Table Talk

Since I started teaching in 1993, the furniture in my classroom has always been tables-- at my request. My training was all about student collaboration, and the trapezoidal tables the school supplied have been configured and reconfigured into all manner of arrangements over the years. I reckon that those tables are original to the building, making them circa 1974, and vintage for some time now.

My feng shui of teaching has completely gone by the wayside this year, though. "You won't even recognize your classroom!" a colleague told me after a brief foray into the school back when everything was still shut tight, but getting ready for the time when the doors would be forced open one way or another. She may have been right, except that I had been there a week or so earlier, and I knew my tables were gone and replaced by two rows of laminate and plastic desks. 

Even so, I understood. It was as stark a necessity as the orange duct tape on the floors, the bucket of sanitizing wipes by the door, and the masks we all have to wear, all the time in school. But today, when one of the handful of kids I teach in person was pulling some trash out of her desk, a little flash of resentment flared. "Ugh!" I said to my co-educator. "This is the reason I hate desks! Kids are forever leaving stuff in them."

She nodded sympathetically, but I was on a roll. "There's probably trash in all of them!" I proclaimed, and stepping to the nearest one, bent over and peered in dramatically. A quarter sheet of paper was tucked way back in the corner. "See!" I announced and pulled it out, holding it aloft. Then I looked at it. 

It was a straight up middle school love note! 

The writer had my sympathy, for losing such a thing must have been very stressful. And while I'm glad he was writing in my class? Knowing just how far away his attention was from the lesson? Well!

Yet another reason to get rid of the desks!