In Response to my Commenters

I considered taking an extra period, but I concluded that it's too much like gnawing my own paw off to get out of the trap. All that does is reclaim the physical space, but doesn't create a conference period. And the price for possessing my own eighth-acre of carpet is high: more students, more work, poor pay, and still no office hour. It's going backward.

There are only two paths: change my conference period (too late now for this year, but I'll be damned if I'm getting stuck for a sixth year) to share the love with other teachers for a change, or more classrooms, which of course is the ultimate solution.

We are putting in a new permanent building to replace those ancient 600 wing portable (one blushes with shame to attempt the word "temporary") rooms, the oldest on campus. What I hear is that two years from now a two-story cathedral of glass and stucco will descend from the clouds, and the rooms of it shall be fourteen, and lo, the high school office will find its home there. Much of the lawn on Woodruff Ave., at the end of the south parking lot and where the 800 wing ends, will be cut away to create a new driveway to handle the increased traffic (the whole parking lot gets reconfigured, too). I guess Color Guard will have to find a new place to practice…

I'm sure the newer portables behind the "raft" of currently raised classrooms will have to go to make room for the new building, so those teachers (Tressalyn King and some other RSP people are back there, and I don't know who else, or how many) will occupy much of it: six from the raft, and let's say six more from those other rooms. That leaves only two new rooms, and we have nine vagrant teachers this year. Not much relief there.

I may be wrong: Tressalyn et. al. may not be displaced, in which case eight shiny new rooms will welcome the lion's share of our current credentialed homeless. That will qualify as a bona-fide solution in my book, if that ninth wanderer can be given a room somewhere as well.

The building that is now the high school office? Who knows to what use that will be put. When I started shaving, it was for the use of ASB: a large central room with a conference table and chairs, one office on one side (where Lane's and Kameoka's two closet-offices are now) and the reason Burford has those sliding windows in her office is because that used to be the student store. Yes, you're right, there was no wall: it incorporated what is now Mr. Eeles' office. I wonder what Amanda would do the those kind of facilities at her fingertips?

Decades ago, when we had a sane situation, Rms. 100 & 102 was an undivided "counseling center." All the counselors (one for each grade level: what a revolutionary idea!) and a vice principal had offices in the back, with secretaries up front, and a service counter just inside the door running the entire width of the double-wide room (okay, there were a couple of cut-outs to walk through). All very Ferris Bueller.

The history lesson is not just an exercise in nostalgia: the situation has changed incrementally over time (with the absorption of the junior high school onto the Mayfair campus in the early 80s being a notable exception). Administrators have come and gone, teachers have folded up their careers to be replaced by fresher faces who don't remember how it used to be, and the current situation begins to become normalized. What's at the end of that process? Nine homeless teachers and James Flemming in an embarrassment of an "office" that three people can't sit in. What we have now is not normal, and cannot be accepted as normal, or we've already lost.

I'm not trying to return to the past (even though the accommodations were much more, well, accommodating); I'm trying to get back to the audacious "normal" of a room for every teacher, a conference period in every pot, and office space that has some. Space, that is.

The Squeaky Wheel

There has been a traveling teacher using my classroom on my conference period every year for the past four years. This means I cannot use my desk, pick up my phone, access my file cabinets, or use any other resource in the room to review, plan, prepare, write, or anything else one might do with an office hour. I usually sit in the "teachers lounge," with slapping copy machines, rumbling soda vending machines, and the conversations that have to be loud enough to rise above that din. Not much of a lounge; visions of sofas and coffee pots must be left at the theater.

I've asked to be rotated out of the traveling teacher parade (poor homeless wretches that they are) and have a real conference period this year. After all, isn't four years enough? But we're over-crowded, and there isn't much physical space to put teachers and students. This situation has not changed in the fifteen years I've worked here.

Yesterday my room was given to the Special Ed. department to conduct an in-service. I understood they were to be there from 10:30 until noon. Fine, I'll go have lunch. But when I walk in, the instructor told me she was setting up camp until 3:30. On the day before classes begin, I'm displaced from my room. With a new subject to prepare for.

Well, this is just too much. I've been nothing but sympathetic and accommodating, but now I'm exiled from my room on the day before school starts. I'm done being nice about this, and if it's the squeaky wheel what gets the greasing, that's just what I'm going to have to do.

I've tried to be nice, and sympathetic, and understanding, and patient. But this was the straw that has broken the camel's back. I've spent my patience. I've gone from team player to irritant. Something has to change, and I don't care if it's my conference period, or if someone else takes a turn at being inconvenienced.

I'm going to raise the awareness of the larger issue, our need for more physical classrooms to accommodate the greater number of physical teachers and physical students. This problem needs to be addressed, and plans need to be drawn up and implemented for a final resolution. I'm afraid there are going to be people who are not going to like me, because there may be some toes that need to be stepped on. Well, a lot of change will only happen when enough discomfort is felt with the way things are, so I'm going to start wearing my boots to work.

Every Good Thing Must Come to an End

It's Labor Day, the last day of summer vacation. I sense an underlying urgency to either get out and accomplish a ton of stuff, to make my last day "count," or just lie around, in complete denial, to "make the last hours of summer last." That's just a type of denial, as any student with homework due on Monday knows.

So I'm going to cut a middle path: just get some low-level errands done, putter around the house, getting things done in a low-level way. Works for me.

Been on campus all last week and much of the week before, getting all my new Driver Ed. material sorted out and planning the first week. Lots of drill & kill. but it will take going through it once or twice to get a lay of the land and begin to see where I want to make changes.

Uh-oh: tea kettle is whistling…