Last day of school for me foreverr

 As of June 1st, I am officially retired.  These photos were taken on the last day I was at school. I had worked hard for several months on getting the room cleaned up and organized for the new teacher.  I sorted through 11 years of teaching and threw a lot of stuff  out.  The rest I organized into binders and crates of folders.

 The new teacher spent an afternoon with me and I went through everything and she used sticky notes to remind her of where certain things were.  She's in her thirties with 3 kids.  She has a lot of enthusiasm which is, of course, good.
I had the kids keep notebooks in the classroom and we stored them in crates.  I had no use for the crates so I left them for her as she too will be requiring notebooks.  It's for a 'bell-ringer' that gets the kids in their seats and copying a sentence to correct or a journal prompt to respond to.

 You can see some of the posted notes. Everything was in my car or at home that I wanted except for the printer.  Another teacher carried it out to my car to go back home. It's fairly new and a very good one; it was my husband's --he got a new one.  I needed one at school for printing a brochure project.  Our school does not have a color printer for general  use.
  I'm giving my old one from home to a teacher friend who teaches two rooms from mine.  She will have the tech guy hook it up  or she will just use it with her lap top.  Either way she is happy. No more leaving her classroom in the middle of a class to get something. Its color is not as good as the other one, but she doesn't need color.

I left the basic bulletin board stuff up too.  The janitors don't wipe down the bulletin boards so they tell us to just leave the stuff up.  She can change everything if she wants.  I left a lot of supplies for her also because I don't need them in retirement.  She was grateful as her husband has already warned her not to spend a lot on getting her classroom ready.
When I came there the teacher before me had a ritual of throwing a worksheet away the last time she used it.  She left me nothing: no worksheets. tests. or lesson plans and no supplies.  I was completely on my own and it was daunting.   I didn't want to do that to my replacement.

It felt  good to walk out and know I was done---that not only my summer was free and clear but the rest of my life also.

I will be trying to write regularly about my retirement.  This and the previous posts are the first installments.