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The Photos I Take in May

Every May I walk around my classroom with my phone.

I photograph the seating arrangement. The classroom library. The meeting area. The wall where student work has been living all year. I photograph the schedule posted by the door and the anchor charts that students actually used.

And I label things. Even the things I know by heart. The turn-in area. The supply bins. The reading corner. Not for May me. May me knows exactly where everything goes and why. I label things for August me.

Because here is what I know about August. The room gets emptied. The furniture gets pushed to the walls. And when I walk back in after summer I will be a different person than I am right now. Tired from the break. Not yet back in the groove. Standing in an empty room trying to reconstruct something that in May felt like second nature.

Right now I am living inside ten months of knowing. It is in my hands, in my instincts, in the way I move through the room without thinking. The arrangement that works. The layout that lets students move without bumping into each other. The spots that became someone's favorite place to read.

A classroom at the end of May is an artifact. Every corner of it tells you something about what you figured out this year.

The photos are a gift from May me to August me. And August me is always grateful.

What would you photograph this week before the year closes? What is worth labeling so future you remembers not just where things go but why they ended up there?

I have never once regretted taking those photos. Not once.

What you know in May took ten months to build. The photos keep it. The list keeps it. And what gets kept gets carried into next year, into the next group of students, into every room you teach in from here.

Gail

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