Board of Bulletins

"I swear half the people I went to grad school with only wanted their teaching degree so they could do bulletin boards," a teacher laughed yesterday when she saw us carrying the telltale roll of fadeless paper. "Personally?" I think they're a tedious waste of time."

"They do seem low priority when you have so much other stuff to do," I agreed. "But they are so old-school, literally, that I can't imagine ever getting rid of them."

I thought back to my own years in elementary school and those standard letters and cardboard cut-outs of presidents, Cupid, snowmen, punctuation marks, math operation symbols, shamrocks, etc. And those classic wavy borders! I do admit to a bit of a thrill when I put up the first bulletin board of my own! But the novelty quickly wore off, and by the end of my career, I had resorted to year-long displays with just a few rotating pieces.

Heidi tells a funny story about a student at the special ed school where she first worked who loved to tear down papers as he went by the bulletin board next to his classroom. "Put his work on there!" suggested a behavior specialist, and that did the trick. He never bothered the board again.

I have my own story of bulletin board defiance. Years ago, when we got a new assistant principal, he walked through the hallway at preservice week and ordered all the teams to "freshen up" their bulletin boards. As team leader, this edict rubbed me the wrong way, especially coming without context from someone new to the building, so rather than take any time for the bulletin board, I put in a work order to have it removed from the wall. No board? No problem.

Of course, the guy never noticed, because he had no idea where the bulletin boards were; he was just planning to inspect the walls. A few years later, though, at the beginning of yet another school year, the administration assigned instructional assistants the task of doing the bulletin boards. "We noticed you don't have one in your area," the principal told me with concern, so we're having one installed."

By then, I was no longer team leader, and I had a great idea for our board. It was called "Advice from Dolphin," since we were the Dolphin Team, and was based on the "Advice from Nature" series of posters by Ilan Shamir, combining his poetic guidance with practical suggestions from former students. One of the maxims in his poem is, "Find your life's purpose."

Evidently? One of mine has to do with bulletin boards.