In Teach for America
The oddest part of teaching this year is that I and other second-year teachers are now considered almost veteran teachers, especially to the incoming Teach For America corps. We'll see how much that holds true, as the year rolls on. But first, I want to share some of the stories I've gone through in setting up for this year.
The first thing I noticed when I got into my classroom was that my whiteboards had fallen off the wall and were laying on the floor. Well, actually, they fell off the chalk boards they were glued to and were on the floor. One of the first things I did was get some monster drywall screws and drill my whiteboard back onto the chalkboard. See, if I sent the request for maintenance into the district office, it would take literally weeks to fix. That, coupled with the fact that nobody cares what modifications I make to my trailer (and I've made a number of them), I just fixed it myself.
So kids, the good news is that I have somewhere to write for you to see. The bad news is that we have no air conditioning! The lack of air conditioning was the second thing that I noticed about the room. This presented a huge problem. Kids would be whining like crazy on the first day of school, it would set a poor tone for the whole year, and the district will take ages to fix it. The worst part was that the inside of the class was like an oven. The temperatures outside would be in the low 90s and the inside would be over 100. It was interesting because the thermostat in my trailer has only two digits for temperature, so when it got to 100 or 101 degrees, it would read 00 or 01, respectively. High temperatures aren't nearly enough to scare me out of the trailer, so I labored on in hopes that my kids would have AC by this coming Monday.
The next project was to paint the ugly, brownish-vomit colored file cabinet that I had. It was really my first attempt at painting something in class.
Since my filing cabinet turned out to be a success, I am now planning to start painting the inside of my classroom. Like I said, I can do whatever I want to the trailer. I think I'm going to use main characters of stories that we read. I imagine a montage of Pony Boy from The Outsiders, Napoleon from Animal Farm and others. We'll see.
The next thing that I did was put out a map for my word wall. See, my word wall was running up on the ceiling last year and was getting out of control, so this summer I devised the following scheme:
I mathematically optimized the word wall by allocating wall space for a letter based on the proportion of words beginning with that letter. This kind of thing should not come as a surprise to those who know my anal-retentive tendencies (Kat?). Here's the plan in action:
See, you do use all that math that you complained about!
Next I wanted to place tennis balls on the bottoms of all my chairs so that they won't make so much noise when they are moved around in class. A shout-out to Shoa, who gave me a bunch of balls to start out with. Anyhow, I was cutting crosses in the balls with a new razor blade and didn't think it would cut through the balls very fast after I tried a few. I was therefore not especially careful. That was quite a mistake. I was slicing one open and the blade went right into my left index finger, which turned into a geyser of blood in my living room. My roommates luckily came to the rescue, but there is now a blood stain on our couch. After I got the bleeding to stop I had to keep going with my ball slicing operation and cut over 100 balls open.
Finally, I also got up two new posters that I picked up this summer. The cute purple one is from Ed Trust and the other is from UVA. The administration, and I, are trying to beat the college drum even harder this year. You might also notice the Soviet propaganda in the background and be wondering what I teach my kids. It is there because learning about propaganda is a 6th grade benchmark in Mississippi. Most teachers don't show them real propaganda, but instead talk about advertising. They get the real deal with me. I also tie it in with Animal Farm when we read it.
I went in today (Saturday) to put finishing touches on my room and found -- to my surprise -- that my air conditioning had been fixed... but it wasn't the district who fixed it. The husband of a 5th grade teacher knows how to fix them and hooked us up. I was totally excited that I would have a climate-controlled room, but seriously, go figure. Now I need to start planning...
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