Today was a teacher workday and in between meetings, I started packing up my basement office.
I have been teaching virtually from my little spot, overlooking the back yard with my Bassett Hound and two cats nearby since the school year started. I moved downstairs to start the 2020-2021 school year, after managing the spring in the dining room and back porch. I needed my own space away from my high school kids trying to find their way in virtual learning.
The back yard changed from late summer to vibrant colors of fall, to the dead of winter; snow and ice, and now as I look outside the patio doors for the last time this week, the first signs of spring, again.
I remember looking up from a meeting in late October and my complete surprise to see two of my adult kids hauling a large desk down the side hill and through the back fence. My teenage son felt I just didn’t have enough work space on my little borrowed trapezoid table from the school and rounded up a nice replacement on Craig’s list or something for $40. I loved the new desk, with lots of space for everything, including the cats. Mostly I loved the thoughtfulness my son demonstrated in surprising me with it.
My little Woody and Buzz figurines which are always in my brick and mortar classroom and adored by all my students (and even some of my colleagues) found a new home on my bookshelf. I move them around often and the kids always notice. Sometimes they are on an old Fisher Price school bus. Sometimes dangling from the rope on the beautiful teacher box my students gave me for Christmas. Recently, they have been hanging around the model sailboat. They are already packed up for their return to school. My in-person students are going to love seeing them in real life from the top of my classroom whiteboard, where they typically live during a normal school year.
Tomorrow and Wednesday are my last two days teaching from the basement before returning to the building on Thursday, almost exactly one year to the day school buildings were closed. I have been back a few times to teach in-person intervention groups on Mondays, but this week marks our return as teachers in Grades 3-6.
It’s exciting, and a little overwhelming to face so much change again over the coming days. But it’s good change and it’s time.
Goodbye to the basement home office and the home of my whiteboard Expo Marker art.
https://beyondmudpies.org/2020/12/08/expo-marker-gallery/
I hope she doesn’t stop drawing them for me. I am going to leave the whiteboard up, and a new blue marker nearby, just in case.