Things to Unpack

Now that we are all on the same page with the excitement of a newfound job with a salary just a bit better than babysitting, I'll tell some tales of the reality of it. No, it has not gotten that bad yet. But here's what I'm doing right now:

Thursday was the first day I could get into my classroom. I showed up with a nervous tummy, all eager to see it. (It was, you know, only my second time to step foot in the building.) But on Thursday I ended up doing nada in my classroom. The teacher whose position I took was there collecting some things. And rather than deal with that big plate of Awkward and a side of I'm The 22 Year Old Replacing You, I decided to leave. The office staff knew the situation and I said I had no problem coming back tomorrow.

It was hot anyway and I was sort of exhausted from all the other taxing things I'd done that day... like getting out of a training session 2 hours early and meeting my sister for lunch in downtown Chicago along the river. (At which we both recognized how surreal it was to meet up in such a place on an idle Thursday afternoon. #I <3 my life.) All good reasons to just call it a day and come back Friday.

Except I show up Friday and realize I had no idea how badly I should have stayed on Thursday. Because there are only about... oh, 30-35 boxes of stuff to go through. You mean all this STAYS in the classroom??? I thought teachers took all the crap they had collected with them! Turns out not. I guess she was just getting her favorite pens and paper weights the day before. What was left for me was boxes and boxes of every kind of book, old science materials, math manipulatives, craft supplies, and--worst--awful teacher posters with animated suns and seasonal decorations. I spent the first 45 minutes staring at it, incredibly overwhelmed. Not only did I have to make the huge decision of which corner to put my desk in, I had to clear a path of boxes to even get it there. It was a maze of box moving and table scooting and figuring out creative ways to move boxes that weighed more than I do.

Today I threw out science books in Spanish that were from 1984. And a book about the human body from 1969. Nobody would read those! Not to mention they are probably inaccurate! I was glad to toss them and make room for Newberry Award winners on the bookshelf.

There is no air conditioning in a building this old (it was built in the 40s) so it was pretty hot in there. At the end of today, you could see the floor! And a lot of it! Here is the view from the back of the room by my desk:

 

This is the classroom library which I have barely started unpacking. There are enough books in this room to fill four of these shelves. I can't complain about that, because that's exactly what teachers need. But I can complain about how unorganized they are coming out of the boxes and how I don't even think my students will want to read most of them. 

But since there are a million other things to focus on in the next week, I'll aim my energies elsewhere... such as curriculum planning, first week activities to build classroom community, bulletin boards, and scrubbing the white board that is not so white!