We’re guests in our current school building. The charter high school with which we are affiliated (indeed, for which we will be the feeder school) is letting us use one hallway to house all 150 of our middle-school students. So none of the facilities are ours. The cafeteria is not ours. The gym is not ours. My classroom is not mine: I’m only using it until our building is completed, and we move in, which is supposed to be some time in the middle of the second semester. March-ish.

While we use their facilities, the teachers we displaced are “floaters.” They have one class here, one class there. always moving from room to room. 

”That’s how almost all teachers in Poland are,” I explained to my colleagues, adding the notion of the Polish cohort: a group of kids with whom you spend all day, every single day, throughout high school. “Oh my God! No way!” is the typical student reaction; “I’d hate not to have my own space” is the typical teacher reaction. Both are understandable.

Being a long-term guest is liberating in a sense. I’ve not bothered putting much of anything on the walls. I put up some pictures on existing nails, but I haven’t added any holes that weren’t already there. I’m using the teacher’s desk while mine sits along one wall virtually unused. Everything the teacher, Mr. W, left hanging on the walls is still just where he left them. I leave as much untouched as possible. Liberating.

Yet I’ve already gotten into routines of using certain things that I won’t have when we move. Mr. W has a number of small dry-erase boards, each probably about a foot square, which is great for students to use for notes and such that are not critical but need to be shared with others. He has a hanging divider on the wall where I store six folders (one for each class) that has work in it I need to grade. (All are currently empty: a great feeling.) The chairs are fablous for middle schoolers: there are four possible positions the kids can choose from (and they all make different choices from day to day, believe me). All of that will change when we move to the new school, and while I usually hate change like that, I’ve gone into the year with the understanding that it is by nature a year filled with change. So I’m surprisingly calm about it.