Twenty years of teaching. I feel like there should be a commemorative bobblehead giveaway or something tomorrow when we all walk in to class to open the 22-23 school year. Or at least a cool logo.
And I’m most definitely at peace. I committed to rest and self-care all summer, made my checkbox list (my next-door teacher neighbor and geometry team member has taken to calling it a “quick start” guide), and got everything set up for my kids’ first day on Wednesday morning.
The two teacher work days had their usual assortment of glitches (learning how to dump my workflow into a new Promethean board that didn’t quite want to do what I wanted it to do how I wanted to do it), a lack of paper stocked up in the copy room (had to go down into the basement with another teacher to retreive a couple cases to bring up. Funny story: the basement was at one time intended for use as a bomb shelter for neighborhood families in case of nuclear attack. There’s a separate outside entrance and everything).
The Promethean board thing was stressful, not gonna lie. Spent the entire first Work Day afternoon trying to work the bugs out. To no avail. But all that was water off my back and everything that needed to get done to welcome kids on Day One got done.
If you’re at all interested in the plans, I’m using One Word (H/T Tom Rademacher) for our intro activity on Day One. They’ll take their block day on Thursday or Friday to make their signs and I’ll get them put up on the walls of the classroom. Between the week of remote and the week of hybrid to start last year (not to mention getting used to seeing my kids 5 times in every two weeks on the block schedule), I sucked at getting to know names and faces and making connections in the first few weeks last year. I think this will help.
We’ve been encouraged to present our best lesson to our kids on Wednesday, and I’m down with the concept, but the 25-ish minutes I’ll have after attendance and schedule-change reminders in not nearly enough time to do In-N-Out Burger 100×100. Keeping that for the week we do Algebra “review” especially because it will be an awesome transition to New Tech-style Problem-based Learning. And a great call-back throughout the year (“Hey remember when we did the 100 patty cheeseburger thing back at the beginning of the year? This is like that. Group up”.)
I think partially the peace comes with a widespread belief that we might get a somewhat normal school year after three years of pandemic-related disruptions. That obviously remains to be seen. Cases are declining rapidly in the county where my school is located, but my wife’s office (well south of my school) has been under a mask mandate for a month after a surge in the company.
But there is something else that’s been rolling around my head for a minute too. Our admin team returns intact from last year. Don’t underestimate how important that consistency is to a staff and student body. In keeping with our shift to the New Tech model, our admins shared their “whys” with us at the opening faculty meeting.
Now hold up. I know what you’re thinking. Bear with me here. I knew some of the backstory, but not all of it. I’ve mentioned in this space how my current district is basically the family business, how my mom was a school nurse here for 28 of her 30 years in the business. And in a large district like mine, there’s plenty of folks with family connections. I’m not that unusual.
So our principal and one of our APs not only went to the same (nearby) high school, not only graduated the same year, they were in the same homeroom. And before you start thinking “oh, cool, old boys club”, she was here before he was. It’s not like he came in as principal and started hiring his friends.
Then: another of our APs was our principal’s wrestling coach in high school. Yet another assistant graduated the school where he now works and isn’t shy about sharing that he was a bit of a knucklehead in school.
Yeah, I know there are plenty of districts like that, where students come back to eventually teach. They feel comfortable there, like family. It’s a homecoming.
But this hit me like a two-by-four between the eyes as I sat at this faculty meeting, not caring the least that my admins were spending the morning talking about themselves to a bunch of teachers who had work to do.
There was a method to the madness.
I’ve heard it said that if you have a job where your boss insists “we’re like family here”, run away quickly. Family can’t be claimed like that. It has to be earned.
And from what I saw last year, and what I heard Monday, it’s been earned.
I sat there at that meeting re-energized to do the work our kids and my colleagues need done. Because that’s what family does.
Especially around here. Pick up your hard hat and lunch box, punch the clock and go to work. Make something.
We were not close to being ready to open our consolidated school last year at this time. No locks for the lockers, no student IDs, no student chromebooks. Not the admins’ fault, we were fighting the same supply chain issues as everybody else in August 2021. This time around we are still tweaking some things but the basics of a functioning school are all there. We even have water fountains instead of the pandemic-era cases of bottled water.
So my Promethean board won’t play nice with Spotify or let me download Chrome instead of its proprietary browser. So I’ve got 36 minutes to make a first impression with all my students tomorrow (except my 7th hour which is wrapped around our four lunches, so we get to hang for like two hours). So my schedule was still evolving as late as 2:00 pm today, 17 hours or so before students enter the building.
I’m gonna sleep like shit tonight, as I always do on the night before the first day with kids (Is it 4:30 yet? No? OK good, like another two hours to sleep”). My neck already has a little tension in it like I get in February every year and honestly my back is killing me tonight and we haven’t even started. Nothing three Advil and a nice Chardonnay can’t fix. I blame the dining room chair where I’m writing this, but let’s be honest: I’m old.
But:
Twenty years in, and surrounded with my people, we got this. The anticipation of meeting students on the first day never gets old.
Tweaking For No Reason 