Construction is going on right outside of my window. I have a front row seat to the building of
the new high school, as it will be connected to the school in which I currently
teach. The crew has been unmercifully
downing trees, and the outside vista now resembles an exfoliated rain
forest. As much as it disgusts me to see
the trees go, I am morbidly fascinated with my disrupted train of thought as I
attempt to go about my business. Here
are ten random and completely useless facts about the construction project:
1. There's an old
water tower right behind our school that I never even knew was there.
2. I can see the
lights to the sports fields down the hill now that the trees have gone.
3. The wooded path
that connected the two buildings is now a barren wasteland.
4. If it's a dark day
(like today), the crew can see right in my windows.
5. Extremely large
trees can be piled into pyramid-like structures.
6. For reasons
unknown to those inside the fishbowl, workers find it necessary to stand right
against the classroom windows even though they're supposed to be working 300 yards away.
7. There are canals
in the ground that, when frozen, would make for a great game of ice skate tag.
8. Millions of stinkbugs
live outside the school, and about a million more now live inside the school.
9. The temporary
parking lot was designed by someone with zero skills in engineering, geometry,
and space management.
10. All of the
workers have been CORI-ed.
I sure do hope they finish what they're doing before the
mandated state testing starts in a few weeks.
If the kids and I are this distracted now, imagine what we'll be like in
a high-stakes, concentration-heavy assessment situation. We may all be wound up tighter than Charlie
Sheen on an amphetamine bender.
Or … we may be just fine.
Sometimes people stop by my room and marvel, "How can you even
think with all that noise outside?"
I find it rather humorous, actually, because most of the time, if I'm
going to be really truthful, I don't even realize the workers are out
there. It's just more background noise. Hey, I work in a middle school -- If I can't
multi-task with varying degrees and intensities of noise levels, I'm in the
wrong damn business.
This may be a construction zone, but the kids and I are in
our own zone, and most of the time it beats the monotony of saw-fell-pile-haul-rinse-spin-repeat.
