The S word

Today I set up my classroom. It was already close to 80 in the building when I arrived a little after nine. I tried to open the windows but couldn’t. They wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I pulled. I pretty much knew this would happen. School windows are always hard to open in the summer, but in the winter I never seem to have a problem. 

I’d brought plenty of water and was already hot. I took a big swig. The floor was shiny and sticky and smelled of polish. At the end of the year, when I knew I was moving to a new classroom, I’d brought everything I needed down from the third floor, and had made a neat little box fortress in one corner of the room so I could keep all my things together, about fifteen crates of books and teaching supplies. I’d covered the whole lumpy mess in garbage bags and duct tape, to keep everything clean and secure and keep out dust bunnies and other intruders. 

My cardboard and duct tape building no longer existed. I’m sure the custodians had to move everything around when they cleaned the floor. My stuff was scattered everywhere. The desks were in nice rows, but the reading and science tables were pushed randomly around the perimeter. Boxes were piled in corners and on tables. The room needed some hefty organizing.  

But first things first. Though the floor and student desks were clean, most of the work tables, computer tables and shelves were coated in thick dust. Fluffy lint balls the size of kittens had taken refuge in the spaces between the computer towers, monitors and keyboards. I’ve done this enough times now to know that the first day of setting up the classroom is not about putting up bulletin boards or getting lesson plans ready or going through student files. Nope. Day one you’re cleaning.  

I’d brought my own bucket, soap, and rags. I walked back down to the first floor where there’s a deep sink, and filled the bucket with soap and cold water. I’d have preferred hot water of course, but there was none. There never is. Then I trudged back upstairs and tried one more time to open the windows. Nope. They weren’t budging for me. 

I spent the next couple of hours washing scuzzy surfaces, dusting off books, and moving furniture displaced by the summer floor polishing. Moving long tables designed to seat four good-sized kids is not that easy, especially when the tables are stuck to shiny varnish. But when you’re as experienced as I am, you develop a technique. Here’s mine. Simply stand at one end and hoist the table until it shudders and goes thunk! Then stand at the other end and repeat. Then drag the table over the newly polished floor, leaving marks of course but what are you going to do? You can’t start school with the place looking like a used furniture warehouse. 

I carried cartons of books from one end of the room to shelves at the other end. When the cartons were too heavy to lift, I dragged them. When they were too heavy to drag, I emptied them first. I found the pencil sharpener – always a good thing – but discovered I had no waste basket. I scouted around the building and found a few garbage bags in a pile in the auditorium. I took them and filled them.   

As I was finishing up for today, the custodian popped in to ask if I’d seen the vacuum. I shook my head. I asked him about getting a waste basket and he laughed and said, “You and ten other teachers. We don’t know what happened to them all.” 

He was in a hurry to find that vacuum, but he kindly opened two windows for me. The first stayed up by itself. The second window kept sliding. Before I could stop him, he propped the second window open using a crate full of my books. Then he scooted out. 

The air was delicious. I was able to get all my teacher manuals organized. I found some supplies too. Now I’m all set for the first few days of school, though I still need to tackle the sea monster that is the tangle of cords behind the computer table. I didn’t have the patience to try to sort out that snarly bad boy today. 

Before I left, I went back and forth on closing the two windows. It would be nice to leave them open and let some fresh air dust out the place a little bit more. But all my books are near windows and I didn’t want to chance losing them to rain. It’s one thing to have my books get dog-eared and ripped because they’re old and well-loved by the kids. But losing books to stupid things like rain? That's a waste of my hard-earned cash. Plus, it's murdering books. 

Of course, closing the window propped up with the crate of my books, some really nice books, was risky. The windows are a good ten feet tall and quite heavy. Removing the crate frightened me a little. I kept thinking of last year, when a window just like this one crashed to the floor in the classroom next door. One minute it was in its casing, the next, without warning, down it came.  Thankfully, there were no injuries. No one was sitting near it or trying to pull a crate of books out from under it.  

I pushed the crate a little. It was definitely the only thing holding up that giant glass window. I would have to proceed quite carefully here. I thought about last August in my old classroom on the third floor. I’d had to trash about a thousand bucks worth of my own books, old books but good books. Books my own daughters had read night after night for years. Over the summer, there’d been a huge rodent problem in the building. Scores of paperbacks my daughters had loved and had given up so other kids could love too, were filthy with mouse droppings. I nudged the crate, and pulled on it ever so gently, slid it forward, to the left, to the right.   

In the end, I closed the windows.