This is part 1 of a 2 part series. Part 2 talks about Easing a child’s transition back to school.
A restless night’s sleep, anxiety, a mix of excitement and terror, and frequent trips to the bathroom. This is how many teachers feel the night before the first day of school. (and you thought only kids got the jitters!)
While the first little cherubs (or bigger cherubs, in middle and high school) show up in their straight lines, washed faces and neat new clothes for a new school year, they (and their parents) scarcely realize the insanity that has taken place in the classroom so far—an insanity that continues throughout that first week. A day or two before the first day, most teachers return to rooms that resemble war zones: furniture strewn about, boxes in disarray, evidence of vermin. Task number one is cleaning and dusting every corner of the room, giving no quarter to any six-legged friends that have taken up residence in our absence.
The desks, tables and chairs need to be re-arranged. Often, a screw or two somehow “disappears” from a chair or desk, prompting a quick fix using a pencil or paper clip (at least until the second or third collapse). Groups are made, and centers are carved out: never mind that the social studies center is a globe and stack of old history books from 1973, it counts…(or so we rationalize to the assistant principal upon inspecting the room.)
The books have to be put in their baskets and shelved according to level, genre and both. This is thanks to the smarmy “consultant” who was hired to “facilitate” teachers toward some new-fangled program. He also led the professional staff development on said program, which took up the majority of the little time we teachers have to clean and organize. Apparently, smarmy guy suggested investing in a whole slew of new books for this year—books we don’t have, but everyone else does. After successive pleadings, threats, and bribes to the assistant principal and the school aides, we barter with colleagues to get at least a class set of said books. Upon leafing through the books, we see it bears no resemblance to the curriculum map we mapped out the previous spring. (oh yeah, smarmy guy had the curriculum altered, too. Surprise!)
Then comes the roll, the list of little darlings (or potential monsters) that will be the cause of your migraines for the next 183 school days, give or take. It’s a fantasy: that roll is never accurate. It was printed in June, and doesn’t take into account Mikey getting left back for the umpteenth time, that Jose moved to Florida without notifying the school district, that registration keeps going on all through the first week of school, or the new apartment building is (gasp!) zoned for our school.
Of course, the little angels need something to do…no use having them sit around and stab each other with pencils for six hours. A good teacher would have at least a week, if not two weeks’, worth of lessons, mostly on getting the class accustomed to routines and procedures: how class will work, homework policy, procedures for centers/the library/the bathroom, etc.
These procedures, like the roll, are a pipe dream. There will be constant interruptions: for assemblies, drills, monitors for new materials, assessments (since smarmy guy needs his “data” to make teachers “accountable”), and new students dropped at the doorstep like orphans at a convent.
On top of all this, the assistant principal, who’s angling for the top job and secretly hates the smarmy consultant, wants to show that his/her teachers can produce work quickly. Hence you’ll be pressured to get something—anything—up on those bulletin boards to make them “print rich,” no matter what unintelligible scribbles your charges come up with.
Oh, yeah, lest I forget…there are state tests coming in a few months, and the fate of the universe lies in the performance of your students—even the “special” ones.
This is the world your child enters on the first day of school.
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Luciano D’Orazio, AKA “Mr. D”, is the chief author/founder of Mr. D’s Neighborhood, a history education blog containing news, opinion pieces and resources pertaining to history and history education for grades K-12. He is the social studies coordinator for a K-5 elementary school in the South Bronx, New York, and is a Teacher-Historian with the Teaching American History federal grant program.
I love working with little kids, I love pressing for/making change.
