The Organized Classroom

This week I had to give a lecture to new English teachers on how to create lessons, manage your classroom, etc. I put together a slide show of ideas for organizing your classroom too. Here it is!

 

Remember the Milk

When I was in middle school, I walked into the public library with a list of books I wanted written on my hand in black marker. I walked right up to the information desk to ask where I could find the books I wanted, pointed to my hand, and the librarian stared at me in shock. "You'll get ink poisoning!" she yelled.

Fearful of dying from marker ink, I switched to pens clearly labeled "non-toxic" and tried to find other ways to remind myself to do things. Like post-it notes. But those are easily lost and crumpled and accidentally thrown away. I tried computer sticky notes, but they didn't transfer from computer to computer. For awhile, I had a paper planner that I carried around everywhere, but trying to find the perfect planner for my OCD self is a challenge in itself. And it became full of neatly handwritten notes, with cross-outs all over them, which quickly became a mess.

And then I discovered "Remember the Milk." It's an online list program which can be synced across almost any electronic device with internet access. And you can make different kinds of lists for different parts of your life. (My current lists are "Graduate School", "Personal", "School") And it's free. You can sign up here: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

One of the best things about Remember the Milk is that you can put it on your desktop, so you can see it even if your internet isn't working. For Mac/Windows, download "App for the Milk" from http://www.chrillo.info/apps/app-for-the-milk/

You can also sync it with Google so that it shows up on your Google homepage, or on the left-hand side of your Gmail account. And do a zillion other things with it.

And, my personal favorite thing to do, is to embed it in your Windows desktop, to make everything look nice and clean and organized. Here are instructions on how to do just that!

Step 1: Right click on your desktop and select "properties."

Step 2: Click on the "Desktop" tab in the "Display Properties" window.

Step 3: Click "Customize Desktop."

Step 4: Click on the "Web" tab in the "Desktop Items" window and then click "New."

Step 5: Next to "Location" type in: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/ and click "OK"

Step 6: Go to http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/ and type in your username and password, and check "remember me."

Step 7: Go back to your desktop to re-size and move around your new Remember the Milk list.

AND if that's not reason enough to sign up for Remember the Milk, you can also sync it to your iPhone, so you'll always have that list with you wherever you go!

(But I still like to write on my hands every now and again, just to spite that librarian...)

Flashcard Frenzy

The first 6 months that I was at my school, nobody would tell me where the laminating machine or the color printer were. Begging my co-teachers to help me didn't amount to anything, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I looked in classrooms, checked supply rooms, and broke into empty offices on my search. Finally, behind a mound of paperwork in a nearby office, I found the color printer, and began the tedious task of trying to decipher the Korean enough to remotely hook it up to my computer. I had to go through almost every single computer in the system before I found the one with the matching Korean symbols, but it was worth it. I now had access to the color printer.

The laminating machine proved a more daunting challenge. I finally located it under a pile of trash and extra signs in a downstairs supply room next to a red machine that looks like it's meant for small-scale torturing. I snuck in with my newly printed color copies when the repair guy (who actually doesn't really do anything but watch TV all day) was out having lunch. But confronted with the Korean machine, I failed miserably. My usually tactic of button-mashing didn't work, and I found myself unable to turn the thing on. So I moved on to Plan B, which was tricking a Korean teacher to help me, as the English teachers still insisted that they didn't know anything about lamination. Ha.

One year and eight months later, I had accumulated a massive collection of flashcards, which looked like this:

This is no way to store flashcards! So I decided to separate them into categories by grade, as well as an extra category for flashcards that can be used for all grades, and one for flashcards that are part of a board game, like Clue or Guess Who?

Inside each box, each set of cards is stored in a plastic Ziploc bag and labeled with a small piece of paper with grade number, lesson number, and general subject of the flashcards.

My board game box also has dice and little plastic animals to use as pieces.

Now, I'm in Korea, so all of these boxes (which my school bought for me) feel awful, like nails on a chalkboard, and have the following picture on top:

If you do this in your own classroom, I suggest a nice plastic box and a label-maker!

How to Manage 912 Middle Schoolers

I teach English to three grades of middle school, the equivalent of grades 7, 8, and 9 in America. Each grade has eight homeroom classes, and each homeroom class has thirty-eight students. So 3 grades * 8 classes * 38 students = 912 middle schoolers to keep track of in any given week.

Then it gets a little more complicated- Grades 8 and 9 are divided into 3 levels- Apple, Banana, and Cherry. Last year Grade 9 had a Durian level too, but since they fired all the extra English teachers, Durian class went away. And last year Grade 9 had a "special" class (read: torture the NSET time), but again, that class has been cancelled. So that makes 8 homeroom classes /2 homeroom classes per English class * 3 levels * 2 grades = 24 English classes.

Grade 7 used to be divided too, but again, there aren't enough teachers, so they just stay in their own classroom for English. So 24 Grade 8 and 9 English classes + 8 Grade 7 English Classes = 32 English classes.

On top of all that, the "Movie English Club" meets Monday-Wednesday during the lunch break, and super early on Friday mornings before school starts.

This repeats on a bi-weekly basis.

This sounds like a pain-in-the-butt week to manage already, but throw in the fact that the Korean teachers like to move and cancel classes with about negative five minutes notice, and you've got a schedule that will throw off even the most organized of professional organizers.

This is my solution:

It's a file folder with plastic sleeves. This is great because you can slip pages in and out easily, and keep them clean when you inevitably spill coffee all over it. And, if it's in a plastic sleeve, your co-teachers can't write all over your pages in their horrible non-color-coded-handwriting.

In the front goes a copy of my bi-weekly schedule, which I reprint every week so that I have a fresh copy to write all over when my classes get cancelled, and un-cancelled, and re-cancelled, and un-re-cancelled and re-un-re-cancelled. Then, the old schedules go in the back of the folder, to reference later when the co-teacher tries to tell you she didn't cancel class 3 times.

After that goes my yearly schedule, with a list of every single class on the left side, and all the lesson numbers going across the top. This way I can keep track of which class has already done what, so I don't end up throwing away extra copies that I need, or teaching a lesson that I've already taught. It's a little redundant, but much nicer to look at than the bi-weekly schedule.

And that's how I keep track of all 912 students in all 32 different classes!

Desk Disaster

Over winter vacation, my school decided to change my desk. They did this by taking everything from my old desk (as well as my cabinet space) and dumping it in a large pile on a new desk, complete with trash and belongings from the old desk occupant.

An hour and one package of cleaning wipes later, things looked a little better!
Here are some tips to deal with a disasterous desk space:

• Move everything onto the floor and clean the desk thoroughly. This will cut down on the amount of cleaning you'll have to do in the future.
• If you have a glass top, consider getting rid of it. It traps things underneath, making it harder to clean, and it's hard to use your mouse on glass. In my case, the underside of my glass top was plastered with dried up Korean papers that wouldn't come off, which made it an easy decision to ditch the glass.
• Thread computer cords through a hole in your desk or behind the desk. Getting them off the surface of the desk makes it look less crowded.
• Organize your books by size, putting the smaller books closest to you. In a small bookshelf, it's not hard to find what you need, so a size-based organization will make your bookshelf look more streamlined. It will also make your desk feel bigger.
• Hang an over-the-door hook (or command hook) under your desk to hold things like a lint roller, umbrella, and small towel (in my case, my school has no paper towels).
• Give yourself an inbox to corral all those papers that you need to deal with that you're just too lazy to organize right now. If you look carefully, mine is in a paper box top on the filing cabinet under my desk. My rule of thumb is that if it gets too high to fit under the desk, I dump it all out and sort through it. This makes an excellent form of procrastination.
• If it's not yours, get rid of it. Especially if it's in another language that you can't understand.
• If you haven't used it in the past 6 months, either toss it or give it to someone who will use it. In my case, I relocated my half-used erasers, stamps, expired hot chocolate mix, and a mysterious key to the trash can.

Once you're organized in a way that makes you happy, it will be easier to stay organized in the future!