A Place to Exhale
I once had a colleague who collected floating pens. You know the ones — a cruise ship drifting through clear goo with a Royal Caribbean logo floating behind it. He had hundreds of them. Students brought them back from vacations. Families dropped them off after school breaks. My favorite was a pen from Costa Rica with floating turtles wearing inordinately large smiles on their faces.
His desk became a place for stories. For laughter. For the kind of giggles that can only be brought on by smiling turtles suspended in liquid.
It was compelling. For pre-teens.
And if I’m being honest, I was a little jealous.
Not because I struggled connecting with students. I didn’t. I adored them. I loved their humor, their obsessions, their wonderfully strange ideas.
But the gravitational pull of his desk made me wonder whether I needed a thing too.
I spent a whole semester quietly auditioning collections. Novelty erasers. Vintage postcards. Funny coasters. Nothing stuck. And then I realized I wasn’t a floating pen person. I was a quiet corner person.
His desk was perfect. For him.
Mine looked entirely different.
I rarely sat down in my classroom. A middle school math teacher, constantly on her feet, getting her steps in (hello 8,000 before the closing bell), trying to make the classroom feel alive and lived in. But coming back to my desk always felt a little like coming home.
I drink coffee. And tea. So treating myself to fifteen quiet minutes of a warm beverage, email scrolling, and last-minute lesson prepping felt like a luxury. Because I made it one.
I started treating my desk like a sanctuary. Not precious. Not a hands-off “don’t touch my teacher stuff” zone. But intentionally calm. Intentionally organized. Intentionally reflective of me.
I made a homemade quilted coaster. I wanted less institutional fluorescent lighting, so I bought a lamp and splurged on the better bulb. I bought beautiful bookends simply because I like beautiful bookends. I even made a pillow for my chair in my signature slate blue and burnt orange. It’s a thing.
Little by little, my desk stopped feeling like something I inherited from the teacher before me and started feeling like mine.
His desk was colorful and cluttered and full of movement. Mine was quieter. Softer. More grounded. But both spaces did the very same thing: they gave us somewhere to return to in the middle of the day.
And maybe that matters more than we admit.
As you slowly turn your shoulders from summer toward fall, ask yourself:
What do you want your desk to feel like?
What kind of space helps you breathe in the middle of the school day?
What tiny objects might quietly say that you matter too?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the desk wasn’t really for me alone.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one who needed a quiet corner.
The students who drifted toward my desk weren’t looking for floating turtles or novelty. They were looking for the same thing I was: a place to exhale.
Once I understood that, I stopped looking for my collection and started creating my corner.
Though I do still love a good floating pen.
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