Sunday afternoon at school
I went into school today to finish a yearbook page that required more expertise with Photoshop and Illustrator than my yearbook students currently have. (They are just being introduced to Photoshop and to digital photography. We’ve recently received funding from a mini-grant for a digital camera to be ordered next week, one that will be capable of handling most of our needs, with my camera, the wonderful gift, to supplement.) The seniors wanted the last page of the senior color section of the book to have their pictures set in puzzle pieces. I am a novice with Illustrator, but I did find a page online that showed me how to shape a basic piece of a puzzle from a simple square, and after six hours’ work, including a batch of time spent scanning prints, I had the page I hope matches the one my students envisioned.
The project, begun yesterday, was interrupted by the Fall Festival, an event at which the seniors traditionally run the jail as a fundraiser. The jail consists of four heavy panels of unpainted, pressed wood, with a door and high, barred windows fashioned by an adult who wasn’t thinking of the fact that little kids will have to jump up and down to see out. These four panels reside in a locked room at the back of a locked shop behind the school, and it was the business of half an hour just to find a way in when the key to the inner room was not to be had. The panels then had to be hauled to the center of the gym floor and nailed securely together so that its “prisoners” could not harm themselves by rattling it down. (Next year, there will be a power screwdriver and screws.) Festival goers put each other in this hastily assembled jail by paying two tickets, and prisoners may either serve their five-minute sentences or pay two additional tickets to be set free. This proves to be a genuinely popular attraction, for reasons I don’t adequately grasp, and the seniors have a box full of tickets (to be cashed out) for their trouble and mine. Disassembling the jail was at least twice as much fun as putting it together, and hauling it back to the shop was the highlight of the evening ;->.
At school on a Sunday afternoon, the place is generally quiet, but sometimes I can hear the copier running downstairs, and today, when I came out, the middle school science teacher was mowing the narrow lawn that stretches along the facade of this old building, in front of its unusually well-thought-out beds (where school landscaping is concerned) of flowers, liriope, and shrubs.
“I didn’t know teachers got to mow the grass,” I called.
Mr. M. stopped the mower. “When I wanted to do this,” he gestured at the landscaping, “[the principal] said that, if we did it, I’d have to take care of it. The kids made it, really. It was a community service project.”
He made a garden with the kids, and now he takes care of it, and there he was, mowing the grass in front of the school on a Sunday afternoon.
The best things that happen at school happen not because of testing, accountability, standards and whatnot but instead because someone cares to tend to kids and to making school a good place to be and to learn, on and on.
There are implications that come with that realization. For starters, I’d better get going checking yearbook pages.
jo(e) wrote:
The best things that happen at school happen not because of testing, accountability, standards and whatnot but instead because someone cares to tend to kids and to making school a good place to be and to learn, on and on.
You are so right.
Posted on 01-Nov-05 at 6:09 pm | Permalink
Squirrely Jedi wrote:
It’s a great gift people like that exist in the world. Who knows where we’d be otherwise.
Posted on 02-Nov-05 at 12:32 am | Permalink
Phil Roberson wrote:
One of the great challenges of teacher preparation, which is what I claim to do, is to introduce teacher candidates to the REAL LIVE good teachers. You know, dispelling the old “summers off, home every afternoon by 3:30″ myth. What I have come to know over the past 15 years visiting schools and getting acquainted with the kinds of teachers who volunteer to take wannabe teachers under their wings year after year, is that we could never pay them enough for the work they do, and the magic they work with troublesome kids. They see it as a “service to the profession” AND, in some cases, as an opportunity to take on an eager young learner and actually USE them to benefit the kids in their classrooms. Others see the task as a necesary evil or lending a helping hand to the college down the road. Others do it because they are made to or because it was “their turn.” You can guess which type of mentor teacher helps to keep the profession somewhat vital and, well, alive for another generation.
In Wyoming, where more than a few schools are hosted on expansive ranches miles and miles from anywhere, teachers host future teachers for a full week, so they can “live the life of a real teacher.” The teacher may have five or six kids who drive in from surrounding ranches to attend the one room school house that is a modular unit on the ranch, where the teacher also lives sometimes. Now that’s an experience, especially for the teacher candidate who was drawn to the profession by the myth.
I would that all future teachers had a similar, brief,live-in experience with a teacher like some I know and like you and the “yard man” you have described, you know the “Sunday afternoon” teachers. The growing trend is otherwise, with more and more teachers on alternative licenses, with little or no training or support, living the myth. Worse still, they are drawing the same low wage as the real teachers, the Sunday afternoon yard men, and Photoshop women.
Posted on 05-Nov-05 at 10:30 pm | Permalink
Heck Of A Guy » Teacher Appreciation #2: A Gift For Teacher wrote:
[…] and Mindspinner writes about teachers showing up at school on Sundays as commonplace). […]
Posted on 27-Mar-06 at 9:23 am | Permalink