New School for the New Year

My school moved locations over the holidays. Our new site is all portables, which sounds depressing, but it is really nice. It feels open and new, with benches, and little new trees and plantings, tables with built-in chess boards, basketball courts, a mini soccer field (asphalt, but still better than before), brand-new and adequate bathrooms (which the students have been keeping clean), a loudspeaker, a sign board out front, a big open central quad, and a lunchroom. The only thing we're missing is an auditorium or gym. We had to skip our first week's weekly assembly. For week two, we had our assembly outside in the quad. It's been incredibly warm and lovely (or maybe I should say 'disturbing' because of what it means in the bigger picture) for January, so it was actually quite nice to sit outside. It also helped with the acoustics, as far as I was concerned. The cheering didn't echo, which I think discouraged kids from shrieking crazily as they sometimes do. Less shrieking = happier me.

One day earlier this week I sat down at the black and white checked table outside my classroom door at lunch. No kids were around, so I just sat down with my book and lunch. After awhile some freshman boys came up and asked if they could join me at the table and play chess. It was fun to sit there and listen to their silly 14-year-old boy banter while they played chess with what I can only assume was very little skill as each game went quite quickly. I love the kids at my school. They are a delight.

Our new site is at the back of an elementary school. Apparently they (and we) had argued vociferously to the school board against our being placed there, but to no avail. I joined our principal, one of the deans, another teacher, and 3 students in visiting the elementary school staff meeting. They were all genuinely and pleasantly surprised to find out that we had already been in full session for over a week with our 350 students. One woman openly admitted that she had expected the worst and was really happy that it seemed like it was going to work out. We came up with ideas of how we can collaborate: reading buddies, crossing guards, leadership councils working together, etc. I'm excited to get involved in something like that.

Perhaps related to the new site, but also the students' greater maturity due to being a few weeks older, and the general sense of new start that a new year brings...my students really impressed me with excellent projects this week. They worked harder on making them good looking than they had on projects I assigned earlier in the school year. Overall, I feel optimistic about the rest of the school year.

On Tuesday, as a school, we will be walking down the street to the MLK Community Center to watch the presidential inauguration on a big screen in the gym there. I am so happy that I will get to see it, and grateful that I work at a school whose administration is flexible enough to change our schedule and organize for us to do this. Teachers in Oakland have been warned not to try to watch the inauguration on the internet in their classrooms because they're worried that it will crash the district network if everyone gets on at the same time.

I wonder if more or fewer people will watch the inauguration than watched Obama's acceptance speech.