Teacher Tales: This Old Classroom

The daytime portion of The Jason Show has transferred from the newest school in the district to the oldest school in the district.   I am thrilled about my new school, new principal, and my new classroom.  Nonetheless, moving into this classroom has been much like an episode of This Old House.

When I arrived with my first load of things, the room was spic and span, much to the credit of a fantastic custodial staff.  However, their responsibility stops at the cabinet doors.  As soon as I opened them, I was greeted with twenty plus years of materials and manipulatives unclaimed by past occupants of the room, along with twenty plus years of grime and dust.

No matter.  I was actually happy to get down to business and clean them out!  So I opened every cabinet (of which there are many, which is a good thing) and pulled every single thing out of the cabinets onto the floor:

 Yes.  This is actually 15 bags of quilt batting.  Yes it is.

Notice the entire wall of windows?  I love them so.

I sorted everything into piles, kept some of it, and asked for the rest of it to be removed.  Which happened the very next day by the aforementioned amazing custodial staff!

So, with that out of the way, the real fun began.  As I had a week or so to wait for my boxes to be delivered from my other school, I decided to give the room some serious rehab.  This included cleaning every single surface in the room (which involved a ridiculous amount of rags, paper towels, windex, and Swiffers) and also removing perhaps 50 years of miscellaneous hardware attached to the walls that really no longer served any purpose.  I  bought contact paper from the 99 Cent Store and covered some very worn countertops, perhaps the original ones from 1940.

Before:

 After covering one side with contact paper:

And now for the rest of the before and after shots!  Granted, my boards are covered but still empty, and once the students arrive, the room environment changes drastically.  But I've worked really hard on this old classroom and I'm quite pleased with the results.  You may notice that I am something of a minimalist:

Before:

                                                                    

Before:

After:

                                                                               

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

And that's how I spent the first week of my summer vacation, folks!

***

With that, our cast and crew officially hit the road and take to the skies for the upcoming filming of 

The Jason Show Does Italy.

Arrivederci!