New Teachers Back to School

Now that I’m back from my summer vacation in Seattle, it’s time once again to go back to school officially.  New teachers like me have to go back two days early.  It was nice that the new BTSA (new teacher program) person told us second year folks to go to our classrooms to work rather than spend another orientation day in the district office.  This allowed me to put the final touches on my classroom and finally unpack all those boxes from the move.  This took two days.  I also cleaned all the desks, which was no small task.  I now feel very accomplished and I absolutely love my room.  The wood pieces to block the chairs from hitting the walls came out great and they fit wonderfully (it’s too bad that our cleaning crew has already launched my chairs against the walls a few times since I’ve been gone – I had to do a bit of repair work.  Grrr.).  I also bought a life-sized David Tennant (Dr. Who – the 10th doctor) stand up picture that looks great in the room and it will really work once the Tardis (His “Police Box” space ship) gets painted on the door.

My T.A. desk is a bit more crowded this year because I installed a computer at the desk.  In part, this is so the T.A. can grade the electronic assignments which will be much more plentiful this year, but it’s also so I can record grades.  I have discovered that my own desk is a terrible place to shuffle papers and enter grades (it’s too small!), but the T.A. table is great for this purpose.

In sort of a funny note, my “next door neighbor” in E4 (Brett) dropped by late yesterday after his first year teacher orientation at the District Office and the first words out of his mouth were: “whoa, <explicative>, that is one busy room – I hope you don’t have to move anytime soon.”  Ya, me too!  I had been promised that I would be in this room for at least two years, but things change and our admin recently did.  Moving would make me VERY sad because I spent approximately half of my summer vacation building this place up.  It’s not something I want to do very often, if ever again.

In other news, former Vice Principal Hilary Brittan is getting married today!  I wish her all the best in her marriage and in her new job as a principal at a middle school.