Eviction Notice

This week I was “kicked out” of my classroom. I only teach two periods at Elk Ridge, and the teacher who’s been filling in the rest of my schedule has been teaching four periods in my classroom. We have enough seventh graders to give her two more classes. So a move of Machiavellian pragmatism was made to relocate me to a “portable.” These are classrooms outside of the school, lined up like one-room houses on the East side of the main building. They are divested of any technological equipment, they have regularly malfunctioning air conditioning and heating, and they have orange carpet and the lingering odor of wet dogs—at least mine does. I can see it now: For the rest of October, the room will be swelteringly hot, with kids slumped over their desks, half asleep; in December and January, we’ll all be huddling in a refrigerator, wearing our coats and gloves with icicles sticking to our snotty noses.

I was told last week to expect an official notification from the administrators. It never officially came. I knew it had to happen soon, and got tired of waiting for a definitive answer. I got suspicious on Thursday morning, the last day of parent-teacher conferences, and therefore the last day of the week because Friday would be teacher comp day. On Thursday, several of my students told me they would be switching out of my class and that I wouldn’t see them anymore. The counselors told them to expect their new schedule to take effect on Monday. On Monday! So when was someone planning on telling me?

This meant I would have to move out of my classroom and into the portable, and make it look presentable as soon as possible. I’m not sure how people expected me to magically move into my new room without coming in on Friday, or Saturday, or 5:00 AM on Monday. My solution? Skip out on parent-teacher conferences. At my designated table in the gym, I left a note for parents to come see me in the portable.

The portable’s previous inhabitant must have been a Spanish teacher, because an assortment of classroom furniture still bore laminated labels with Spanish phrases emblazoned over colors of the Mexican flag with sticky tape peeling off. So as a result of my relocation, I now know how to say “trash can” in Spanish.