Saturday, October 8, 2011

My Inheritance

As you may recall, I got this job fairly last minute due to a teacher from last year informing the school she was not coming back this fall. So here I am in her old classroom, making it my own. It feels good, you know, having something that's mine. I've decorated it the way I wanted to, moved the furniture around just so, and inherited a whole lot of stuff from teachers manuals to junk.

Inheritance is a weird thing. Some stuff you get "willed" or left to you is extremely useful. And other stuff you wonder about...you don't wonder necessarily why they left it, just how they could have left it in the state it is in.

My leveled readers for example...I have six boxes of them (I teach both 2nd and 3rd grade language arts after all). Sam was kind enough to put the books together one afternoon so that I have (hopefully) five books per lesson per set. But we didn't organize them further than that. What did I do? Yesterday was catch up day so I had my third graders and one second grader help me organize the book. What I heard from them was, "How could anyone leave such a mess?" and "I will never complain about my teachers having to get ready for our classes!" The good news is we got all that organized. Now I have to deal with my classroom library!

During this three day weekend I took the opportunity to take home a lot of things which need to be cleaned up and that I can do here at home. I brought home transparencies that need to be organized, papers that need to be graded, CDs and DVDs that need to be listened to or viewed in order to see how useful they will be to my future lessons and posters that need to be written.

So what did I do last night while watching a movie with Daniel and Sam? Organized the third grade transparancies in a binder...I'm missing some pages but hopefully they are the ones I found somewhere else and already started using. On to the second grade batch, to grading, and to planning for this week and the next...But first, breakfast with my two loves, a friend's birthday party this afternoon, and dinner with great friends we haven't seen in a while later this evening.

Despite the crazy, I would chalk this up to a win. Life is good my friends...even for the novice teacher.

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