I have watched the movie Reality Bites several times - and one scene that popped in to my head this past week was when Lalaina (Winona Rider) is coming home from a job interview where she was asked to define the word irony and she stumbled over her words and was not able to fully explain the meaning of the word. When she got home, she asked Troy (Ethan Hawke) if he could define irony and he said (without hesitation), "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning". And in some way that is how I am feeling during this first week of the school year.
I knew when the school year started that this was not going to be my typical year. I knew that I would be leaving the classroom in just a few weeks so that I could work with some awesome teachers that were on special assignment in ed tech. But I had already set my goals for the year (see them here) - and one of them was to try and be paperless...or at least use a lot less paper this year.
So since I am not going to be teaching the entire year (if you want to know why read this) there was a big room change during the first week of school. My room was taken by another chemistry teacher, and I ended up moving to a different room in a different pod. So where does the irony come in you ask? I was moved to the closest room to the copy room! There are teachers who would love to have this room - steps away from three copy machines. My resolution of not using paper makes the location of my room somewhat worthless. We are one week in to the school year and I have not used 1 sheet of paper yet - our AP Environmental Science teacher has used over 1,000 sheets! So while I am doing my best to be paperless, at least my new room allows me to see many teachers each day :)