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.