Busy Room

We used to call it the Resource Room. Not that there were that many resources. Well maybe there were. Because everyone would send their half chewed, first pages filled in, out--of date workbooks, to us because they just knew we could use it. And we never knew when we might be able to use it - so we kept the unloved donations- stacks of them.

But now we are no longer Resource Room teachers, somehow we morphed into Special Education Teacher Support Services Teachers. Maybe we just lost all our entitlement to even second-hand resources. And we are supposed to be out in the world. And we are- all day. There might not be anyone in the school who hasn't heard me complain that I walk the halls and stairwells so much I should be skinny. But even the chickens come home to roost eventually and 2:30 found four of us squeezed into our little overcrowded, stacked with stacks, half room- half special services office.

The room was humming. At the desktop computer the new teacher sat trying to negotiate the quirks of the frumpy IEP program. Its unnerving to enter anything into a program without a save button.
And the student's file would not come up if she typed the full name into the find box, but somehow I knew typing the first two letters of the name would make it appear. (As I write this, I can't imagine why that worked or how I figured out to do that).

The science teacher wanted help with lesson plans, the testing coordinator was trying to locate the 10th grade PSAT applications and Serina wanted a resume.

Serina took me up on my suggestion to apply for a volunteer position at the Day Care Center.

"But, I can't work there," she reported, "I need a resume."

So I suggest she come to our room and she took me up.

I wrestled with the old laptop- the one that seemed so quick and small two years ago, but is twice as bulky as my current netbook and now can best be described as mad slow. And somehow or another I got a resume template to appear. A half hour later- low and behold a professional looking document proclaimed that Serina was an experience baby sitter who almost had a high school diploma.

"This is an import day," It's not everyday you get to produce your very first resume.

So we all shook hands and Serina took five copies and left the busy room