I was not aware that the most stressful part of getting ready for the school year was going to be putting my bulletin boards up.

I’m at one of those crazy college-oriented charters and my classroom is Georgetown University. Georgetown’s colors are blue and grey, so in my classroom we’ve been going through and systematically tearing down the bright, happy colors that the previous teacher had up and changing everything to Georgetown. It’s a little sad, and a little time consuming, and we still have one left and I need to switch purple to blue on Saturday because we have all-day training for our decoding program tomorrow and Friday.

Yesterday I stayed after school to work on finishing up the room, and the really frustrating thing was everything I did needed to be re-done. I did a bulletin board, sort of, but I didn’t use enough paper and there was too much paper for one person so I ended up wrinkling it beyond repair and I was going to just put things over the blank space so I put up a border that ended up not really going with the color of the butcher paper and my co-teacher said she had a heart attack when she walked in the room in the morning.

Not helpful. If I’m going to be judged to this extent on my bulletin board making skills then why on earth was that not included as a part of my training at any point?

I’ve been in my classroom for a while now, but I’m still not totally aware of what supplies are there, where I’m going to put things, how the filing system works, where I get to keep my tea mug, and what the previous teachers left me. And my number chart is missing the number 98, so I guess it’s a good thing that I’m going in on Saturday to orient myself in my room without the craziness of the work week.

I knew that teaching was going to be stressful, but I really don’t appreciate being stressed over the things that matter the least.