Teachers Who Float

Without a Classroom, Teachers Learn Migration Tactics

Sep 27, 2008 Elizabeth Randall

Overcrowded schools and a lack of resources leave many teachers in a cooperative classroom situation.

The term floating is subjective when it applies to teachers. It implies an ethereal crossing of an educational threshold when, in fact, it refers to migrant teachers lugging carts or buggies laden with books, files, papers, school supplies, and, in the case of one chemistry teacher, test tubes, burners, culture jars and chemicals.

When a teachers "floats," she uses classrooms that the "home" teacher vacates during breaks or lunch. It is an ingenious utilization of space, a solution to overcrowded classes, expensive portables, and capital gains expenditures on new school wings or buildings.

"As a new teacher, floating gave me a chance to get to know the culture of my school very well and very quickly," Beverly Maddox, who teaches at Henderson Middle School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, told Education World in a September 2008 article by Leslie Bulien.

"I carted labs around for a year," she said.

Floating is, however, stressful for the migrating teacher on a variety of levels, which include:

Organization

Floaters find it notoriously hard to keep materials together, to find materials and to plan the right ones for the right classes while also contending with block schedules. Using rolling file boxes with sturdy sides, floaters listen enviously to home teachers who have real file cabinets with lesson plans neatly alphabetized, which they effortlessly pluck for each day's lessons. Most floating teachers fear that their students may remember them always rooting fruitlessly in their buggies for the file folder or the book they left in first period. Which leads to:

Classroom Turf

Home teachers are gracious but nervous about floaters. They are afraid about the safety of their materials, their pencil sharpeners, their computers, their audio visuals against the hoard of unknown students who file in as they are filing out. Can they trust the floater to keep their tools and their room pristine? The floater, for her part, feels guilt and stress when she hears that markers, pencils and papers are missing or strewn about because she does not have time to pick up because of:

Migration

Some floaters don't have far to go, but many travel from one end of the campus to another arriving only seconds before the last bell. This stressful situation is wastes time for students who must wait while she finds and organizes her materials, writes on the board, deals with an unfamiliar (sometimes locked) computer to take roll. There is, however, a bright side because floaters do get:

Back to Basics

Floaters don't have to decorate classrooms, worry about lack of exercise, or plan lessons that require technological expertise. As much as she would like to, she doesn't spend hours displaying student work; like a condo association, the classroom walls are not her own. Floating also enables teachers to get to know how to navigate the campus quickly, find shortcuts, and to meet more faculty than she'd have a chance to if she were shuttered away in her own little fiefdom.

There is a certain freedom and resilience associated with floating that make these teachers feel proud.

Not too proud, however, to someday accept a classroom of her own. When she does, she vows to make it floater friendly.

The copyright of the article Teachers Who Float in Teacher Tips/Training is owned by Elizabeth Randall. Permission to republish Teachers Who Float in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.