Normal People Don’t Work in a Public School
I think I just need to say this. I mean it in a respectful way. Kind of. But Normal People don’t work in a public school. I know this, because I know what happened to me every summer break. I taught in a traditional, quite normal elementary school in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Summer break was a normal routine.
Yeah, I’ll admit that I started relaxing in June. I usually had a professional development class to keep my certification current or my summer job (secretary temp or typing and charging per page), but there was more time for my boys and a camping trip or visiting grandma and grandpa. Things slow down when there aren’t 37 book reports to grade, or lesson plans to revise, or 37 parents to call about the school play.
That’s pretty normal, I guess. But then July would roll around.
By then, we had cleaned out the garage and weeded the tomatoes in the garden. I started calling my teacher friends.
“I’m thinking we should add Where the Red Fern Grows. I’m starting to make a vocabulary list for each chapter,” I’d say to Sue.
And Sue would admit that she’d already started on Tuck Everlasting. We’d talk about whether or not to keep trudging up Timpanogos Cave for our field trip, and how they’d cut our budget and what we were going to do to raise some bucks. We’d talk about how I’d take her class for music if she took my class for P.E., and maybe we should have a 6th grade Valentine’s Day Dance and teach the kids ballroom dancing.
By the end of July, I couldn’t take it. I started gathering things from the kitchen. Baking soda. Vinegar. Chemicals for science experiments. Old sheets and old hats and old things that could be turned into costumes for plays. I’d start hitting yard sales and thrift shops for extra copies of Where the Red Fern Grows and Tuck Everlasting and other books we could use for our literature program that my colleagues and I had created. We kept adding to that program every year until we had over 100 titles with teacher-made vocabulary lists and chapter questions based on critical thinking skills that required debate and discussion and allowed students to come to different conclusions if they could defend their answers with reason and evidence.
By August 1, I was sneaking into my classroom. Our school secretary, Marge, would just shake her head. She had an 11-month contract, but kept reminding those of us who showed up a month before our contract started that WE WERE ON VACATION. I think we caused Steve the Custodian the most heartburn because we wanted to put our desks and chairs in place, and he was still shampooing carpets.
My room was always ready a good three weeks before the first bell rang in the fall. The bulletin boards were cheerful, and the learning centers were inviting, and the lesson plans were chronologically and perfectly and Normal People Don’t Work in a Public School - Lily's Blackboard:
