The Hole In The Wall

As I mentioned in my First Day of School post, there is a hole in the wall at the back of my classroom that goes through to the next classroom. Now, you may have some wild ideas about how it got there, but the explanation is pretty mundane. It's a door-sized hole because a doorframe and a door will be put in there, I'm told, within the next few weeks. I'll give you some background information.

As I wrote in my intro, the high school I teach at is so overcrowded (build for 1,500 students, current enrollment 5,000) that my SLC was invited to move off-campus to partner with the local adult school. The benefit to our students would be that our students could also enroll in Adult School classes and Technical College classes. A student could graduate with not only a diploma, but also meeting all of the requirements to get into any university, in addition to having a trade certificate and an A.A. degree. After much thought, negotiation and soul-searching, we 15 teachers agreed to move with our 300 students to the 2nd floor of the Adult School building. It is about 3 miles from the main campus, adjacent to a large city park.

One reason I was induced to go was because they promised to build a state-of-the-art science laboratory and also have demonstration stations in all of the science classrooms. This was very attractive to me because, ever since I began teaching lab science, I have not had access to a lab! I taught in English classrooms for the most part, then I moved for the last two years to an Art classroom...with a sink! It was very difficult teaching real lab science without a lab and with the strictures that I could not use any chemicals whatsover! (Water was okay and so was salt, everything else was pretty much verboten. Acid/base labs were an enterprise in rule-breaking for me! ) I devised a lot of construction paper modelling and activities that simulated scientific processes so the students could learn to understand some complicated ideas. It really was not very effective; I think they need to do real science in order to learn real science.

So, the last week of school in June, we were directed to move everything out of our classrooms by the last day of school (the students were still working for a grade, which made this kind of messy!) because construction was about to begin. Over the summer, the facilities people tore several classrooms apart, subdividing some to make more classrooms (mine got cut in half and is still very large; I think mine was the size of an Olympic swimming pool), and converting "plain" classrooms into science classrooms. The new wall they put up dividing my classroom is where the hole is! (So, finally, you get to know!)

Although were were assured that the lab would be ready for the start of school, it didn't happen. The Friday before school started they had just finished painting the walls and began to install the cabinetry. Electricity and data lines for our computers is supposed to be coming by the end of next week. That's good because I'm required to input attendance for every class period into the computer and I get reminder notes every period because I don't have a computer in my classroom that works. Supposedly the computer network will be configured a week or so after the juice and the 'net cables come in. Yippee!

I foolishly re-wrote my curricula for the Biology and AP Environmental Science classes I teach over the summer to include labs and internet-based research opportunities. Now, I'm getting to revise on the fly. I really should have known and planned better. Fortunately the first three days of school is all about establishing a productive relationship with the students and learning about them and their skill levels, so I've have some cushion of time to do the revisions.

Until then, my students and I get to listen to the teacher next door. He's used to TALKING VERY LOUDLY to keep his students' attention...a fact of which he was unaware. Every time he gets really loud, I just lift up the construction paper curtain in the doorway stick my head in and say "I think I might have missed a word, could you repeat that?" Fortunately, he's really an easy-going, cooperative guy and we can both just laugh about it. I tell my students that we can just be thankful that the federal fire alarm people don't measure the ambient noise level in his classroom and set the fire sirens to 50 decibels above that!

Today in class I had the students take a Basic Skills Assessment so I could find out how much upper-elementary and middle-school math and English they know. The scores were very.....well, you'll just to come back for my next post to find out!