The Last Day of School & How it Nearly Made Me Crazy

Sigh...

Another school year over.

No matter how good the class has been (and this one was good), I still LOVE the last day of school! I love having a job with a fresh start and a definite ending every ten months.

I will tell you that this year it was more difficult to get ready to go than it usually is. Due to a colleague's retirement, I have the opportunity to move into his classroom. This colleague has been teaching since 1967 (the year I was born!), and has been in his current room for 14 years. I have been in a portable building for eight years, and I would like to have a classroom in a real building.

The problem?

He. Has. Never. Thrown. Anything. Away.

He can't seem to part with anything. He offered me his stuff, but I told him that after ten years of doing this for a living, I'm set. I don't need anything else. So, he decided that the new teacher we'll be hiring must need his stuff. So to my old classroom (the new teacher's room) he sent:

Teaching books... from the 1970s.

Obsolete world almanacs and encyclopedias.

Boxes and boxes of dittos (we haven't had a ditto machine in at least 8 years). These dittos weren't just old, they were used - student writing all over 'em.

Hundreds (maybe thousands) of chapter books - some apparently never touched by students. They were like new. Some have been saved for the new teacher. Some have been donated to our PTO reading program. Some are being donated to another school in the district.

Used crayons.

Used markers.

Used colored pencils.

Nearly empty glue bottles.

Training binders from 1995 and 1996.

Workbooks with most of the pages torn out of them.

Ancient, faded posters.

It took about ten minutes of his students carrying over boxes of this junk, before I had to call him and say that my room was full and to please stop sending things over. That just means they are in my new (his old) classroom and I will have to toss them when I return in late August, but I didn't want this brand new teacher to have to spend days of her time going through all his crap. I had to do that my first year of teaching, and it's no fun to go through someone else's thirty years of accumulated crap.

I was feeling so angry with him for creating so much more work for me and I was just about to cry tears of frustration in front of my students, when an angel of a volunteer mom walked in my door, surveyed the horrible mess, and said she'd be right back to help me make sense of it all. When she returned, we spent forty minutes deciding what to keep and what to toss. After school, the amount that was tossed filled an entire portable dumpster that the custodian uses on his daily rounds. He had filled another such dumpster the day before with more of the crap my colleague had sent to my classroom then.

I'm still upset and overwhelmed by this whole situation. I now realize that I will have to go back to work two or three days earlier this year just to continue purging his room of all that crap. I'm sorry I keep using that word - junk or garbage just doesn't seem strong enough!

Why can't some people throw things away?

************************************************

Update: I just did a little Google style research. This type of behavior is considered "compulsive hoarding" and treatment is usually ineffective. People like this think everything "might" have some value at "sometime". Sheesh... I guess you could call them a CRAP ADDICT!

Hehehe... I crack myself up sometimes!