...So Take Off All Your Clothes...or at least strip down to a standard school attire- appropriate layer.Why you ask? Why are we stripping in my classroom? In February? Because this week it has been officially 89 degrees in my classroom. Yes, 89. I'm thinking about dressing everyone up in grass skirts and just having a luau. You know, for ha has.
We came back inside from our recess period and I could literally feel sweat beads rolling down my back. All of my friend's eyes were glazed over as if to say...'how much longer?' and I agree!
For some reason I will never understand but it seems, our wonderful custodial staff never wants to cooperate with teachers when we say it is too hot in our classrooms. They must think we do it about once a month for kicks! But, about once per month our air goes stagnant...it turns to this stale air that is neither hot nor cold. They have to then go into the 'secret closet' that stays locked at all times and 'flip a switch' of some sorts to reset the air. When they do that appropriately, everything is fine. But every now and then (depending on which person comes upstairs to solve the problem) they decide to turn the whole system off. So not only is there absolutely no air blowing, everyone is ill, and every time I picture the germs that must be breeding in our sweltering sweat box of a classroom, I think I might hurl.
Yesterday I finally thought to ask one of the Custodians if she could reset the air. You know, just a smidgen. My request was met with a resounding, "it's either on or off!" which I find very hard to believe since I witnessed a custodian turn it up myself. I mean, if there's an up, there's a down, friend. My all time favorite excuse is "we don't control the heat in the building...they control everything in the central office"!!!!!!!!!!!! While I've heard that excuse about 117 times I know it's not true because I've had cool air blowing all winter long.
My classroom is on the second floor (hot air rises) and we have two great windows where the sun shines through and heats us up nice and toasty by 10:00 a.m. With the increasing warm weather outside, we had stormy weather yesterday with very high winds. So if we left the windows up we had papers blowing everywhere from the wind and the rain got books wet, but if we closed the windows we were so hot we couldn't stand it. We decided to secure all the loose items and try to deal with the rain coming in...these are all decisions that take away from my excellent instruction through the day!
Please, I'm begging somebody to invent a school building where we can control our own heat and air all year long...and also could somebody send us a live person who actually knows how to work our heat and air system??
Today mom asked if it was 'casual day'?...I'm wearing jeans, lightweight tennis shoes, and a t-shirt with my hair pulled back in a headband...not profession, I know. But as long as I'm teaching for 7+ hours in a sauna this is all I can muster up!
Now, I'm off to continue teaching in my sweltering classroom. Too bad nobody is paying attention to my fabulous lesson...No Child Left Behind, right?
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