classroom cleaning (finished)

This is my classroom, room 2 in the P Pod. It is kind of messy. Not that bad.... as I had spent class time cleaning it while kids were watching review movies (in marine ecology, Shark Tale, Finding Nemo, and a Turtle's Tale are all review - you should hear them talk about it). I had even had some help, but I knew I needed time to do it right. I sorted and filed papers - and that takes the longest.

When we transitioned to the trailers in January I was too worried about teaching my classes and Lindsey's classes, especially AP Chem to go through a lot of my stuff. And I had a lot of stuff to go through. Some of our stuff, that we requested, had been brought to us while in the middle school (that's the really organized stuff on the white bookcases all the way on the left next to the window that I cannot teach without). The rest of our stuff was delivered to our pods for the start of second semester. But I never really made time to go through it and you need to go through it because someone else packed it and its never packed or sorted the way you would do it. It's a good time to purge. So after the end of the school year I was going through boxes of stuff that I hadn't seen since August (some empty in the photo)- things that were in my drawers, things that were on my walls, things that I didn't remember I had. On top of that I had boxes that were normally in the science prep room that got moved to pod B sometime in April that I collected. For the most part these were boxes that I had packed and stored, but I still needed to do some rearranging.

I wanted to do it right. We're going to be in these trailers for at least three more years. Through thievery and bargain hunting, I had acquired shelves and cabinets and I have places to put everything... if I just decide where the homes should be. It's harder than I thought, but I did it. On top of that, they are going to strip and wax the floors over the summer so everything needs to be off the floor on to stuff they are not going to move (like on top of all those shelves and cabinets) or just realize the custodians are going to have to carry all of it out into the hall and then move it back. I had a lot of paper boxes of "stored" stuff on a side table on the right that I ended up moving all of that on top of everything else, just to make it easier on the custodians. 

It's a good thing I came in when I did (the date of this post, more than 2 weeks after the last day of school) because the custodians were supposed to start our floors the next week. Coming in during the summer is a lot like staying late or arriving early because it is really quiet, peaceful, and there are few distractions. The halls are dark and quiet. The bathroom is always free. And without a clock or a computer or a radio, it's impossible to know what time it is and thus I get a lot more done. Plus I wasn't leaving until I was done.

The only thing I am not sure what to do with is this whiteboard. This is from the day of the earthquake. Even though it has the wrong day on it, because I am terrible at changing the dates, this is from the day that changed everything. I haven't erased it because I don't have a reason to use the board and if I don't have a reason to use it, it seems wrong to erase it. The message isn't mindblowing, but I just can't change it yet.