I have two words for you.  Clay. Trap.  That is one thing my sinks need to help avoid another day where 900+ students were mad at me because of a smell that was so beyond my fault.  If I had know it was going to be that bad, I would have waited and had them come in during spring break or the summer.

I put in a maintenance request to have my sink drains cleaned as they were started to clog after 2.5 years of being treated like, well, sinks in an art studio.  I did my best to keep as much clay out of there, but one can only do so much.  I have learned there are other measures I can take as I continue on the clay journey in my sculpture classes.  But that doesn’t help what had been done.

I thought it was going to be an easy thing, but apparently, it was not.  The drains were full of clay/slip and paint.  The plumber had to wet vac it out.  He still will need to snake into the wall.  The stink from the drains (a cross between sewage and rotten eggs) had gotten so bad that I had to move my afternoon classes to the front of the school, shut the classroom door, and opened the door to the outside.  I am sure the plumber was not happy with the cold as it was below 30 degrees outside, but I had to do what I had to do.  (I must mention here that when I did return to my room, the smell had lessened quite considerably and it was 56 degrees in my room.)

To maintanence it appeared as if we just dumped clay down the sink.  That is not the case–it was run-off from when we washed our hands and our tools.  But, that is neither here nor there.  What is important is at this moment I do not have running water and I will be halting all painting lessons.  Clay lessons will continue, and we will have buckets of water to help wash tools and hands.  Life goes on.  Clay settles, so the buckets make sense.

They (maintenance) will keep my updated.  Hopefully water will return soon.  And they are going to put clay traps under my sinks.  I am mixed about this.  I am happy as I hope this will help, but I will have to change the traps every week or so when they get full.

Lessons learned here… I need to be harder on my kids about how they clean up in the sinks; I need to change the way I run my classroom; and it is more obvious to me that people really have no idea what I do in my classroom.