A Clean Slate

Last year I had the privilege of teaching inn a radically different manner. One of the consequences is I did not have a room of my own in the school. I didn't even have a desk or a chair to call my own. So I had to take ten years of accumulated teaching "stuff" and find a way to store it. Our school is so full I couldn't just stick it all in boxes and hide it somewhere. I had to actually go through every single thing and keep only the vital items. This led me to throwing away hundreds and hundreds of items.

What a blessing this was.

Now that I am returning to a "regular" classroom I have to start over. Which I love! Most of the time. While, it is a ton of work to re-create a classroom from scratch I find myself in the position of re-thinking everything I've done for ten years. My experiences over the last year have a place to live. Many of the fundamental assumptions about how a classroom should be run are being questioned. Some of what I've done in the past was good and will be held onto, but other things will be let go.

So even though I am looking at a very long weekend putting my classroom together for that first day of school, I am thankful for the opportunity to work from a clean slate.