Went to my classroom today!

Neighbor teacher texted to say she was working in her classroom, so I decided to unload the bazillion boxes of donated USB drives that have been overwhelming my miniscule dining room.

It smells funny.

Not the dining room, or the neighbor teacher. No, my classroom smells funny. My nose was itching within a few minutes of pretend-work-but-really-gossipping, and the trip into my closets to find the elusive but completely worthless grammar teacher's edition made me almost die.

Next time, remind me to go in early, open the windows wide, turn on the fan, and go revisit the In'n'Out that I've missed so much this summer. While I'm at it, I should recruit some kids to come and move desks for me...

As we pretended that we were going to do some real work, neighbor teacher and I discussed the following:

• Summer school.
• How happy we were to be rid of our principal.
• How the former principal darkened our souls.
• How low our test scores were going to be this year because teaching quality went down and nobody really did any extra interventions because we so hated former principal.
• Our readiness to move on from the horribleness that was the former principal.
• Ideas for staff collaboration which is guaranteed to be incredibly amazing because everyone loves each other like the kids on Barney.
• My need for help in figuring out how to improve class, learning, and life for my English Learners.
• My need for help standing up to my teaching team. Wonderful people, but they don't always listen.
• Our frustration with the new 7th grade students' general misbehavior and how it's all the former principal's fault (wait, we weren't going to talk about her again).
• Classroom configurations.
• Sleeping in 4 hours later than normal.
• Summer plans.
• Summer reading.
• Books that have been turned into movies.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and how cool it was when the memories kinda dropped like water into ink in the pensieve.
• and other random frivolity.

Seem like a long conversation? That's what happens when you take two people who are accustomed to talking all day, every day, and give them 3 months without students! Really, I should get a job as a telemarketer or something.

Meanwhile, my classroom looks exactly as it did before my arrival, with the addition of several boxes of USB drives and the removal of the remains of the potting soil that we used for an experiment at the end of the year before last and that I now need to repot my basil plants.

Guess I'll have to go back next week. I wonder if neighbor teacher will be there...