There isn’t a full-time janitor(s) at my school, so the third to sixth graders are assigned different areas of the school to clean, as well as their homerooms. The parents (read: mothers) of the second and first graders come in and help the homeroom teachers clean their student’s classroom.
It does make me laugh to watch these kids that obviously don’t clean their rooms at home (I’m pretty sure about that fact because pretty much every Korean that I’ve talked to tell me that their moms always picked up after them) “clean” the school. In my office about four or five girls from one of the sixth grade classes come to my office during the lunch period, they’ll move around the chairs, clean a line on the floor and declare the room clean. When an adult tells them to clean a little more, they may pick up a (suspect) wet towel by one corner and lightly drag it around the top of the tables for a grand total of a minute.
So of course one of the mothers (think a PTA Mom in the States) who comes in every afternoon picks up a mop and broom and a cleaner rag and cleans the classroom because it’s not really to her standards. And I feel bad because there are days that I think that she spends more time cleaning than working.
