Cleaning out my desk

Next fall I'm going to be at a new school, and that means cleaning out my desk at the Old Place. Old Place High School for Boys is where I've been for the past three years, and my desk has attracted a good deal of paper.

I didn't get weepy or anything when cleaning out, but I'm just sentimental enough to take pictures of a few things before throwing them away. Join me, if you please, on this semi-random photo journey through the awkward growth of a new teacher.

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Our first stop is my first year in the classroom. These two pictures decently represent my stormy, confusing beginning:

(I think it's awesome that someone looked at that book and said, "Mr. P could be anybody! This demands clarity," so he took out his pen and wrote "ershan.")

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I tossed all of these things, because nothing really lasts, even the things that take an hour to cut up and stuff into envelopes for a 43 minute lesson.

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Here's another throwback from my first year teaching Geometry, when the idea of having actual models for plane/line interactions got me excited:

It's a plane! It's a line! They're perpendicular!

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This next pic requires a bit of context. For a solid three months last year there was this incredibly annoying beeping noise that went off in the office. At first we thought it was the copier having some bizarre malfunction, but we used science to dispel that theory. (Turn copier off; beep persists.)

Anyway, it drove us nuts. It finally got me so upset that I chased the noise around the room and finally tracked it down to the inside of my desk. I reached in and my hand fell on this:

Good god, that was annoying. I impressed a bunch of colleagues later that year when they found themselves trying to figure out where some mysterious beeping sound was coming from...

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I now feel ridiculous for ever thinking that storing all of my lessons in a binder was a good idea.

But it did feel great to throw all those out. Especially my behavior tracking sheets, which lasted for about 4 months at the beginning of my second year:

I used to walk around the classroom keeping track of who was doing what behaviorally. It didn't work particularly well for me, but I had a really, really rough first year, and I used this to try to manage things better during year two.

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At the end of the day, I had a good time at Ol' Old Place, I learned a ton, and I met a bunch of really cool kids, some of whom appreciated and liked their time with me. 

It was time well spent.

Onward and upward, or whatever.