This is Florida! And it's hot people! In this time of budget cuts, the county has upped acceptable temperatures in our building. There is also some type of motion sensor in our rooms that turns off the air when there is no movement, so... when you leave for lunch or recess or a Resource, the air turns off. When you return, the room's heated up in your absence and never quite cools back down. The air is also off until the last minute in the morning so if you come early to plan, you are reinforced for giving of your time freely by sweating! The same is true in the afternoons, the air is turned off around 4:00 even though we have Extended Day in the building until 6 and Monday mornings - when the air has been off all weekend - oh my! The point is the building has been unbelievable hot this August. By 9:30 in the morning my hair in the back from my ears down is actually wet and in ringlets! I can feel the beads of sweat drip down my back.
To be fair, they did finally decide that there was some trouble with one of the chillers in our building, but even after it was patched back together, it was still hot. Yesterday a teacher told me that she had decided to forgo lunch because she was just too hot to eat. She also said that she didn't blame her kids for not wanting to write at the end of the day because all she really wanted to do was go to sleep. Opening the door to her room was like opening a sauna. The PTA ladies won't even do their work in my room because they complain about the heat. Another of our teachers wrote on Facebook that she went right home and took a shower because she had been sweating all day and her clothes were sticking to her. Professional dress is a joke when you're wet and smelly! This is Florida folks! We are looking at days easily in the high 90's. When I got in my car one day to go home last week, the temp read 101 outside! It's HOT!
Now think about that as you think about all of the assessment that is going on in the building. In the heat that just makes us all tired and cranky, we, Kindergarten teachers, are evaluating the Voluntary Pre-K program in our state. Is this really fair to our Pre-K colleagues? We are also beginning the state's FAIR testing and our own county's writing assessments and benchmark testing in upper grades. With heat and tempers rising, do we really have the best testing environments? Are these really the results that we want to drive our instructional decisions? When we cut educational budgets, what are we REALLY sacrificing?
How sad that the students and teachers are so hot. The heat makes all become irritable and stressful. Germs also multiply in the heat and students and teachers can and will become sick in such environments. Hot, stinky, and sweaty...I know I do my best work then. With cut backs the top priority it will get worse before better. MM
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