State Inspection ... An Organized Mess!

This is about the day the state inspectors came to our school.  Here's how it went in my classroom!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to Hang On Keep Cool. I'm Mr. S. And today I want to tell you about the day the state inspectors came down to our school. We were told earlier in the year that they were going to be coming, but nobody knew when. And our principal said, When I find out, I'll let you know, and that's the best I can do. Well, that's okay. So here we are in the middle of the month of May, and we're doing our rocket building for Rocket Day. I'll tell you about Rocket Day in another episode, but this is what we were doing when we were being inspected. The kids were building their Esties rockets for Rocket Day, and I had about a hundred kids. Therefore, I had about a hundred rockets in the room that were being built. I had clothes lines strung across the room with rockets hanging from them, glue drying, paint drying, all over the place. Rockets were in the windowsills, they were everywhere. And at the time the inspectors came that day, I had a class going and they were all working on their rockets. There was a knock on our classroom door and it's the principal, and he said, Hi, Mr S, the state inspectors are here and they'd like to come in and see your room and talk to you for a while. I said sure, come on in. There were about four of them. And when they got in there, one of them had kind of a funny look on his face. He made a comment similar to like this is kind of messy in here. Well, look around, no duh. I didn't say that, but anyhow, they went around the room, asked a lot of questions to me and the kids, and the kids were able to answer all their questions really good. One of the inspectors asked me, is this really connected to your science program? And I'm thinking, you know, we're building rockets. Uh yeah, this is connected to science, all right. We did a lot of study on Isaac Newton and his laws of motion to get into this. But anyhow, here we are, and so they looked around and finally when they were leaving, they thanked me for letting them come in. And the one person that made his comment about the room said that it was more like an organized mess, and that they thought what I was doing was really quite creative. And I explained to them that in my science classes, this is how I teach. Kind of like the old saying, When I hear I forget, when I see I remember, but when I do I understand. My classes were hands-on science classes. I thought the kids could remember things longer and understand it better if we did it that way. And so anyhow, they left, everything turned out good, and our school got a good report. And everything turned out great. So that's what happened on that day, our school inspection day. I hope you'll be back for the next episode, and until then, don't forget, hang on and keep cool. It was quite a day. See you later.