Sunday night, Dan and I headed south to Cincinnati for the week. We picked up Uncle Ray from the airport bright and early Monday morning, hung around with the family all day and then took Ray to the mall in the evening to get his new iPad. He loves it.
Today, I got up early again to run before meeting a couple of my teacher friends for breakfast. I offered to help them set up their classrooms, but they preferred breakfast. I know why. They knew that we would get very little classroom setting up done what with all the yakking that would be taking place. They are very wise indeed. So, instead we ate breakfast and yakked it up, most likely annoying the poor waitress who was down a table for a few hours. But, it was oh so nice getting to tell them how I was doing, hearing about travel, weddings and babies, and listening in on some Very Important School Business.
It reminded me that I’d been wanting to share a story from my first year at Heritage… a puke story, so… fair warning.
My first year at Heritage was my second year teaching, but I had student-taught at Heritage and I was glad to be back at the elementary school that made me feel very welcome, even lucky, to be around such a great group of teachers and a nice crop of students. It was mid year, and we were coming up on our volcano unit. I had a great idea. I would allow students to create volcanoes (that’s not the great idea), but instead of giving them step-by-step instructions, I would let them determine how much of each ingredient to use to construct it. It would be an inquiry lesson inside of a content lesson and it would be experimental, it would be open-ended and it would be fun. Before I go any further, it’s worth noting that for one reason or another the classrooms at Heritage had carpet instead of the standard school-issue linoleum. This is not a good idea in an elementary school where things get spilled and accidents happen pretty frequently. And, my room had, in it’s first incarnation, housed Kindergartners, so there’s really no telling what was on that carpet. There were many unidentified stains that I didn’t really like to think about and I certainly preferred that students not even sit on the carpet during group projects or indoor recess. And as a Science teacher, I did not help the carpet situation. In fact, I made it much much worse every time I pulled out raisins and peanuts to make conglomerate rocks or filled basins with water to illustrate the way that the plates ride on currents of magma or set up a fake crime scene with carefully (usually) placed drops of fake blood or had that one spaghetti/marshmallow building contest or… well, you get the idea. The janitor started to enter my room each evening with disdain. Actually, there’s a really good (bad) story about that particular janitor that I’d rather not go into, but suffice it to say that he wasn’t the typical nice, helpful, kindly janitor… still, I don’t blame him for being generally annoyed by me.
So, back to those volcanoes (now that I’m sure you can guess where this is going). I gathered up a bunch of materials which included flour, sand, plaster of paris, water, paint, paper towel tubes, and paper plates (that’s all I can remember). I also created a nice little handout that would “guide” student experimentation. It was conservative. Make a plan and test a small amount of each mixture before actually making the whole volcano. That morning, I lay out all of the materials, students start arriving, and we go through our typical morning routine, unpacking, doing classroom chores, waiting for announcements, etc. When it’s time, all of the 6th graders head to their first period classroom.
Honestly, I don’t remember anything between the beginning of that first period and the moment I looked around at absolute chaos. Clouds of flour and plaster of paris surrounded the desks and covered large swaths of the thoroughly soiled carpet. In other places, the carpet was sopping wet or sand was being ground into it. Kids were running around with doughy concoctions covering their hands, getting it in their hair and on their clothes. I shout for someone to go grab a giant trashcan and broom from the cafeteria, so that we can get rid of some of the mess when one student yells, “She’s gonna be sick!” I look over at a tiny little girl with blunt shoulder length hair and small wire rimmed glasses. She’s got her hands in a bin of a soupy mixture looking sick and saying something about how she doesn’t like the way the stuff feels. I tell her to take her hands out and urge her to get to the sink, but just as she takes her hands out and the goop drips on the floor, she leans over her chair and throws up all over that poor, pitiful carpet. I pause, I look around at what I did, and having no other choice… “Get the janitor!”
A few years later, my room was the first to have linoleum installed.
