PERSONAL TEACHER STASH



At my school, I have developed the reputation of being the go-to person for any and everything that you may need. Band aide, got it. Lotion, I’ve got ya. Aspirin (for colleagues), always. Air freshener, whiteboard cleaner, and multi-purpose cleaner, come to me. I have it all.

As the summer winds down, I am thinking about what I will keep in my personal stash to help make my classroom my home away from home. So far, I’ve decided on the following toiletries and treats:

                    Scented hand sanitizer
                    Hand cream
                    Liquid soap, (because the soap in the bathroom smells weird)
                    Toilet paper
                    Contact solution
                    Floss picks
                    Air freshener
                    Clorox wipes
                    Face wipes
                    Lip balm
                   Bathroom wipes
                   Trail mix
                   Granola bars
                   Chips
                   Water
                  Tea

I’m sure that I’ll add more to this list by September and throughout the school year. Please share what you keep in your personal stash to help make your days a little easier.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Image
It seems that every year there are changes in pedagogy. However, in my opinion, these new concepts are really old ones that are just repackaged and given fancy new names. With the constant influx of theories and research that dictate how we are to teach comes the teacher training workshops usually run by well-paid consultants who have rehearsed their presentation dozens of times to schools across the country, but never actually implementing them and of course not with the at-risk students that I teach. And let’s say that they have worked with students in a school district similar to mine. They most likely worked with a group of hand selected students or at a charter school. Needless to say, this is the case for me yet again this summer. My Title 1 school was awarded a grant to make improvements and one of those improvements is working with a program to improve overall academic performance and to give all  students the option to attend college. That’s perfectly fine with me, but
Read more

WHY I DON’T FEEL LIKE TEACHING TODAY

Image
Early in my teaching career, I worked at a high school that made people gasp when I told them that I worked there. It was no big deal to me. I did not encounter many disciplinary issues at all. However, the majority of the students that I taught were not motivated to learn. Each one had their own story and I understood, but on this one occasion I was a bit fed up. I had been teaching them the structure of a persuasive essay for a few days and wanted them to write with a bit more command. I was teaching the counterargument. What I thought would be one lesson took several. With that said, on one particular night I was confused and frustrated about why my students were struggling so much to address the counterargument in their essay. At that point a light bulb went off. I decided to write a model for them to analyze (I found that the exemplars that I wrote for them helped a bit more than the exemplars found on the web because I wrote about topics that they could relate to, so that'
Read more

YES, I'M JUDGING

Image
Here I go again sharing my two cents on something that came across my feed on Facebook. The title of the post “My Title 1 Kids Have $300 Shoes. And It’s Nobody Else’s Business” immediately caught my attention, because 1) I teach at a Title 1 high school and 2) I do judge the students and their parents when I see them with expensive products. The author of this article wrote with a strong tone of sympathy and compassion for her, presumably, immigrant student and his choice to purchase a pair of $300 soccer cleats. She doted on the fact that his family struggled financially and that he actually paid for the shoes himself by working with his father doing landscaping. She complimented the student’s motivation to work hard to get what he wanted and warned teachers against making assumptions and judgements about what our students and their families chose to purchase with their money. Now this is all fine and good, but it is not the narrative for most of the students that I t
Read more