First Day of School

In July, as I was mulling over the barren stretch of time between the end of my summer school courses and the start of fall classes, I wondered if it would ever be possible to enter a school at the start of the year and watch everything from a teacher's perspective.

I wanted to see the first day of school, and the days before, when the halls were quieter but the classrooms no less busy as teachers prepared.

Amazingly, I got my wish. I was offered the opportunity to be an interim teacher for the first week-and-a-half at a local elementary school. I was able to sit in on in-service sessions, data meetings, planning sessions of all stripes, and even had the chance to set up the classroom for the teacher (out on medical leave).

It was exhilarating and exhausting, in equal measures. I unpacked boxes, tried to think about systems and supplies placement as a teacher would, brainstormed math games, listened to veteran teachers make their reading intervention plans, made some new friends, listened as administrators explained and developed procedures, and saw firsthand how much effort is expended in the 72 hours before the classroom door opens.

And then, the classroom door opened.

I found myself thrown into the deep end of classroom management without swimming lessons. My training hadn’t encompassed that yet, so I was following others’ suggestions and going with my gut instincts. I failed miserably and I succeeded admirably.

The students listened to me as I taught a brilliant social studies lesson incorporating the Civil War, Annie Oakley, a lesson on measurement skills as we determined how long the hallway was (90 feet: the distance Annie could shoot a playing card edge-wise!), and even a splash of the arts as we watched a portion of Annie, Get Your Gun.

The students ignored me as I reviewed the four types of sentences.

The students interacted with me as we talked about Woodstock, the dangers of drug use and the neighborhoods they come from.

The students disobeyed me as we learned how to walk the school hallways quietly.

I was alternately competent and disastrously incompetent. I sweated for hours on a day’s lessons, only to watch it implode because of my classroom management deficiencies.

But I also had shining moments when a student showed me a pithy sentence explaining the character of Homily in The Borrowers: she’d listened and learned and thought it through.

How many teachers get to practice being a first-year teacher? Not many, I don’t think. When I do my student teaching, or internship as it’s called on the graduate level, I’ll get to observe and act within a classroom, but it’ll be in the middle of a semester.

I have been given an amazing chance to rehearse something scary that I’ll have to do later. What great preparation…and how very much I have to learn in a graduate classroom before I learn by doing in my own classroom, on my second first day of school.