Packing Up and Hitting the Road

At my old school, we used to get this memo telling us when we could and could not start packing up our classrooms and what could and could not be packed up.  By the time I left, the memo was three pages long.  So if any of you are non-teachers, that gives you a sense of the (possibly needless) complexity of the task of packing up classrooms while, theoretically, learning and teaching are still going on.

Now that I teach high school and my principal is a sane and reasonable person, one who does not routinely issue three-page memos, I don't have to deal with that anymore.  Classroom packup starts before Regents even start because classrooms are supposed to be stripped of posters and other materials that could assist students on the Regents.  So it's June 26th and I have maybe 30 minutes left of work to do.

Of course, part of the work that remains involves outsmarting the summer school teachers and the custodians.  My classroom library, painstakingly sorted and tidied, is covered with craft paper and KEEP OUT signs. I've freshly covered my bulletin boards with nice new paper and stapled DO NOT USE UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH notices to them, though somehow those did not work last summer.  And anything I might miss come the first week of September gets taken home or ingeniously hidden under, say, stacks of 90 copies of the August 2009 English Regents exam.

Well, I'm off to professional development here, since my school is one of the many not-crazy buildings that made yesterday and today non-attendance days for the kids.  This being a sensible institution, one of the items on the agenda is a brief reminder of final pack-up and return instructions for classrooms before tomorrow.  However, it's only down for five minutes.

See you Thursday, when I'll be coming to you from SUMMER VACATION LAND.