Typically when it is hot outside you turn on the AC and when it is cold you turn on the heater. Not too complicated right? Well, at Rosehill Elementary this concept has for some reason not been grasped yet.
Oh, the daily battles with the classroom temperature. It baffles me and makes me laugh all at the same time. The temperature in our building is usually on the cold side, but it really depends where you are. We have all learned to adapt by dressing in layers or by bringing a sweater just in case. The teachers used to do this trick where you put a wet paper towel on the thermostat. It really does make warm air come out of the vent, but it turns out that it then causes cold air to go into the room next door. Oops. Really gotta put others above yourself in that situation.
This winter has been a bit more extreme and harder to adapt to. Something is always broken. The district guys who fix the heaters have pretty much become a part of our school's staff. Most of the classrooms I am in have cold air blowing into them. I don't understand. It is freezing outside and so the air is on?? Sometimes I think there is some big shot at the district who just sits by the controls all day and when he gets bored he turns up the air to make us miserable. Our head custodian, Mr. Gary, is running around all day responding to teachers whose rooms are too cold or too hot. He has this sweet thermometer that he holds up in the air to find the temp. I think it is fixed because he always ends up telling the teacher that the thermometer reads 70 degrees or something, but we are all wearing three layers of clothing and are still cold.
One day, while it was still cold in most parts of the building, one of the kindergarten classrooms got up to over 100 degrees! All exaggerations aside- the kid's crayons were literally melting on the tables. Then there is my favorite room- the third grade math class I help with. For about five minutes the vent blows out freezing cold air. You can walk by and get minor frost bite. Then for the next five minutes it blows out wonderfully warm air and everyone is fighting to stand by it to warm up. The teacher in that class loves calling Mr. Gary in to check the temp and see how dreadfully cold it is, but of course by the time he gets there we are in the five minutes of warm air time.
The other day we came back from Christmas break. It was like 6 degrees outside and I was running to get into the school. I got in, breathed a sigh of relief, and took off my coat expecting to be embraced by the warmth of the building. The weird thing was that I still felt like I was outside. Then we all get an email that said five of the heating units are out. The principle didn't mention in that email how many units we have all together, so that could have been all of them, who knows. It was 40 degrees in some of the rooms! Everyone had on coats and hats, kids couldn't write because they had their mittens on, teachers pens weren't writing and their dry erase boards wouldn't erase. Everyone's favorite thing to do that day was to put their cold hands on your face to show just how cold their classroom was. I don't like that game.
During lunch one of the heater fixer guys walked through the teacher's lounge. Mistake on his part. The teachers swarmed him and asked what was wrong and when it would be fixed and so on. I over heard him say, "Well, the problem is that your system is decrepit. It should have been replaced ten years ago."
I guess these children and teachers will just have to keep suffering in the cold with our decrepit system because the government keeps taking money away from the schools and gives it to the big corporations who clearly need it more than we do. Ah, but that is for another blog post on another day. :) On the plus side for that heater fixer man, if we did have a better system, he probably wouldn't have a job.
