Desk Tetris #MTBoSBlaugust

 Thanks to the help of a friend and colleague on Friday, I figured out a fairly simple way to arrange my desks so that students are 6 feet apart. I have 27 desks in my room, and I put them in pairs; one desk in the pair will not be used. I had 14 desks that were properly spaced.

I looked at my rosters to see how big my two groups would be for our new "hybrid model," and one class period had 16 students in Group A while another class period had 17 students in Group A.

After the initial thoughts of, "PANIC! This won't work! My rosters need to be changed!" I realized I needed an extra set of eyes to look at the room and see what options I have. So I called in the big guns. I asked my husband to take a look.

This is the guy who goes behind me after I load the dishwasher and declare it full and fits another 20 dishes in it. This is the guy who fit luggage and beach gear for 6 adult women in our vehicle. He's really quite amazing (but don't tell him that; it will go to his head).

He was actually a little excited about the idea of figuring out the classroom arrangement. He said, "It's Tetris!"

We went to the school last night so he could measure all the furniture and get an idea of what he was dealing with.

He came home and drew a model of the room and all the furniture and decided where it would all fit.

(This is not a great picture, but I find it way funnier than I probably should that he used toilets to represent student desks.)

This afternoon we went back to school, and he moved all the big stuff where it needed to go. We arranged the desks in their proper locations, and we put tape on the floor so desks can be easily put back in their proper locations.

My room is not student-ready, yet, but having this very big task - making sure I can fit the correct number of students at the correct distances - off my plate feels really good.