Where do teachers live?

Last week I was explaining the difference between salary and hourly wages to a group of sixth graders. After listening to my explanation, they all decided that hourly was much better than salary. And after last week, I might have to agree with them.

Last week it seems like every big thing hit all at once. Grades for the first term were due by 2:30 on Friday. Normally we have till Monday, giving us the weekend to finish them up. Nope, not this time. For some strange reason they needed them by Friday. So I was franctically trying to get those done.

Then, being that it was the week before Thanksgiving, I always do “turkey stories” with the fourth-sixth graders. They sit at their computer and start a story titled “Five Fat Turkeys Are We,” and they get to decide what happens next. Except that every couple of minutes I say “switch” and they have to scoot down one computer and start working on the story at the new computer. We do 10-12 switches and then they go back to their computer. This year I decided I wanted to start displaying student work. That meant that I went through all of the approximately 275 stories and did a quick spell check and grammar check for punctuation and spelling (the stories don’t make sense, I wasn’t checking for that) and then printing them so they could be taped to the wall outside my classroom. I did the fourth grade stories on orange paper, fifth on red, and sixth on yellow. It looks great in the hall and the kids were real excited about it. I love seeing how the stories get longer each year as they get faster at typing. So that was a huge project, but worth it for my kids.

And then I had a big paper due in one of my classes last week as well that needed to be based on an interview I did with one of the teachers I work with. The interview was a lot of fun and helped me get to know more about one of the teachers I’ve really admired at my school.

So with all of that due, I did, in a way, live at school. Tuesday I was at work from 8am to 10:20pm. I had to scrape frost off my car when I went home. Wednesday I didn’t get home till 11:00pm. Thursday I worked from 8am to 3:45 and then went to class. I got home from class about 8pm and stopped to pick up some papers that Melissa had corrected for me and eat something for dinner before going back to work and staying there till 12:30. Just think of what I would’ve been paid for all that extra work at night if I was paid hourly.

Yesterday I was reading a chapter about the environment in schools in one of my text books. Part of a quote in the chapter says: “The relationship among adults who live in a school…” And after last week, I almost think I do live at school.