Tomorrow is the first day of school, and I am setting up my classroom today. This turns out to be a challenge in some ways, and a useful exercise in others. Of course, much of the stuff is in exactly the same positions as last year. I’ve reorganized the desks quite a bit, because there are fewer students in the class. We get to have a round table this year, rather like Arthur’s knights.
I also made this lovely sign for my advisory bulletin board, which has a lot of Zentangle patterns in the lower part of the sign. I like how it turned out. I reorganized how my desk sits in the room, so everyone coming into the room has to greet me right away. Also we moved the trash bins so that people don’t have to look into the trash to come into the room. And I hung the paintings I’ve made on the wall above and behind my desk, so that they reflect out into the hallway. Given that the paintings are abstract representations of positive spiritual concepts, I hope that this will have a suitable effect on passers-by as they walk through the hallways. I also cleared a small bulletin board so that I can post student work in the room. There wasn’t much space for that beforehand; now there’s more than there was.
I noticed last year that kids working at the two computer stations in the room often spent more time chatting with one another than working on their assigned projects. HAving the two computer stations right next to one another also prevented a second person from working on the same computer on a joint project. So, I’ve physically separated the two computers, and I got stools from our annual furniture shuffle. Now the two computers are at some distance from one another — two or three kids can work at each computer. There’s also a handouts station — any time I give out a handout, I can print two or three extras for each class, and there’s now a place (near the computers) where the Latin classes and History classes can pick up copies of the forms they’re missing.
I’m really excited for what the next few days will bring.
