I’ve found recently that most people do not know I am a single Dad of a 12-year-old boy.  I post enough stuff that Luca and I do together – yet I still get messages from people referencing my wife, our fairytale life, etc.  When I was married, my wife and I had the thing going where she’d work full time, and I’d work full time + full time.  Anyone with kids and a house or apartment knows how much goes into maintaining and cleaning things.  The lawn, the dishes, the laundry, vacuuming, organizing paperwork and bills, taking out the garbage, shopping, putting the groceries away, cleaning out the fridge, shuttling kids from practice to game to friends’ houses, and the absolute worst of it all, doing all the above and trying to get to bed at a reasonable time.

It is all hard work.  It takes time, effort, and energy – and invariably, as the week goes on, crap piles up.  When I was married, we had four kids (3, hers, 1, mine) – but now I am down to one.  That’s how these things go sometimes; I know I am not alone.  Whether it’s one kid and one adult, or four kids and two adults - managing it all is hard. I hid from it for a while, trying to keep some of myself to myself.  These days, though, I have a Posse of people stalking me online and even in person, then writing terrible stuff about me.  I’ve blocked them from my Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.  The Posse helped me decide recently that there is no sense in keeping myself to myself.  Their efforts to dehumanize me can only be undone by my reminding readers that I, too, am a human. My constitutional right to free speech allows me to express myself, and if you are reading this – you can see that I am doing so increasingly here.

Don’t get me wrong. It feels good to out bullies; I am certain there will be much of that. So that readers do not confuse this with AI, I will be writing about my life, which I’ve experienced in my language, without APA format or political polish.

Getting back on track, I was thinking about the cleaning and organizing the house thing, which is a real pain in the ___ during the week.  Every day when I come home, I use the Atomic Habit (from the book) of cleaning and organizing for a brief time - whatever I can pull off.  This gives me more time on the weekend when I might have time for such things to do other, more fun, real-life living things aside from work.  The cleaning operation is important for me because I cannot type in a mess – and nor is it good for Luca to live in a place that is not organized.  This gets me to tonight’s topic…the physical learning environment. 

Take a look at these classrooms…

Now ask yourself, in which environments does it SEEM that kids will learn best?  And why? It’s the same reason that I am always cleaning this darn house.  The same reason is that we put our laundry away.  It is the same reason we clean our counters, mow our lawns, and even organize our junk drawers.  If you don’t take it from me, take it from Marie Condo.  The bottom line is that kids learn best and live best in environments that are clean, orderly, softly lit, with little background noise, free of clutter, and colorful. 

Paying attention to this detail in classrooms is very important.