HYDRATED AND HOPEFUL

I've been pulling double-duty the past few days: Teaching on my feet all day, and packing up my classroom into special crates for the one-year move to the old high school.  Aside from the fact that my windowless room is twenty degrees hotter than the air outside (it was cool and in the 60's outside and broiling in the 80's inside), the packing is going quite well... except for the fact that the crates sit on top of each other after I pack them, and I need a chair to reach the top one.

This afternoon I stay even later at school and start packing up more stuff.  Little by little, my things have to come home or else they will be thrown out.  It's with this in mind that I think I should bring old computers and the two broken dehumidifiers to the school and just leave them in my classroom to be someone else's problem.  The microwave came home yesterday.  Today I bring the computer desk home.  I have what seems to be tendonitis in my right elbow, so I can carry but not lift things. I enlist the help of two young gents to carry and load the desk into my car at the end of the day.

I also pack up two bags of stuff to bring home -- my electric teapot, packets of sugar and tea and hot chocolate, paper plates and bowls, and plastic utensils.  I have eight days left and it's going to be in the high 80's outside (90's+ inside).  I doubt very much I'll be needing hot tea.

I survey what's left to pack.  The school gave us those four crates.  Most of us could easily use four more.  Truth be told, if they expect me to pack the text books, I'm going to need about twelve more crates.  I'm an English teacher.  My personal library of young adults novels (400+) took up the bins they gave me with no room to spare.  I still have more to go with my literature circle collections and the classroom set of novels we read at the end of the year, all books I paid for, so all books I intend to pack myself. 

Moving sucks.

I'm used to it because I have yet to stay in the same classroom for more than two years in a row.  I seem to be the mobile teacher in the group.  One year they told me I'd be moving to one room, so I cleared that one out, only to find out I'd be going to another room, so I had to clear that one, as well.  Maybe they move me around because I'm efficient at it.  Last year the room to where I was moving still had the other teacher's crap all over it.  I had to go back the day after school ended, move all her shit to the middle of the room where students desks belonged, and set up my new room around her.

The other day some of us surveyed our new digs at the soon-to-be-demolished-after-we-spend-a-year-there high school.  The place is kind of a pit.  It smells, it's moldy, and the classrooms are the sizes of postage stamps.  The students desks are on top of the teacher desks, and I'm not kidding -- they are crammed in so tightly that the first row is desks overlapping and balancing on the teacher's desk.  I really don't want those kids THAT close to me, especially middle schoolers who still tend to underestimate the time it takes to get out of the desk and run to the toilet when they feel like puking.

I still have so much more to do in the room to get ready before we are kicked out at 3:00 p.m. on June 24th, our last day.  In the meantime, we have a field trip to Boston, field day at the local park, meetings, assemblies, and a whole hoopla of interruptions.  Oh yeah, I have to teach in that time, too.

It's a good thing the kids are flexible and like to work on the fly like I do.  Between my mess, their help, and the ever-growing heat index inside the plywood prison that is my classroom, we're sprinting eight more days to the finish line.  As long as we stay hydrated and hopeful, we just might make it.