School Spirit

It’s been a while since the last (and first… and at the moment only…) Teaching Tutorial was posted, that one guiding the reader through the important steps necessary to start your day on the right foot, fit and fighting and ready to take on the world, or at the very least twenty five kids. So I thought it high time another post was added for those of you wondering exactly what this job entails from day to day. A lovely, ordered utopia of sharpened pencils lined in their appropriate tubs, quiet days strolling between the tables while children focus intently on their work, heads bowed in concentration, and not an unsavoury odour on any slight breeze anywhere at all.

And outside the window, an entire flock of flying pigs.

No. A day will come, and if we’re honest, it will come tomorrow, when you will walk into your classroom, fully intent on endowing upon the children new and exciting pieces of knowledge and improve talents, that you look around and… you can’t find your desk.

You know it was there. You saw it yesterday. Or was it the day before. Maybe it was last week. Anyway, you know it’s there somewhere because, I mean honestly, who’s going to pinch a desk? I mean… those things weigh a truckload, eh? Exactly. But still… the fact remains. You can’t see it.

Why? Because it’s submerged under that deluge of paperwork, kids correction, planning folders, kids show-and-tell bits and pieces they’ve left there for six weeks, the odd lonely hair clip (lost as well) and quite probably, somewhere beneath the crust, that ham, salad and beetroot sandwich you were really looking forward to eating last fortnight. What do you do about it? Do you spend your lunchtime and recess and an hour after school sorting through everything with the greatest of care? Rein in some sort of order and file everything where it should be? Correction in a pile by your bag (which you haven’t remembered to take home for the last two weeks anyway, but the intention is always good). Show-and-tell bits and pieces distributed into the corresponding child’s locker tub. Planning folders open in the centre of the desk so you always know what you’re doing.

Or do you sit the bin where your chair usually goes, reach across to the back of the desk, drag everything forward and watch with desperate satisfaction as everything crashes into the depths of that black plastic bin liner and start with a clean slate?

The first one sounds like that utopia again, the second sounds easier. One doesn’t exist, and the other gets you in strife when report writing comes around and you haven’t got anything to report on except your gut instincts. And you can’t really back them up without all that paperwork, eh?

No. So you perform a balancing act. You get yourself through the rest of the term and tackle the desk on a day during the holidays. Yes, much of that day is spent finding it… but once you’ve found it you’re halfway there.

Spend a good hour at least sorting everything into various categories (or, if you want the easy, realistic term, piles) on the floor, and keep that recycling box handy too. Correction there, ready to be done once you’re finished, various learning area books and texts back onto the shelves. It’s amazing how you didn’t have time to put them there when you were finished with them first, eh? Fair dinkum, those kids are a distraction, aren’t they? Eventually you’ll find that your piles have become neater, many of them will have been placed in more appropriate locations (and the bin is generally not one of those places, no matter how tempting it may be - unless it’s old work that’s no longer necessary because you’ve taken down the kids’ results, I suppose. Your decision, I guess).

Finally, when much of your bits and pieces are back into some sort of order and logical locations, set your desk out. Get those pencils into their tub in the corner, straighten out that planning folder (we might have to have a post about that too, eh?) and stand back to admire your clean and sparkling desk… of which you can now see almost half of the surface of! Enjoy the order and the neatness of the piece of art you’ve created, and go home content with the world.

Because next week you’ll be back to the start again.

Those kids are a big distraction, eh?

Related posts: Teaching Tutorial 1: How to start your day

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There’s an art to starting your day of classroom teaching off on the right foot. You can’t just roll out of the car, saunter casually into the room, cast your eye across the impeccable neatness of the room, sit back with the daily newspaper while the last ten minutes tick by before the bag bell rings, and then settle into your big, comfortable teacher’s chair as the kids file in and politely sit in three equal rows before you, eyes fixed intently on yourself and ears alert and eager to drink in the knowledge you are bound to feed them that day.

No. There’s a certain order to things, and the above just isn’t reasonable.

Let’s start with your arrival at the school in the mornings. The first thing you plan to do when you arrive is set up the daily timetable so the kids know what they are expected to do today. But somewhere along any major road you travel to get to work, you’ll find yourself stuck behind some small little hatchback with one of those bobble-headed cats grinning at you like an idiot from the parcel shelf. It will be travelling at half the current speed limit, and there will be no safe opportunity to over take. What’s worse, if you are well enough prepared that morning so that you actually leave early, then your chances of encountering such a hatchback will in fact double. This will mean that, even though you’ve left for work ten minutes earlier than normal, you’ll get to work five minutes later than usual anyway.

Once you’ve managed to park your car, it’s time to get yourself across to your classroom, and then set that daily timetable up. No easy matter. You’ve got your lunch in your hand, and maybe the basket or bag with books you took home to correct the night before. If you’ve found time to actually accomplish this correction, then clearly you’ve forgotten to do something else of major importance which will come back to bite you on the freckle at the most inopportune moment. That’s not the immediate problem though. You will get halfway to your room and realise you’ve left something on the front seat. Do you return to the car and juggle everything in two hands, or sacrifice a little more time to unload in the classroom and then make the trek back?

Neither will work. Juggle everything and you’ll drop it all opening the classroom door, if you even get that far. Decide to stop by the classroom first and you’ll be distracted by the first kid that wanders past (who shouldn’t even be here yet at this hour, but that’s working parents, eh?) and you will forget you ever had to go back to the car in the first place.

If you’ve left something in the car though, it couldn’t have been that important anyway, eh? Unless it’s your key ring and you can’t get into the classroom.

Once you are inside, you’re nearly there. Well, you’d like to think so. Where did the cleaners put the classroom bin this time? In the bag room? On one of the tables? In the classroom two doors down for no apparent reason? What about that daily timetable you update each morning so the kids can keep track of what’s expected of them today? That won’t take long, so let’s do something more important instead. Photocopy today’s maths work. Right. There it is… and right on cue! Paper jam. A paper jam that won’t let you get the paper out unless you spend the next ten minutes up to your elbows in photocopier guts.

Right. The photocopying is done. Better put lunch in the staffroom fridge, pick up the daily paper, and read the bulletin and the staffroom information board (which will be updated the moment you walk outside again). The paper’s haven’t arrived, you’ll have to rearrange the shelf of the fridge so your sandwich doesn’t get squashed by three apples, a plastic salad container and twelve old bottles of sauce that no-one’s thought to pitch out yet.

Okay… after getting distracted by one hundred and thirty seven kids on your way back to the classroom, all wanting to tell you every intricate detail of their latest adventure which usually involves a trip to gran’s, the latest elitist new toy fad, or the state of their dad’s tinia, you arrive with the intention of setting up that daily timetable just as the bag bell rings and the kids pour in.

A few minutes later, after you’ve spoken to a few parents loitering around the door, yelled at Johnno for doing a swan dive off his table, and fobbed off another dozen kids with their little stories, the bell goes again and the kids are falling over themselves on the way to sit on the floor. You’re about to call the roll when one kid calls out that the timetable hasn’t been changed.

At which point you think about stabbing him with your pen, calling it quits and finding something easier to do like run the country.

Instead, because you’ve learnt to keep all that inside and show a chirpy, eager grin, you instead make up a glorious excuse involving something of drastic importance you had to do this morning.

Yes, that’s right. You tell a little white lie because you know the moment the kids find out you’re not actually in complete control they’re going to eat you alive.

And then tomorrow, you’ll do it all again!