Monday Morning Musings

Posted on October 18, 2021 under Monday Morning Musings with one comment

 

Out of the closet

 

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who is the fairest one of all?”

The Evil Queen

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Why would I be thinking about Snow White? Stay tuned dear reader for its not what you might think. We have already had a few light dustings of snow, but this piece has nothing to do with snow, or winter, for that matter.

I’m a closet junkie. “OMG, Len. We knew there had to be a rational explanation for your irrational act to go and teach in the north at the age of 68.”

No, no, no. I haven’t turned to hard drugs late in life.

It started innocently enough. In our school, we have a large room which was once a computer lab. It gradually turned into an electronics graveyard. Someone decided that the back of this room (it’s actually a separate room) would become our Covid room. The problem is that there was Covid material in several rooms in the school. I decided, once and for all, to consolidate all the masks, hand sanitizers, wipes, thermometers and gowns into one tidy space. I’m a bit of a neat freak. Just ask my children. After big family dinners, I could often be found cleaning off plates and organizing the dishes before the meal was over.

It took me a few days and the help of my colleague, Audrey, to get the room ship shape. This got me to thinking, which is dangerous. I knew that there were several other rooms in the school that needed a major housecleaning and reorganization.

“Mark my words, there’s trouble a brewin.”

Grumpy

When I first came up north to teach two years ago, I went to the school’s resource room looking for material. In large schools, there is one large resource room and a resource room teacher. Our school doesn’t have this luxury, so teaching aides and resources are stuffed into three oversized closets. The first time I went looking for something, I realized that these rooms had also become storage rooms for everything imaginable in the school. Things piled up over time and the rooms had become virtually unusable.

In a fit of insanity, I decided to tackle the largest of these rooms on the secondary side of the school.

“Sink’s empty. Hey, someone stole our dishes.”

Sneezy

No, Sneezy. No one in recent memory had gone into the resource room and magically tidied it up. I waded into a jungle and five days later I emerged unscathed other than a few serious paper cuts. (For something so innocuous, paper cuts hurt like hell. ed) Day one was spent clearing out all kinds of electronics, mostly old computer parts, keyboards, and a million miles of wires impossibly tangled. Houdini couldn’t have unraveled them. Of course, there was only one place to take them- to the computer graveyard once serving as a lab.

I am not going to waste your time describing every item I stumbled across once I had cleared a path and was able to tiptoe through (the tulips) the room. A few things stood out. Some of the textbooks were over thirty years old indicating the last time that this room may have had a serious inventory check. There were boxes and boxes of old slides, 8-tracks, VCR tapes, cassette tapes, DVD’s, an old overhead projector (and the plastic sheets that went with some of the lessons) and a few tape recorders. I was staring at the technology revolution of the past half century right in front of me.  I caressed one of the old cassette tapes and thought about the days when we used a pencil to rewind a tape when it got discombobulated. I know many of you did this. Or thinking about the 8-track playing in your car until a zombie attacked your prized Everly Brothers tape, ate it up and spit it out.

But the piece de resistance was an ancient reel to reel machine. Cue “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. I was immediately transported back more than 50 years when I remember, with absolute clarity, watching Snow White in the music room at our old high school.

“When hearts are high, the time will fly, so whistle while you work.”

Snow White

Several of the secondary students were following my progress and, from time to time, popped in to help me lift heavy boxes off high shelves. They had never seen a reel to reel before and were mesmerized by my accounts of ancient history. “Len, those movies were probably in black and white,” they said jokingly. You betcha. I’m not about to suggest that I started to whistle but this wave of nostalgia made the work a bit less cumbersome.

There were all sorts of old things that took me down memory lane but one box in particular, left me scratching my head. I had finally whittled down dozens of boxes so that I could actually catch a glimpse of the floor. And there, sitting in an oversized carboard box, was an engine. Now it should be made clear that we do not have an auto mechanics course at the school. After several inquiries, no one knew how this engine had come to occupy space in the resource room.

Besides getting the room organized, I was getting one hell of a workout with all the lifting, and moving things around, including relocating items to their rightful place in the school. By Friday, I discovered that there was an actual floor in the room and every single item was now either trashed or sitting on a shelf. We all know that feeling of satisfaction when you tackle a seemingly impossible task but, by just staying with it, the job eventually gets done. There’s nothing like a good purge.

“Look, our house! The lit’s light. The light’s lit.”

Doc

After a week of toil, the job was done.

I was feeling proud of myself, but I had another feeling that trumped everything. When I stared at the finished product, I realized, with the deepest of humility, that it would take me the rest of my life to read everything in that small room. Knowledge is so powerful and there’s just so damn much to learn.

The secondary math teacher is our “go to” guy in the school when it comes to technology. We are threatening to take the reel-to-reel machine down from the top shelf during our next professional development day and see if we can get it to work.

Maybe I’ll contact Disney and see if they can provide me with a copy of the original Snow White movie… in black and white, of course!

Have a great week.

P.S. At the end of each day, I went home dusty, dirty and smelly. I give the last word to Grumpy:

“I’d like to see anybody make me wash if I didn’t want to.”