Welcome to Year Two

This afternoon, I headed towards the door to leave a brand new classroom (NOT in a trailer), flipped the lights off and turned around to say good-bye to the clean, overly-ready room that tomorrow will change as 17 three-year olds run into the classroom, starting their first day of the institute we define our childhood by. Right now, there is a blankness to the room. Everything is clean, unused and turned to the perfect angle. Floors are not scratched, and there is no rainbow of colors on the tables. The board is blank, my desk is blank, the job chart is blank, the spaces I have created for artwork are blank. Each center--dramatic play, blocks, art, etc.--cannot yet be too overwhelming, so shelves are empty and Lysol-wiped to the n-th degree.
Sure, it looks really nice, almost sparkling due to the literal cutting-of-the-ribbon ceremony that took place at my new school a few weeks ago.
But I hate it.
Since the first week of August, I have been unpacking, cleaning, creating, building, moving, all the while envisioning little hands and little minds, and I am ready to see if my visions worked. I don't want starch white paper or brand new markers or empty trash cans or the satisfaction of how clean the House center appears. I don't want students' individual symbols just hanging from the Happy face on the behavior chart--I want reasons to move them up to Super Happy or even down to Unhappy if it means teaching about not throwing a bin of blocks across the room. I want to come home not exhausted from transporting boxes in the heat but exhausted from dancing and practicing walking in a line and running from a paint spill to someone writing an alphabet letter to turning an upside-down book right-side-up. Mess means we did art and imagined or took too long talking about the details of a story so we couldn't clean the mats up after naps. It's great.
Everything right now is blank. And I could be cheesy and talk about a blank slate for the year, blank minds, but those are the things that are not blank. I have filled-in lesson plans this year and a room ready for minds filled with big personalities and potential energy. We might have to hold a rope to walk in a line or a stuffed animal to make sure we are taking turns talking. But, really, there is nothing blank in those minds at all.
So I'll try to wake up super early tomorrow to have a roommate take a first-day-of-school picture on the steps, me and my 10 bags and gallon of coffee. I'll walk into a clean room but will hope to go big or go home before 3 p.m.: crayon marks here, drying paint there--it's going to be awesome.