Chapter 8: First Days

The night before the first day of school, I could barely sleep. My stomach was a twisted mess of knots. How on earth was I going to go to school the next morning and live up to the expectation that I would be a high-quality teacher who, as superintendent Pat Skorkowsky demanded, reached "100% of students 100% of the time, without exception, without excuses," and who, as TFA demanded, provided "all students access to an excellent education?"

Regardless of how prepared I was (or, more accurately, was not), the morning arrived like a relentless, unstoppable bulldozer, and I braced myself for its impact as I downed three cups of coffee. I'd gotten up extremely early that day, so as to take time on my appearance and complete the 30-minute drive up to the school while still arriving early enough to adequately prepare for the morning. The sun hadn't even risen as my son and I piled into the car.

Eight months ago, when I'd first heard about my acceptance into Teach For America, I had wept with joy. I had felt excitement and happiness on a level that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. Now that the proverbial "dream" was about to come true, though, I felt buried beneath the overwhelming weight of high expectations and ill preparedness. I wished I felt more ready. Was that something that would eventually come to me, the more I taught? Did I miss something at Institute, something necessary that would have prevented this feeling?

I consoled myself with the knowledge that, since it was the first week of school, I would be spending the majority of my time getting to know my students. At Institute, we'd learned lots of ice-breaking games and activities. I knew I could pull these off, and maybe after I got to know my students a bit I would feel better about my time in the classroom with them. Other teachers (such as Michaela) had told me that they spent the first two weeks doing these activities; other teachers (such as Jordan) told me that they spent no more than two days on them. I'd decided, personally, to spend one week.

This first week, then, would be devoted to that, as well as to establishing rules and procedures. At first, I'd been looking forward to using the same "stoplight" behavior management system that had worked at Flo-Jo, but I was a bit thwarted in that because my school had its own behavior management system that all teachers were expected to use. It was a version of the "stoplight" system ... but a bit different.

Honestly, it was kind of weird. Instead of the straightforward green = good, yellow = yield, and red = stop, my school insisted on a clip chart that used seven different colors. At the top, students started on "perfect pink." From there, they moved down to "blue blue" and got a first warning. After that, they moved down to "rowdy red" and got a second warning. If misbehavior continued, a student then moved down to "panic purple" and received the loss of a privilege. Then, a student moved down to "yucky yellow," which meant a phone call or parent conference, and then down to "grotesque green," which meant a time out of some sort (I think ... as I'm thinking about it now, the lower colors and their consequences are a bit hard to remember in full detail). Lastly, students were moved down to "outrageous orange," which meant that they had to visit the principal.

I personally had a desk set up at the back of the room and called it Azkaban. I planned on sending students to sit in Azkaban if need be as a form of time out. I wasn't sure that I was actually going to incorporate two warnings, loss of a privilege, and a parent conference before doing so, either.
But we'd see. Having never taught in my own classroom before, it was hard to gauge exactly how I would respond to any one thing.

Preparation that morning consisted of making sure that my sorting hat was ready to go, that my shelves and desks were neat and clean, and going over the activities and games in my lesson plan. It was kind of like rehearsing for a play -- I knew everything I needed to do and say, but there was still some anxiety over the possibility that I'd draw a blank and fail in front of my audience (in this case, my students). But I told myself that as long as I made it look like I was in control at all times, they'd believe that I was.

My son stayed in my classroom with me, helping me prepare and set up, until an all-call was made for a staff meeting before the first day of school. I thought that having him in my room in the mornings, and also having him sit quietly (he was a well-behaved nine-year-old, after all) with a book during meetings would be fine. Otherwise, if he couldn't attend meetings, surely he could stay in my classroom until it was time to line up for the day. This is what I assumed, anyway.

Turns out, it's what I assumed wrongly. Mrs. Lawrence launched a tirade, halfway between irritation and frustration, on me about how I needed to have my son in Safekey in the mornings. For those who don't know, Safekey is a babysitting service that takes place at schools. It allows parents to drop their kids off early and pick them up late at school if they need to. It is not a free service, mind you -- it's around $20 per week for mornings, and more for afternoons, which can add up quickly if you're not a wealthy person.

Needless to say, I'm not a wealthy person, and I was certainly nowhere close to wealthy at that point. I hadn't even received my first paycheck yet, and was recovering from the very expensive move I'd just completed (and was also battling new debt, as TFA provided a loan to help me get through that process). The Safekey program at my school had no discounts for teachers, either, so I was a little put out that I was essentially being forced to spend nearly $100 a month on unnecessary babysitting.
I thought it would be a reasonable option to let Brendan sit in my classroom with me while I prepared for the morning.

But Mrs. Lawrence insisted that wasn't an option. I absolutely had to register him for Safekey and take him to the cafeteria every morning to be looked after by strangers, regardless of the fact that I was in the same building. She said it wouldn't be fair to other teachers to have a child in the halls or classrooms before school.

I could have had my child at a different school. He didn't have to be there with me, but I'd thought the experience might be good for both of us. Mrs. Lawrence didn't really give a shit whether I kept Brendan at the school or not, though (until she found out that he's a stellar test taker, anyway, which came later), so she was not at all interested in negotiating her Safekey policy with me. I was decidedly unhappy about this.

But anyway, back to that first day. I met my students for the first time as they lined up outside for breakfast. At the school I taught at, each student was entitled to a free breakfast, which was to be eaten in the classroom. So the daily procedure started with meeting our students outside.
Let me preface the daily morning procedure with a few facts. First, this was to be Principal Lawrence's second year at our school. She'd been brought in to take it from a low performing school and transform it into a high performing one. One of the first changes she made was that, when students arrived in the mornings, they were not allowed to play on the playground (they used to be able to do this, under the previous principal). Instead, they were to go straight to the classroom "dot" to line up for the day. So there was a 10 to 15 minute time frame from which the gates opened and students filed in to get in line to when we started leading them inside for breakfast. During that time, students were expected to stand their classroom lines.

Breakfast was set up with two lines into the cafeteria. Students would go through the line and grab one of everything (it was all pre-packaged foods such as cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, or little boxes of cereal) before going to class. We'd then lead our class through the halls and to the classrooms, where students would sit down, eat breakfast, and then throw their trash away in giant trash bins located in the pods. Right around finishing time, the school counselor would come on the loudspeaker to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and lead 30 seconds of silence (both required by Nevada state law), give morning announcements, and reveal the day's lunch menu. After all of this, we could begin our academic day.

My first day centered around getting to know my students. I sorted them into their Harry Potter Houses first, and only after this had been completed did I realize that it wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made. I knew nothing about these kids, and randomly assigning them to a House from which they'd likely not want to be moved before getting to know them presented a few challenges. First, somehow or another, a group of about six girls (who all happened to be friends) all wound up in Hufflepuff together. Next, a group of about five boys (who all happened to be very loud and talkative) all wound up in Gryffindor together. And so on. I continued with this original plan, though, assuring myself that, as I got to know the students more I could move them around as needed.
The second thing that I did that morning, after sorting the students, was introduce myself and attempt to learn names and something about each student. I did this by moving all of the desks out of the way and sitting in a circle on the floor. I told the students that we were going to play a name game which would involve using an adjective to describe themselves -- but the adjective had to start with the same letter as their first name.

"My name is Ms. Sirls," I began, to lead by example. "Since Ms. starts with an "m," I'm going to pick an adjective that starts with that letter. So I'll introduce myself as Musical Ms. Sirls because I like to sing and listen to music, and musicals are my favorite type of show."

While I was counting on some issues, such as shy students who didn't want to talk, I did not count on my 5th graders not knowing what an adjective was. This proved to be a major problem.
"An adjective," I tried to explain, "is a word that describes something. So you have to pick a word that describes you and use it in your introduction."

Even when they seemed to grasp, in a way, what an adjective was, there were still issues surrounding following the rules of the game. "I don't know," some of them said. "I can't think of a word that describes me." And for some of them, it took a good five minutes of gentle prodding and questioning to get them to come up with a word that described them. Some of them never did come up with a word.

Others, still, came up with a word but ignored the direction about having it start with the first letter of their first name. "I'm Nice Maria," they'd say, for example, or "I'm Cool Brian" (I didn't have any students named Maria or Brian; those were just examples of what the kids said).

After a while, I stopped trying to correct them. It didn't matter. I was getting their names and one-word descriptions of themselves, which was what was important to me.

We then played a different name game, in which a person says their name, and the person next to them says their name and the name of the person before them, and the next person then says their name and the names of the two people before them ... and so on. It gets really difficult, obviously, the further down the line you are, but I promised that I would be able to say everyone's name by the end of the game -- that I would go last and go around the entire circle and correctly state everyone's name.
I did, too. In all honesty, I surprised even myself at my ability to correctly name 30 students after only a small time in the classroom.

The day continued on this way until it was time for me to take my students to lunch. I had a 30 minute lunch break every day, and the students also had 30 minutes for lunch. But for them (again, another implementation from Principal Lawrence), they had about 25 minutes to eat (if they ate faster, they sat quietly), and then 5 minutes or so (sometimes it was closer to 7 minutes) to play outside. So, here in this elementary school environment, the students had, thus far, received 5-7 minutes of play time outside, and there was no more scheduled throughout the day.

5-7 minutes. To Principal Lawrence, play time for children was not important, not when that time could be used to teach standards and prepare for state tests. And to top it off, she was so afraid that the 5th graders would fight all recess long that she scheduled 5th grade lunches all at different times to make sure that they weren't all interacting during their one, small break a day. This upset a number of my students, as they wanted to play with their friends from other classes. I encouraged them to create a petition to take to the principal about moving 5th grade lunches so that they all occurred simultaneously. They did write a petition, too. My high-achieving GATE student drafted it and the entire class signed it. I agreed to take it to the principal, but it was to no avail. She felt very sure that allowing large numbers of 5th graders to interact on a daily basis was a very bad idea.

So things stayed the way they were in regards to lunch and recess. I usually chose to eat lunch (or not -- I didn't always eat during lunchtime) in my classroom, away from other people. As an introvert, constant interaction is particularly draining for me mentally, emotionally, and even physically, so lunch on my own was a small breath of fresh air for me every day. I'm sure that other teachers must have thought that my avoidance of the lunch room was because I was a snob of some sort (or something -- it's not unusual for there to be divides on campuses between TFA teachers and traditionally trained ones, though it's not always the case), but it was necessary for me.

My prep period -- the 50 minutes of time during which I could plan, grade, or do whatever I needed to while my students attended music, P.E., art, or library -- occurred directly after lunch. So I'd finish my lunch period and make it outside to pick up my students after their small recess period. Then I'd march them inside to whatever "special" (as we referred to the previously mentioned classes) they had that day. The students went to music, art, and library once per week, and to P.E. twice a week.
Most days, I tried to spend my prep period completing the arduous task of completing lesson plans, but there were times when I was required to attend meetings, too. There were a whole lot of meetings to attend that first year at my school. Every week, everyone was required to attend a PLC meeting in the morning (the 5th grade PLC was on Wednesdays, I think), during which we'd discuss strategies, data, new curricula, or whatever else our strategists thought we needed to discuss. These PLC meetings took the place of staff meetings, which we never had. Then, we were also required to have grade level meetings once a week (led by our team leader, Jordan), and these usually happened during prep. In the beginning, these were designed to assist us in staying on track with teaching the same standards at the same time, creating homework, analyzing data, and other such things; later on in the year, however, they turned into much-needed venting sessions.

But that came later. My first week at school seemed to be inundated with meetings, never ending lists of data I needed to produce and analyze, groups I needed to make, information I needed to gather and share, and on and on and on. I think I survived it only because I wasn't teaching any real academics that week. Balancing a heavy workload and a steady stream of increasing demands that you don't even fully understand is easier to do, I think, when you're spending class time playing games and learning names and such.

After that first week, though, things became more difficult as I tried to incorporate academic standards into my lesson plans and my classroom. I would sit up for hours analyzing the standards and figuring out how I could present them. Where would I fit language or writing into this day, or where would I fit speaking and listening standards in anywhere? Organizing my lesson plans around such questions proved daunting, and more than a few gray hairs grew from trying.

Throughout that first week, I felt like I was drowning and wouldn't ever figure "it" out. As I progressed into my second week and beyond, the waves above me became so crushing that I wasn't sure I'd ever resurface again.