What My Classroom Really Looks Like

This weekend, I spent a good chunk of time cleaning at my inbox. Notice, I didn't say cleaning out my inbox. Despite spending 6+ hours organizing and writing replies, I still have 205 or so e-mails that require some type of action or response. This is what I get for putting off answering e-mails for pretty much the entire first semester. Oops...

Anywho, in one of those e-mail replies I was writing, I found myself saying something to this extent: I strive to be an honest person, and I want my blog to reflect that honesty. Someone had thanked me for the fact that I still blogged about ideas even when they didn't exactly work out as I would have hoped in my classroom. Yes, we all have our lessons that flop. And, I feel like I have to blog about those lessons in order to learn from them. Learning through reflecting on my blog almost sort of redeems the flopped lesson. After all, if you learn something from it, it must have been worthwhile.

The rest of this post will be me trying to be honest. The idea has been on my mind since August. At the beginning of every school year, we fix up our classrooms and take pictures to post on the Internet. Everything is in its perfect place. Shelves are organized. Desks are gleaming. (Of course, my classroom is never quite perfect. There always seems to be that pile of posters I haven't gotten around to laminating and hanging or something...)

At the beginning of the school year, my room looked like this. This is not me. This is not reality. I wish this was reality. In reality, I'm incredibly disorganized. It's bad. When I was in school, I would secretly judge my teachers for their messy desks. Now, I'm the one with the messy desk. Yeah. I told a student one day that I really just needed a secretary or assistant. Her reply? "You know, Ms. Hagan. Every other teacher has the exact same amount of time in their day as you do. And, none of their desks look like yours!" Ouch.

So, are you ready to see what my classroom really looks like? Now, these pictures were taken on our first day back from Christmas Break. It was a professional day without the kids, so I had time to clean my room up and get first semester grades finalized.