changing classrooms in the fall so the job is a touch more involved than usual. But that’s it, and I think I can probably call myself done-done once the kids are gone.

Anyway. Back to the lazing.

ATTENTION

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

This was the thermostat in my classroom when I arrived at work this morning– half an hour early, as there was a fairly important meeting scheduled in my room before school and I needed to get some shit done– and I would officially like to state for the record that I cannot.

Good night.

It ain’t much but it’s mine

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, TeachingLeave a comment

Dropped off my stuff in the new classroom today. I don’t love it, but it’ll do, especially if I come up with some ways to liven the space up a bit, and the fact that every single square inch of wall can have stuff attached to it is encouraging. I haven’t done any actual decorating– everything on the walls was there when I walked in today, including the (genuinely appreciated) welcome message on the bulletin board, but here’s what we’ve got:

The view from my desk. My biggest class is only twenty-four kids, which is spectacular, as I have way more desks than that, but they’re armchair style and they’re currently in rows. I’ll rearrange them eventually but for now that’s what we’ve got.

Major disadvantage #1: the classroom has no windows and therefore no natural light, which is going to murder me during the winter. I’m never going to see the fucking sun, and I predict I go out a lot for lunch, especially since my lunch and prep periods run together so I’ve got a longer contiguous break than usual.

The desk area itself. There’s a nice open space in front of it; I could put a group work table there or I could see if somebody has a couch or a chair they don’t want or something like that. There’s plenty of space in the room, especially with a max of 24 kids.

Problem the second: that teeny little whiteboard is all the space I have in the room, and I can apparently choose between using it as a whiteboard or using it to project on, but not both, which is … suboptimal. Now, on the plus side, I did ask the principal if it was possible to put whiteboards on the entire back wall of the room and she didn’t blink. I’m not getting it tomorrow or anything but it wasn’t immediately shot down, so hopefully I won’t have to deal with this for too much longer, as that’s an instructional handicap and not an environmental one. I can cope with no windows; I’ve had windowless classrooms before and there are ways to deal with them. No whiteboard space? That’s a genuine problem.

And then the final view of the room. There’s a doorway to the classroom next to me in the back there, which … okay, that’s fine, I guess. If I’m not getting new whiteboards right away I need to come up with something good for that back wall. We’ll see.

Classroom setup

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Open House is tonight, and the room is ready, and I’m here for 11 hours today and my back hurts. Whee!

On educational equity and classroom decoration

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I encountered an argument today that I thought was interesting and also kind of caught me by surprise, and I wanted to talk about it here both as a means of wrapping my head around it a little bit and to see if anyone else has any thoughts on it.

Every year I spend, conservatively, several hundred dollars on my classroom– either for basic supplies like pencils and paper, wall decorations that will probably last through the year, and on occasion more long-term, expensive items like my laser printer. Some years are more expensive than others, of course– any year where I change classrooms or subjects is gonna be bad– and even this year, when I’m not actually in the building yet, I still shelled out a chunk of change for items to improve the lighting in my office, a new mic stand, and a few similar things.

(I have a classroom wish list, which I’m pretty sure does not expose my real name; I link to it not because I want you to buy me things right now but so you can get an idea of what sorts of things I’m talking about.)

This teacher’s argument was that we should not be spending our own money on items for our classrooms. That, in and of itself, I’ve heard before and thought before, plenty of times, and the basic reasons for it are obvious. No other job, or at least none that I’m aware of, expects employees to pay for the basic services and tools necessary to do that job. My job is supposed to make me money, not cost me money, and blah blah whining about teacher pay.

No, her argument was different: that we should not be spending money on our own classrooms, because it creates an equity issue among the staff and among the students. So if Teacher A can afford whatever they want to put in their classroom and creates a magical learning wonderland by spending a bunch of money, and Teacher B is a new teacher who is struggling with student loans and isn’t getting paid jack, Teacher B’s students are going to get a lesser learning experience through no fault of Teacher B’s, when the fact is the state should be funding the rooms properly in the first place and making every classroom a magical learning wonderland. This is particularly an issue at the primary level, where there might be three fourth grade classrooms and the kids are with the same teacher all day.

And I’ll admit, part of me wants to dismiss this idea immediately and part of me thinks it has some merit. As a math teacher that every 8th grader in my building is going to see, it’s less of a concern for my situation, because all of them will be in my magical learning wonderland for a class period a day regardless of whether I spend a ton of money or not. But I can see this mattering at the elementary level. Then again, there is already going to be a certain level of educational inequality from classroom to classroom simply because of the composition of the classes and the skill and experience level of the teacher. We’ve all wanted to be (or have our kids) in a certain class with a certain teacher or h ad one who for whatever reason we’d rather avoid, and sometimes that’s the breaks.

This is, I think, less an argument against the actions of any one specific teacher and on stronger footing as an argument against the system itself. We all know the arguments about the ways we fund schools and what, as a society, we prioritize and what we don’t, and the simple fact of the matter is that the wealthy teachers shouldn’t need to use their money to spruce up their classrooms, particularly in a situation like we’re seeing now, where we see that some teachers are literally creating carrel desks out of plexiglass so that their rooms are safer from the plague. So we’ve got teacher income inequality leading to situations where, at least in theory, students are literally physically safer than in others.

That is bullshit, as I think we can all agree, and I’m not going to fall into the usual rant about how little America actually values education beyond paying barely-understood lip service. Throw a rock on this website; you’ll probably find one. But does the argument in general have merit?

Some, I think, but I still need to think about it more. What say you, commenters?

Postus interruptus

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I have a good half-dozen posts rattling around in my head right now, none of which are really publishable at this exact moment for one reason or another. There are a couple of things I’d like to review; I’m not done with one of them yet and I’m going to wait a few days for another. I’m waiting to see about a couple of work-related things before I speculate much more online about how next year is going to go. I could find any of half-a-dozen different online bits of nonsense and get mad about that.

And it’s just, like, nah.

Here’s what I’ve got for right now: Not getting that job I wanted was a bit of a disappointing setback but for the most part everything has been going the way I want it to on the work front for the last few days; the school board and the superintendent both seem to be behaving and it seems like the teachers actually have some good advocacy there. We had a little bit of nonsense going about how they wanted all of the teachers to come into school and sit alone in our empty classrooms to do our e-learning, and that got quashed with a quickness, which was good– I’m not about to leave my damn office that I’ve set up exactly like I want it to go try and record videos on my little work laptop, and not having to have to fight with somebody about that is all good.

I continue to improve my little corner of the office, and I’m enjoying this far more than I ought to. Still need a little bit more lighting and maybe a new webcam, which since I’m not buying any classroom decoration stuff this year ought to be a reasonable expenditure. I am changing classrooms this year, and I went into school yesterday and basically packed up all of my stuff from last year’s classroom and stuck it in a corner in the new one. I’m not spending a single second longer than I have to in there; once/if school reopens I’ll have plenty of warning to get everything set up and right now I’m not wasting the effort.

The new room has what is effectively a walk-in closet in it; I had previously thought that it was some sort of common storage space and would be full of crumbling editions of abandoned textbook lines or something, so I was surprised to discover yesterday that it was completely empty. There’s not even any shelving in there– just an empty, carpeted, windowless, concrete-block rectangle, maybe 8′ x 15′ or so. I would be all over this little room if we were actually about to have a normal school year– I could make myself a separate office area that wasn’t part of my classroom if I wanted, or a quieter small group area– lamps! Beanbags!– or any of a dozen different things, and instead it’s just gonna be there, empty, because if we go back there’s not room for more than one person in there and I suspect I can’t literally isolate a child in this little room without getting in some trouble with somebody.

Ah well. We’ll see what happens when and if things ever get back to normal.