The Fulton School
My second week with Mr. Platz
Day 1 – Today I didn’t really do much but I learned that the next 2 weeks is a good opportunity to learn some life skills even if I might already know some of them. The cleaners didn’t come by last Friday so me and Mr Platz had to do the trash and mop the floor. We also had to refill some spray bottles with soap. The most exciting part of today was putting up the umbrella on the playground. It was really nice outside and something about doing some hard work was just relaxing to me because it was a beautiful day and I could take my mind off of things that were disturbing me. We made it a lot more difficult than it had to be putting up the umbrella but in the end we used our brains and got it done nice and easy.
Day 2 – Today Mr. Platz was gone so I ended up doing some more IT work at school with Lou Filla. I had one goal today which took me all day and that was sorting out the shelves inside the cafeteria closet. Everything was a massive mess and there were a lot of unopened products that were waiting to be found. Out of those unopened products there was an unused projector, a security system, and an unused filing machine for printers. What made it annoying to get through everything in the closet was the fact that there were so many monitors to try and find space for. I ended up thinking about it for a minute and decided that I’d sort out the shelves big objects up top and lighter objects as you go down. At the end of the day there was a bunch of junk that Lou wanted to take to his car. When I had hauled it all outside into his car I had finished my work for today.
Day 3 – Today Mr. Platz was back and it was a really fun day for me. It was nice outside yet again and it was a perfect day to do some cleaning. Today I was given the assignment of bringing down the bleachers for trivia night, or at least I thought so, they never really told me why but I did it anyway. All of the bleachers were outside on the upper parking lot and I had to roll each and everyone of the bleachers all the way down and around to the door up front. After getting all of the bleachers down I needed to do some cleaning because they had mud and grass all over them. I started off with a bucket, a brush, and a mission. I started scrubbing away and dumping water on it for about an hour and it was finally so shiny it was blinding. I flipped it up to take it inside and then I saw all of the grass stuck under it and felt defeated. Luckily for me I still have the ace up my sleeve which was the hose I had in the back of the school. While I was on the way back to use the hose Mrs. Lloyd decided to give me more trouble than I asked for. She needed me to unload some groceries that were meant for trivia night and hide them in the office closet. That side job took me about 15 minutes – 20 minutes. When I had finished I was back on my determined mission to make those bleachers spotless. I hooked up the hose head I had found on the ground and I started blasting the bleachers. This was probably the most fun I had cleaning anything ever considering I never had an interest in cleaning. But as I cleaned stuff up the past 2 weeks in different ways I am starting to learn that cleaning is something I don’t hate for some reason. Anyway I sprayed the bleachers for about an hour and a half to get off as much as possible. There were a few people that got caught in the crossfire but they were all ok. I did end up spraying myself with the hose quite a bit as well considering it was hot and I also just couldn’t help myself. Anyway when I had fulfilled my mission I took the bleachers inside and that had wrapped up my day. This was definitely one of my more fun days so far in senior projects just because senior projects can really develop you as a person. You end up learning things about yourself that you hadn’t known before while going out and doing different sorts of things and meeting lots of different people along the way. Or maybe I just loved spraying myself with a hose for some reason… Either way it was really fun.
Day 4 – Today was a day I ended up doing some constructing. My goal for today was to build something that would hang up on the wall for Lou so he could organize all of his cables in the cafeteria closet. Today I had a lot of blisters and it made me pretty dang tired. I started off getting the plan from Mr. Platz which was a lot more simple to follow than I would have imagined. The plan was to hammer some nails into some wood for the cables, drill holes in the closet for anchors and then hang it up. We had some really long planks so we had to start by measuring how much we needed to fill the space we had. We ended up making the planks five feet long and we had two of them so when the cords would hang down they wouldn’t get mixed up or tangled. After we had cut the wood we measured how many nails we were going to hammer in and marked each of the spots and pre drilled holes. We also marked where our anchors would be so we wouldn’t end up putting too many nails in and splitting the wood. Spoiler we ended up splitting it a bit in the end… Anyway when everything was marked he sent me outside to hammer all of the nails in and I hadn’t really used a hammer that much before then so you can imagine how it started. I ended up hitting my hand a few times and making really bad choices but, the more mistakes I made the better I was getting at it until eventually, I was basically a pro. It was tiring though considering I was hammering about 35 nails or something like that and I was already tired after using a dull hand saw to try and cut the wood. After I had finished hammering in all of the nails this is where I got to use the fun tools. I brought the wood back inside and took it to the cafeteria closet so I could begin to make holes in the wall to hang it up. At this point I got to use the demolition hammer. And this was probably the most fun tool I’ll ever be allowed to use for the rest of my time with Mr. Platz. We held up the wood and used the pre-drilled holes to mark up where we needed to make holes in the wall. After we did that it was time to drill and I have a small clip I can hopefully post as well of me drilling my first hole. After finishing up all of the holes we hammered in the anchors and hooked the wood up to the wall and our job was done.
One Comment on “My second week with Mr. Platz”
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Bryce, I love the way you described your days individually. I have a lot of appreciation for how much introspection you did. It’s often very exciting to realize that something you once hated actually isn’t that bad. I used to hate cleaning things, and I still don’t do a great job at cleaning my room, but whenever I’m anxious or bored, it’s rather relaxing to do the dishes or wipe down the kitchen counters.