Back to School Preperations, Part 1

This past Monday signaled the start of the new school year for the teachers in my district.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were filled with meetings and inservice classes. Lots of meetings and inservice classes, including one in which the school nurse warned that the safest course of action for the year was to treat everyone in the school like they had a communicable disease. That was probably not the best thing to say right before a team building trust-fall exercise... unless she wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon treating blunt force trauma injuries, that is.

Now, I am not usually a fan of meetings and inservices, but if we could have more sessions like the one I attended Tuesday afternoon titled, "Yoga Stress Release for Teachers", I would sing praises to the heavens every time an inservice day rolled around. For a brief minute or two, I considered scheduling in some yoga time between classes, but I quickly realized that the sight of me in yoga mode would startle any of the kidlets who might be walking by. And when kidlets get startled, the quite often piddle on the carpet. Of course, they also often piddle on the carpet when they laugh, cry, and sometimes when they sneeze. Kidlets are a lot like puppies except for... wait. Scratch that exception. Kidlets are a lot like puppies. Period.

But moving past the piddle....With my body and soul aligned, I felt more than ready to jump head first into Thursday's scheduled teacher work day. My goal for Thursday, and then again on Friday (for some strange reason I get a lot more work done on the days when I don't have to be there and am not getting paid) was to get my classroom prepared for the kidlet invasion that will happen on Monday.

But before I could prepare my room for the junior high experience, I had to prepare myself for the junior high experience. So I tossed my other musical selections for the week aside, broke out the Ace of Base, and felt the flood of pre-teen angst return as soon as I heard the first strains of "All That She Wants" start to play.

By the time my computer speakers were pumping out"Don't Turn Around", Mug Obama was in his place, filled with new writing utensils, and Rufas the burping naked mole rat hall pass had reported for duty.

Soon I was multitasking.

Writing the first day schedule on the board as I rocked out to "The Sign."

Then I was lip syncing along with "Cruel Summer" as I attempted to make the movie posters in my room more educational.

By the time the "Happy Nation Remix" started, my signs were up...

...and my lesson plans and copy runs for the whole first week were finished.
I should sleep well this weekend knowing that my syllabi are prepared, my class rules are posted, and the Wall of Shame is ready to host any and all no-name papers that appear in the turn in boxes.
With my room thus prepared, I no longer needed audio assistance from my 2nd favorite Swedish pop group. The smells of duct tape, copy toner, and cafeteria floor wax charged my teacher batteries and soon I was warming up the noodles...

... and harassing my other school district friends via Novell instant messaging.

I left school early this afternoon secure in the knowledge that my classroom was ready for the first day of school.

Of course a "prepared classroom" and a "prepared teacher" are not the same thing. So here's hoping I can power through my non-classroom related back to school preparations so that I can get a few nights sleep minus the walking into school in my underwear dreams.