First Day Feelings

"Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying.  Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty...and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say...Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's been flying so poorly." 

A slight stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, "One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode." 

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have," said Hermione. --Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, on Cho Chang and Ron's emotions. 

Teaching is all I’ve ever known as a real, adult-life job, so in some ways I’m ready for the school year to start.  The rhythms of the school year—summer break, beginning a new year, Thanksgiving, Winter, and Spring Breaks, projects and tests, planning and grading—all feel as normal to me as they did when I was in middle school myself.  But at the same time I feel nervous, underprepared, and in general overwhelmed by what’s starting tomorrow.

I don’t have quite as many intense emotions swirling around as Cho did, but there is an awful lot going on in the back of my mind as I make final preparations like seating charts, wall posters, and outfit choices.  I’m excited to actually meet my kids, I’m interested to see what it’s like teaching middle school, I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and to have the halls filled with kids (schools are strangely too big and empty when teachers are there but students are not). I’m also intimidated by the idea that I’m teaching for Fairfax County Public Schools which has Very Definite Expectations for student success, and I’m uncertain about teaching in a “barbell” school—one which has a substantial amount of upper class kids, and a substantial amount of lower class kids, but without many middle class kids at all—and how that dynamic will play into the year.  I’m seriously underwhelmed about the fact that my students will all have to take not only a reading SOL but also a writing SOL in the spring—something I’ve never had to deal with so directly. 

In the back of my mind—you could say all of the above is swirling around the middle—are two more intense things: 1. I believe I’ve been called into this profession, and that calling was not a way of being set up to fail, and 2. It’s feels like a very long time since I’ve done this.   Number 1 I need to just focus on, relax in.  But it’s number 2 that I can’t seem to fully shut out.  

In reality, it’s only been two years since I was teaching, but it was a vastly different situation.   By the time I left Shenandoah County I had been teaching ninth grade for five years and knew the curriculum and the type of population I would be getting—knew it like the back of my hand.  Eighth grade? I haven’t done that since I was in Big Spring Middle School in 1999.

One of the advantages to teaching for FCPS is the vast amount of resources and support available to teachers—my department already has an awful lot on the calendar for me, ready to go, to tell me what to teach.  There’s still a good amount of freedom—I get to choose what books/stories/poems I use to teach the concept, but I know that on Thursday, I’m going to teach author’s purpose (totally doable in like an hour, right?).  Part of this greatly relieves the anxiety I feel about not knowing this curriculum very well, but part of me wonders how I will feel about it next year.  When I came to ShenCo, I had some help from other teachers, but in some ways I felt (and we all felt in our own specific grade level I think) like I was re-inventing the wheel.  And that sucked for the first semester I taught (which is the only reason I taught the really awful book Summer of My German Soldier).  But then every semester after that, it was great.  Yeah, I had worked really hard to reinvent that wheel, but now the one that I was pushing uphill everyday? It was my wheel.  It was designed exactly the way I wanted it and while I was continuing to hone it and smooth it out and strength it, it was something I had really made.  Here, I’m being given the wheel, mostly formed, which right at the moment feels pretty helpful, but I can’t help but wonder what it will be like—if it will in fact feel like—I’m pushing someone else’s wheel up the hill each day. (I guess in truth, all of us are really just refining the wheel the state puts out anyway.  Also, I think I need to not use the word “wheel” in the post anymore.)

I hope going back to teaching is like riding a bike—I can handle it taking a few minutes before I feel really in the swing of things.  And I know that once I’m in that classroom and I’ve met my kids, I will probably realize the same thing that I realized last year in the elementary school:  Kids are just kids.  They come from different places, they have different challenges, and they are taught different things at different ages.  But all of those differences don’t take away the fact that kids are all basically the same. 

It just might be a long day from now until the end of school tomorrow for me, working through all the different things I feel before (hopefully!) coming to that sort of realization.   In the meantime, I’m remembering that I am a teacher.  It’s part of who I am, and tomorrow I will officially be one again—and that’s pretty exciting.  One more emotion to add to the list.