Read Online Close Encounters of the Third-Grade Kind by Phillip Done - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Phillip Done
Tags: BIO019000
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busy with the children, he pointed and whispered, “I’ll just put it on your desk.”
Uh-oh. Not the desk.
I followed him with my eyes as he walked to the front of the room. When he reached my desk, Bob stopped and scratched his
head, hunting for a place to set the form. I considered telling him that I was in the middle of spring cleaning, but since
it was only October, I decided against it. Instead, I cringed and watched him set the form down as if he were adding to a
tower of playing cards.
My poor desk. It looks like the floor of a snow globe after all the flakes have settled to the bottom. It is covered with
stacks of papers, overhead transparencies, lesson plans, teachers’ manuals, construction paper, sticky notes, permission slips,
library passes, spelling lists, answer keys, clipboards, grade books, and my attendance folder. That’s just the top layer.
My coffee cup has never rested on a flat surface. My elbows have never leaned on wood. When Christopher set his hamster on
my desk, it took us five minutes to find her.
My students tease me about my desk all the time.
“Mr. Done,” Stacy said one day, “you need to clean Oscar.”
“Who’s Oscar?” I asked, tilting my head.
“Your desk.”
I blinked hard. “You named my desk
Oscar
?”
“That’s only one of his names.”
“You have
more
?”
“Yeah. Want to hear them?”
“No.”
Actually, my students have only seen Oscar clean twice — once on the first day of school when everything looked perfect and
again on the morning after Back to School Night. When the kids walked in and saw that my desk was clean, they started clapping.
Bob’s desk does not look like mine. It does not resemble the return counter at Macy’s the day after Christmas. His stapler
looks polished. The little plastic circle that sits in his tape dispenser always has tape on it. (I’m sure he has never had
to hunt for the end of the tape on the little roll then scrape it off with his fingernail.) Bob’s planner sits perfectly in
the center of his desk. His to do list is color-coded. All the pens in his pencil can have caps on them. His pencils do not
have masking tape flags on them that say, “THIS IS NOT YOURS!” His paper clips are not all globbed onto a magnet that someone
pulled off the whiteboard. There are no trolls or plastic toys taped to the top of his computer. The little brush inside his
bottle of Wite-Out does not look like it just had a seizure.
Of course, I’m not the only teacher with a messy desk. There are lots of us out there. Teachers with messy desks know who
all the other teachers with messy desks are. It’s like a secret club. We even sit together at lunch. But we don’t talk about
our desks — especially around the teachers whose desks are not messy.
I’m convinced that there really are only two types of people in the world — those with neat desks like my boss’s and those
with messy desks like mine.
Tidys
and
Messys,
I call them. It really is a Mars-and-Venus sort of thing. The two groups do not understand each other.
Tidys
roll their eyes at
Messys
and make jokes about us waiting for the File Fairy to come clean up our piles.
Messys
long to be accepted by
Tidys.
That’s why you will occasionally see
Messys
shaking their doormats wildly out in front of their classrooms. We want
Tidys
to see us cleaning.
You know those decorating magazines that show cluttered rooms transformed into organized ones? Well, the “before” photos are
always taken at a
Messy
’s place.
Tidys
do the makeovers. Sometimes in those magazines there are quizzes to see how organized you are. You answer questions like:
Do you leave your keys in the same place? Do you keep your desk neat and organized? Can you find your stapler today?
But
Messys
understand something that
Tidys
do not: A cluttered work space can serve as an invaluable teaching tool. Take our planet, for example. A messy desk provides
the perfect
Uh-oh. Not the desk.
I followed him with my eyes as he walked to the front of the room. When he reached my desk, Bob stopped and scratched his
head, hunting for a place to set the form. I considered telling him that I was in the middle of spring cleaning, but since
it was only October, I decided against it. Instead, I cringed and watched him set the form down as if he were adding to a
tower of playing cards.
My poor desk. It looks like the floor of a snow globe after all the flakes have settled to the bottom. It is covered with
stacks of papers, overhead transparencies, lesson plans, teachers’ manuals, construction paper, sticky notes, permission slips,
library passes, spelling lists, answer keys, clipboards, grade books, and my attendance folder. That’s just the top layer.
My coffee cup has never rested on a flat surface. My elbows have never leaned on wood. When Christopher set his hamster on
my desk, it took us five minutes to find her.
My students tease me about my desk all the time.
“Mr. Done,” Stacy said one day, “you need to clean Oscar.”
“Who’s Oscar?” I asked, tilting my head.
“Your desk.”
I blinked hard. “You named my desk
Oscar
?”
“That’s only one of his names.”
“You have
more
?”
“Yeah. Want to hear them?”
“No.”
Actually, my students have only seen Oscar clean twice — once on the first day of school when everything looked perfect and
again on the morning after Back to School Night. When the kids walked in and saw that my desk was clean, they started clapping.
Bob’s desk does not look like mine. It does not resemble the return counter at Macy’s the day after Christmas. His stapler
looks polished. The little plastic circle that sits in his tape dispenser always has tape on it. (I’m sure he has never had
to hunt for the end of the tape on the little roll then scrape it off with his fingernail.) Bob’s planner sits perfectly in
the center of his desk. His to do list is color-coded. All the pens in his pencil can have caps on them. His pencils do not
have masking tape flags on them that say, “THIS IS NOT YOURS!” His paper clips are not all globbed onto a magnet that someone
pulled off the whiteboard. There are no trolls or plastic toys taped to the top of his computer. The little brush inside his
bottle of Wite-Out does not look like it just had a seizure.
Of course, I’m not the only teacher with a messy desk. There are lots of us out there. Teachers with messy desks know who
all the other teachers with messy desks are. It’s like a secret club. We even sit together at lunch. But we don’t talk about
our desks — especially around the teachers whose desks are not messy.
I’m convinced that there really are only two types of people in the world — those with neat desks like my boss’s and those
with messy desks like mine.
Tidys
and
Messys,
I call them. It really is a Mars-and-Venus sort of thing. The two groups do not understand each other.
Tidys
roll their eyes at
Messys
and make jokes about us waiting for the File Fairy to come clean up our piles.
Messys
long to be accepted by
Tidys.
That’s why you will occasionally see
Messys
shaking their doormats wildly out in front of their classrooms. We want
Tidys
to see us cleaning.
You know those decorating magazines that show cluttered rooms transformed into organized ones? Well, the “before” photos are
always taken at a
Messy
’s place.
Tidys
do the makeovers. Sometimes in those magazines there are quizzes to see how organized you are. You answer questions like:
Do you leave your keys in the same place? Do you keep your desk neat and organized? Can you find your stapler today?
But
Messys
understand something that
Tidys
do not: A cluttered work space can serve as an invaluable teaching tool. Take our planet, for example. A messy desk provides
the perfect
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