Banishment!

I'm not sure if I've really explained before that my school has a four day week. We have school Monday through Thursday from 8:00 to 3:00 (3:30 for seventh graders.) I love this schedule. I'm not sure what's going to happen when we have to go back to a five day schedule for whatever reason. When we went to this schedule, one of the biggest worries was planning time, since we would be losing a whole day of after school planning time. So we picked one day a week to stay until four thirty and one afternoon a month that hour would be a staff meeting.

Good plan right? Well, it didn't exactly turn out that way. We ended up having a staff every week. After a few weeks of this I realized that it was because people weren't reading their memos! We would go to the meeting and 90% of the time was spent on regurgitating the memo! I mentioned this to Sr. Callejo once and he told me that the rest of the staff wasn't reading the memo and couldn't be trusted to follow through with things the way I did, simply because they read written instructions. He laughed it off, but in my mind I was saying, "then hire better people you crazy man!"

Anyway, we had our first staff meeting this afternoon. We were given a folder of information that we had to sort and some of it needed to be returned. Instructions had to be given four times. Which wasted time.

And then came the title of this post. My classroom is the largest. I love it. It's got a great heater and a great air conditioner, the computers are out of the way, and I have enough space to store things. However, there are four doors. There is one door that leads out into the school parking lot, a straight line from the school to the cafeteria. Another door leads to the small office of the school business manager, another to the other classrooms and admin offices and the last leads to the second and third grade classrooms.

Now, there are many times during the day when people have to come through these doors. Second and third graders need to be able to get to their title one reading and special education classes, admin staff need to be able to get the business office and to the second and third grade classrooms as well as my own. I get it. I'm fine with that. The kids are trained to do it quietly and a month into school, it won't bother my students at all. What drives me nuts is the interior/exterior door that leads straight to the cafeteria.

On the first day, Ms. Jenson thought (and rightly so, she's brand new and we've been using my interior/exterior door during orientation) that that door was how her kids were to go to the bathroom, so twice during the morning and once during the afternoon. So before the second morning, I took her aside and explained that she could use her own interior/exterior door. She was upset. Not sure why.

At the end of the day today, I ran into the third grade classroom where my fourth graders were having Spanish, to pass out some things. I reminded the students to put their pencil boxes back on our classroom library bookcase for the next day. Ms. Jenson looked at me and said, "Well we'll have to go through your classroom then." And I said, "Oh yes, of course you can go through at the end of the day." She said, very sarcastically, "Oh yay!" I walked back into my classroom very confused, because when I asked her not to use my door, I was only talking about the whole class bathroom trips in the middle of classes.

There's one teacher, Ms. Gana that I had to beg last year not to use my door during the school year. She's started back up this year. (Even thought this year, she has her own door on the same side of the building as me!) Last year she was upset that I asked her not use my door. This year after Ms. Gana and a few others have taken to using it during the school day again, I decided to bring it up at the staff meeting. Very politely, I explained that we needed to not use that interior/exterior door during the school day. After I was finished, Ms. Jenson said to everyone, "Yes, she's already BANISHED me from using that door." I was so surprised, I couldn't really defend myself.

I really hope our relationship improves. It's going to be a hard year if my co-teacher is like this about things that have nothing to do with what's being taught...