Assistant Principals and In-Boxes

The Assistant Principal at my wife's school went on a power trip at the beginning of the school year and decided teachers would still only have six class periods each day with two periods off, one for conferencing with students/parents and one for department meetings. He did this knowing the enrollment was rising dramatically and now it's come back to bite him

After this week all the schedules are changing and there will be no more department meeting period for any teachers. This is because some teachers had over 30 kids in a single classroom. This became a major headache when they discovered there weren't enough desks in the district to cover the class sizes.

Anyway, it's a huge hassle, the kids will be lost in the hallways again, just like at the beginning of the year, and the Assistant Principal is in some serious hot water for overstepping his bounds and, essentially, trying to do the Principal's job.

My wife uses a stack of in-boxes for her students to turn in their assignments. There's one box for each period. She had six boxes and, as of this next Monday, she'll have seven class periods. Rather than trying to find the matching plastic in-box to stack on the existing ones we decided I would simply build a new one. Two, actually, since she needs the same thing near her desk to keep track of graded papers.

I used birch plywood to build the boxes.  It's very durable and that's a good thing since my wife teaches 7th Grade Reading.  I never even considered using hardwood of any kind.

The real crime in all of this isn't that I had to delay another project in order to build these boxes, but that the A.P. has disrupted the entire school, preventing any learning from taking place in the process.  And he's a tyrant.  He told the teachers they couldn't take personal days this year.  They have personal days in their contracts. On the other hand, he's already been gone four days and we just finished the third week of school today.

Regardless, here are the in-boxes.  I think they turned out great. The double-thick left side of the box was added so my wife can attach the color-coded labels she likes to use to differentiate one class from another.